Interrupted, An Essay in Fragments: Or, Write Like a Mother

This essay is part of The Headlight Review’s series, “The Process,” which features writers describing the steps they take to develop and realize a literary work. Writers discuss their inspirations, stages of their drafting, the swings and misses, and the messes they’ve made.

A narrative can focus on the story of a single creation or may instead frame a process the writer employs on a regular basis. We dig hearing writers talking about writing and understand not everything can result in success. Failures can tell a story, too.

In addition to a submission call, we asked a quartet of our favorites—Jason Crawford, John Henry Fleming, Robin Silbergleid, and James Whorton Jr.—to participate. These essays will kick off our series.  

We hope to continue publishing narratives on “The Process.” Any writer interested in participating may contact THR with a pitch, or we’ll be glad to look over a submission in its entirety.

Word count: 1500 or thereabouts. Multi-media essays are encouraged.

May 14

When I saw the description of the class—“Embracing Interruption: Writing While Mothering” with Amanda Montei—I signed up immediately. The class was scheduled for a Tuesday in May, a day that I could reasonably assume to be the beginning of my “summer,” after the last full week of my contract, after the last committee meeting (scheduled way too late, on May 10, to accommodate the Dean’s over full schedule). And yet, when it came to that long-awaited Tuesday, I logged on to the Zoom meeting late, moving over from another tab on my laptop, where I’d been writing annual review letters for my colleagues that I’d planned to finish the week prior. Even as I sat there at my dining room table trying to pay attention—I wanted so much to really turn my attention, my full attention, to my own writing—the notifications from Microsoft Teams kept popping up in the right hand corner of my laptop screen, doubled (two notices for every message), to tell me my colleagues were trying to reach me. 

By way of introduction, in the chat, I wrote: “I'm pivoting between the semester and summer mode and hope(d) to use this session as jumpstart...not quite done with administrative tasks :)”

I tried to listen, I truly did, tried to focus on the minimalist PowerPoint with familiar names of women writers (Virginia Woolf, Sarah Ruhl, Annie Ernaux) and felt myself pulled in multiple directions. Just as we settled into the actual writing—an exercise to perform an act of mother work for five minutes and write it down in exquisitely painful detail (my words, not Amanda’s), I had to leave the class meeting early to pick up my child for a medical appointment. I couldn’t finish the class about maternal interruption because I was interrupted by the maternal.

On Amanda’s slides, one of my favorite quotes from Woolf: “The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be.”

At the appointment across town, the doctor says H needs to eat lunch: their BMI is falling (again). And I want to protest that this is still a step up from where H was a couple of years ago, when they weren’t even on the growth chart, but this moment doesn’t seem to be the right time to make such an argument. Instead, I start to spin about cooking eggs for breakfast on school days even though I don’t have time to make eggs for breakfast on school days, and remembering all those months I baked dozens of mini muffins to get them to fatten up as a toddler on the cusp of “failure to thrive.” It hits me in some primal place that feels a bit like PTSD. The impulse to log all the intellectual work of motherhood, which was what Amanda was talking about before I left the class.

After the meeting with the doctor, H convinces me we need to go out for ice cream and then promises they will eat a good meal, including protein and vegetables, afterward.

Later, after the ice cream excursion, when H is watching TV, I dip back into email where there is a note from my friend K inviting me to write a craft essay. I am torn because I like doing things when I am asked and this exercise seems fun, but also I have promised myself I am not taking on new things because I need to prioritize finishing the old things. I’m much better at starting than finishing. This opportunity will pay $250, which is approximately what I pay for an average week of summer camp for my child, which is the only way I have (mostly) guaranteed uninterrupted time to work. This seems like an appropriate trade.

In the class with Amanda, before I left, I wrote in response to the prompt: “It was such a small thing, folding the blankets and putting them neatly back on the couch. But it made the tear in her shoulder pinch, the place in the bicep used all day long to put things away, to reach. And there was getting down on the floor to pick up the small things her son didn’t put away, all the LEGOs, and some actual garbage, like the broken earpiece from some sunglasses (whose?). That he had collected such detritus was maddening enough but the fact that these objects weren’t even treated with tenderness, put away like a museum artifact on a shelf, was infuriating. There was so much actual work to do.”

In my notebook, I copied down from the PowerPoint: “At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life” –Sarah Ruhl

May 17

I meet my friend Z halfway between my town and her town for a summer kick-off writing session. She is working on a book chapter; I have declared that I am using this time to establish my summer writing plan, which might also be a draft of this essay I have promised K. I have a mocha latte, iced, because it’s hot outside. Z and I have our goals-setting chitchat, and then I start to write. The table is too high, which puts strain on my arms, so I have my laptop balanced on my actual lap. This is all part of the process.

This past semester, I taught our capstone class in creative writing for the second time. Although the goal of the class was, for the students, the production of a substantial amount of writing (40 pages on a long-form project), learning about the writing process—and instilling good, sustainable work habits—was the actual purpose of the class. In our many conversations about these topics, I insisted that they just needed to carve out small amounts of time to write. They said no, they needed to write in big gulps, hours upon end; that was the only way. They ascribed to the beliefs we’d discussed at the beginning of Amanda’s class, about the genius male writer who has no responsibilities other than his art. I asked my students, following Jessica Abel’s advice in Growing Gills, to track their time. Where did their hours go? When could they possibly write?

In the corner of my screen as I type, the Microsoft Teams alert pops up, telling me that one of my “teammates” is trying to reach me. There’s a problem with one of our undergraduates. There’s a problem with the schedule. There is always a problem.

Even before I became a mother, I was drawn to works in fragments. Carole Maso’s novel AVA, with copious white space between short segments of prose, where the work of association happened, which invites the reader in. That is, I am thinking both about the use value of fragmented writing in relation to its content, and also the use value of the fragment for the writer who just needs to get something down on a page. When it’s possible to write 100 words, but 1000 seems unfathomable.

At the next table over there is a man on a phone, maybe a Zoom meeting, while a child in his care spins around. I smile at the child. The man doesn’t look up from his phone.

I started writing a book about mother memoirs in 2018. I told my editor that I would have a complete draft in 2022. I had just started earnest solid work on the project, and then the world shut down in spring of 2020. My kids were home, one doing violin practice in the bedroom upstairs, the younger one, not yet on ADHD meds, literally poking me in the arm while I was in Zoom meetings. Finally, I put a sign on the door that read: “I’m working. Can you figure it out like a scientist?” When the vaccine became available and we started imagining the world opening up again, someone asked me, “what will you do when quarantine is over,” and I replied, in all seriousness, “sit in silence for eight hours straight.”

I have written in my car. I have written sitting in the bleachers at ice skating and basketball practice.I have written at the pool, half glancing up while my child swims under the supervision of a lifeguard. I have written in the afternoons at a coffee shop while I have a babysitter, or kidsitter, as my now 12-year-old likes to say. I have emailed and texted myself when I have an idea and my phone, but not a piece of paper and pen. What I like best is the moment when the kids are at school, and I sit in my brown reclining chair with a cup of coffee and maybe a cat next to me, or somewhere nearby, and I have time to think deep thoughts. Those days are rare and precious.

In an essay on fragments, Steve Fellner writes of his experience with bipolar disorder: “my relation to Time became different. I couldn’t pinpoint the moment when something revealed itself and then when it vanished. Everything was blurry and fragmented.” This, too, is my experience of Mother Time, which is, not coincidentally, the title of my book in prose poems.

I stop typing the essay and text my now 20-year-old to remind them I can pick them up after their training when I get back in town. 

The unwritten book will get written. I have written enough books now to know this. The book will get written in fifteen-minute sips between meetings and doing childcare, cooking dinner so the twelve-year-old fattens up, driving the older child to their job at the hospital across town.  

What this means partly is reminding myself, again, that writers do not write in long stretches, the way my students think. Rather, it comes in fragments, interrupted, one sentence after another. 

During the pandemic, my university colleagues and I were invited to submit “Covid impact” statements with our annual review materials, a log of the new kinds of labor we were doing, the way we were slowed down.

It occurred to me that it would be more useful and true for those less impacted to write statements of “temporal privilege”—understanding how their productivity was dependent upon someone else doing carework.

Fellner again: “A memoir-in-fragments invites non sequiturs. Accepting a life as a series of non sequiturs may be the most honest way of not only writing but also living”

June 4

I am moving this morning fluidly from sleep to work, a stop in the kitchen to make coffee and take it back to my bed with Rachel Zucker’s The Poetics of Wrongness, which I have been meaning to read for months. Down the hall, H is still sleeping. (The sleep score on my Fitbit says I slept better, almost nine hours, which is frankly unfathomable, but I feel it in my body, a clarity that hasn’t been there for a long time.) I scan the table of contents and note an essay on the poetics of motherhood, which seems like the right place to start, although it is the last of the four essays. I read until H wakes up, and then I make H an egg as part of what we are calling Operation Grow Strong and Healthy.

June has already started, and I haven’t yet set any clear plans for the month, beyond the vague “work on the book” and attending eight sessions of physical therapy for my arm, an injury that thankfully doesn’t mostly get in the way of my work. More concretely, I suppose I will also finish this essay and a conference paper (related to the unwritten book) that I will deliver on a weekend, without childcare, from the dining room, which is the place where I have the best internet. It is also the place in my house that is literally most central and therefore interruptible. 

Back in bed with yogurt and berries, I finish reading Zucker’s chapter and realize it is connected to another project in the works. I open a different file on my computer and dump in some notes that I hope make sense later about the conversational mode; it’s for an essay related to play and also a thank you note to my dissertation director, who encouraged me to write in new shapes, like an essay in the form of a love letter or a series of fragments. My shoulder aches. I remember the exercises I am supposed to do, the one that the therapist calls “the squeezies,” and pull my shoulder blades together. I forgot to take the red band out of my bag, the Lands’ End diaper bag that I still use when I don’t use a backpack, although I haven’t needed to diaper a child in about nine years.

Interrupted fragments seem both more true to lived experience and also a useful way of drafting and assembling a project that seems too large to manage. A sentence on a notecard or in a notebook or an email or a text to yourself. One can write a whole book a fragment at a time.

To do: buy a new bag.

H calls from downstairs wanting to know what I’m doing, and I yell back “writing an essay” and try to ignore the various sounds that suggest H is throwing their body around the family room while wrestling a sleeping bag full of stuffed animals. I think of Meg Woltizer’s mother character in The Ten-Year Nap, writing while her children were on the other side of the door, knocking for her attention.

Zucker’s essay details the process of her being stuck, unable to write a lecture on the poetics of motherhood which, spoiler alert, ends up being the lecture on the poetics of motherhood. What strikes me is the distancing move that Zucker uses, the third person, describing herself as “she,” which is one of my favorite ways to play with memoir: “She wanted to write about how the experience of motherhood and these poets’ identities as mothers had led to formal innovations and new epistemologies, changes in what poems are about, how they look, what they sound like, what they are for, and who they are for” (114). 

Zucker continues, “She was thinking about the ways in which these works were long and messy and relational and exceedingly interrupted and interruptible” (119).

I realize this thing has gotten much longer than the 1200 words I was invited to write so I email to ask about a hard stop.

I would not argue, of course, that fragments are essentially a maternal writing strategy; rather, fragments are useful for anyone—like mothers—faced with interruption and distraction. Anyone, honestly, who is trying to work on something while also there’s Slack notifications and Facebook and endless scrolling on Instagram, which is to say our current fragmented, interrupted, distractable moment, or what Cal Newport infamously calls “the hyperactive hive mind.”

Another version of this essay might have been my to-do list, with footnotes. Another version of this essay might have been two columns, with the “argument” on the left and the “personal” on the right. Another version of this essay would cut the personal entirely. But I don’t think they are actually separate or separable.

After the shooting on my campus last February, when my students could not write anything at all, I asked them to take a “micro step,” a term I gathered from a psychologist, toward their project. Like: open the Word doc. And then another. This is the best advice I can give. Sit down in the place you can write. Set a timer for fifteen minutes, or even five. Write something, anything. How many micro steps does it take to complete a chapter of a book manuscript?

To do: look up recipes for H.

To do: reschedule physical therapy appointment.

To do: listen to Zucker’s podcast.

To do: check out Alicia Ostriker’s The Mother-Child Papers

To do: check in with the academic advisors about any FIRES <insert FIRE GIF here>

I text D a quote from Zucker which is also a way to let her know I am thinking about her.

Zucker: “Nothing could compare to the feeling of ambivalence and rage she felt when torn between her mothering and her art, and this was her poetics of motherhood, and she wanted to write about that” (134).

I put on my yoga clothes and tell H that I am going for a walk around the block. H asks how the essay is going. Almost there, I say.

To do: drop off H at camp. Open Ch. 2. Reread. Write a list of what needs to happen to finish the chapter. Take the first step.

References

Fellner, Steve. “On Fragmentation.” In Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction. Ed. Margot Singer and Nicole Walker. Bloomsbury, 2023.

Ruhl, Sarah. One Hundred Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write. Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Hogarth Press, 1929.

Zucker, Rachel. The Poetics of Wrongness. Wave Books, 2023.