How I Wrote a Book With Two Small Children, AKA Letting Dads Parent
Behind the Scenes of Book-Writing and What I've Been Up To
Welcome to another installment of My So-Called Feminist Life, a weekly newsletter wrestling with what it means to be a feminist today. Once a month I plan to send a little update like this one, with a glimpse into the behind the scenes work of writing my forthcoming book and some links in one place for other places on the Internet you can find my work, as well as what I’m reading. This issue delves into some final (for now) thoughts on masculinity in the form of dads and parenting and how I wrote a book. Next week we’ll get into a new loose monthly theme.
As always: I do encourage you to feel free to share your own thoughts on the texts or topics in the comments. Conversation (that remains respectful) is encouraged. Thanks for joining me on this journey.
Love,
Maggie
Babies, Books, and the “How Do you Do It?” Question
After my first baby was born, it took me more than a year to spend my first night away from him. Something about that first umbilical cord, it took much longer to truly cut. The first time I left him with a babysitter, a sweet college student, for a few hours so I could get some work done at the coffee shop down the street, I spent the majority of the time trying to breathe my way out of a panic attack. As that invisible cord between us stretched thinner, it seemed more and more likely that I’d return home to find him missing. Or even that he never existed at all.
Of course, since we couldn’t really afford full-time care at the time, it also just meant I wasn’t all that used to leaving him. Nothing seemed to really require me to leave his side for an overnight. Finally, during the summer of 2019, I realized I had to go on a reporting trip to Oregon overnight for a story I had been putting off and putting off. I remember vividly driving away, waving to my partner and kid right after I told them I really didn’t want to go at all. Holding my breath.
It turned out fine. Just as it had always been fine when my partner traveled for work, which he had to do every couple of months, and I was home caring for the baby on my own. Then COVID hit, and you know the story. We were stuck inside with an 18-month-old in a 2 bedroom condo for five months before we bought a house and gave ourselves at least a bit more breathing room, but were still stuck inside, not traveling. Needless to say, I didn’t leave my oldest again until he was three, I was pregnant with his sibling, vaccines existed, and my partner and I took a weekend anniversary getaway. I. could. not. wait. to. get. away.
By that time, too, he was firmly in 4-day-a-week daycare and I experienced the strange sensation regularly after dropping him off a kind of twisted version of that initial anxiety attack. A wave that began as a burst of worry followed immediately by relief. I was alone. I could focus on myself. My work. My needs. I did not have to parent wholly, completely, all of the time.
When people find out I have two small children — a five- and two-year-old currently — and a book about to publish, they usually balk for a moment. “How did you do that?” And I haven’t been sure really how to answer. But I’m realizing that the answer is: I do not see my children as mine alone. When I was pregnant I had a long intense conversation with my partner: I could not do this on my own. I could not be the “primary parent,” the “default,” I could not lose myself or end up a stay at home mom because my work made less money, or was more flexible or any of the usual excuses that two-parent households end up making that seem rational financially or emotionally but also dig us all deeper into gender stereotype. Maybe it was that conversation, or maybe it was just the person he is, or the constant conversations we’ve had since, but my husband has always held up his end of the deal on that front. Never asking me to de-prioritize my work (my needs). Never comparing incomes as some means of trading off domestic care and labor. (Not that we haven’t had lots of conversations about dividing labor along the way).
We’ve also invested, financially, in daycare, babysitters, nannies, friends, to provide care so that I can do the work I need to get done, he can get the work he needs to get done, and our children are taken care of, as we could afford it. Again, without ever tit for tat-ing the individual incomes our work brings in, but that didn’t mean I didn’t do that in my own head, anyway.
When I was pregnant with our second baby, I knew I needed an escape hatch, a way to force myself back to my work — I don’t say this in a capitalist way, not the work that made the most sense financially — but the work that made the most sense spiritually, once he arrived. I knew how easy it was from the first time around to lose my self in the hormonal flood of new babydom that can pound you down into feeling like nothing more than a pair of breasts and a living, breathing rocking chair. Or to be convinced that somehow, the other parts of you are no longer worth investing in, because now this little being needs you and you are the only thing that can provide for it. So I spent my pregnancy with him honing the book proposal I’d been strumming on for years. The one I was scared to invest too much time in when my oldest was young, because it wasn’t bringing in income that I could hold up as proof of my contribution to my family or our childcare costs. I cut and wrote and shifted and polished and threw out and wrote more. Then, just two months after he was born, I sold my book.
The investment in myself, my work to not let go of that other part of myself, the journalist, writer, hopeful author, paid off.
Within several months of book writing, I realized that to write the book I wanted to write, I’d need to leave my small children to work. Both to get some intensive writing done — away from the daily mental drubbing parents of small children take, with the tasks and tasks and tasks that crowd and distract — and to report. I was digging into stories that were untold. There were people I needed to meet in-person, a video tape across an ocean I needed to see, and a physical archive I needed to sift through. And if I was going to meet my deadline, I’d need to go soon. My 13-month old second son was still technically breastfeeding when I left for a weeklong international trip to the UK. Though I had night weaned him the month before, I was still producing milk. I just couldn’t really pump it. So leaving was also an end to nursing my baby.
Somewhere between having my first and my second child, I decided that leaving my kids even when they were small, even for trips that took me sometimes far away for extended time periods, was good for me, good for my goals, good for them, and good for my partner.
I’ve written and worked for enough women’s magazines that I’ve tired of the interviewee response, “You wouldn’t ask a man that question.” But not because it isn’t necessary. It absolutely is. Because I’m tired that it is still necessary. You wouldn’t ask a man who wrote a book how he completed the task while having two little ones at home — would you? The answer is obvious: his wife, a nanny, whatever combination of partner care and paid care. And the answer for me is the exact same. My partner, paid care workers, seeing my work as more than a means to a financial end (a privilege, yes, and an investment in the future) that is how we do work and parent at the same time.
But also, I secretly love it when people ask me this question, amazed how I wrote this book with two small children. Because it was hard. Having two small children in general is hard. But here’s a lesson on gender I’ve been trying to instill in myself and my family — besides breastfeeding (and breastfeeding is not a necessity) there is nothing I can do for my kids that my husband cannot. And many many things that our extended family and network of care providers can do that my husband and I cannot. And that’s exactly how my partner showed up for me and for this book by stepping in when I needed to be elsewhere, whether that meant upstairs writing on the weekends, or leaving the country to chase a story. Was it always perfectly smooth? No. But it happened.
Maybe it’s the deluge of divorce memoirs hitting the bookshelves right now, but I’m fully aware that this is a privileged position to be in. Wherein I have a partner who doesn’t act like my care work is somehow the default parent’s care work, or that he’s incapable of anything to do with our children. I know many fathers feel unprepared or even lean on their weaponized incompetence in order to foist more domestic care work onto mothers (dear God, this Michael Bublé story!!), but that system will never be undone if we don’t prove that it’s all bullshit. When I floated the UK trip (and another writing trip and a trip to Boston to see the Marathon and and and…), my partner said yes, of course you should go. Every time. Was he anxious? Yes. Was it going to be hard? Yes. Did that stop me from going? Not for a second.
So a little over a year ago, I was in the UK for a week, by myself. Working. Reporting out some of the most important bones of my forthcoming book. My partner stayed home with our 13-month old and four-year-old.
I landed in Edinburgh utterly confused and also buzzing with the energy I have learned to harness whenever I leave my kids. It’s thrilling, in a way, to leave them behind, safely, and discover I am still me, apart from them. By the time I checked into my hotel, Edinburgh was dark and a cold wind blew down the cobblestone streets. I met up with a friend who happened to be living there for a time. She showed me a cute pub where I had a “malt of the month” then went back to the hotel and fell into a deep sleep. I set an alarm because I knew my children wouldn’t wake me.
The next morning, I took a train out to the Scottish borderland to see the end of the Spine Race — the ultramarathon that’s run through the Pennine Way, also known as England’s backbone. Three years earlier, the race became famous worldwide when Jasmin Paris, at the time a nursing mother herself, shattered the course record, coming in first out of all the competitors that year, regardless of gender, while stopping at checkpoints to recover for an hour or two, eat, drink coffee, and pump milk. I had to see the winter ultramarathon for myself.
From there, I went to central England, to visit two older women who had been PE teachers in the 1960s and 70s, and taken on duties as amateur sport historians when they decided to track down all the living women Olympians from the earliest games. They had an interview with an American woman who I’d been writing about that ran in the 1928, 800 meter race that only existed on a video tape. She’d died in 2008. They had me in for tea, and lunch, and cake, and stories about their lives. Then on to Bath to meet with a researcher and academic who I interviewed about the societal impacts of gender differences in sport. Finally, I ended up in Birmingham, to see the grounds where the first woman to run a sub-five minute mile completed the feat. I spent the day with her daughter, going through archives of her old running club and hearing stories about what she was like as a runner, and a mother.
I was immersed, in other words, in my work at a time when some mothers (perhaps some parents in general, but mostly mothers) feel their children are perhaps too young to leave behind for so long. And this is one of the ways that I was able to write the book that I knew I needed to write at the time I wrote it.
And I know this sounds so trite — that letting my husband stay with the kids was some kind of revolutionary statement. That I was able to travel by myself for my own reasons for a week. That I could do the work I found meaningful even if it took me away from my young family and wasn’t necessarily going to be financially fruitful. That this allowed me to prioritize work I wasn’t sure would pan out financially (because books, no, are not the paths to riches for most of us) while investing in care for my children and not bringing in a regular paycheck. But actually, I think, sometimes we need to hear these little things. That letting male partners parent the same way we are often expected to parent, wholly and completely, is a powerful way to teach all of us that men can be caretakers as wholly and completely as women can. That we don’t have to accept the status quo.
After a truly exhausting (but exhilirating) week of reporting and train travel and hoping the meetings I’d set up with random people across an ocean would all pan out, I returned home. My flight landed shortly before the kids’ bedtime. It was dark when my husband pulled up to the arrivals pickup area at the airport. My two boys were in the back seat, buckled in their car seats. I kissed them both and enthusiastically told them how I’d missed them. They looked at me with the quiet side eye they usually reserve for strangers or people they haven’t warmed up to yet. On the drive home, I kept turning around to look at them both. To smile and tell them I missed them. Amazed, in some way, that I was back here, that they were still here. More shy smiles in return, a cheek turned away at the attention.
As soon as we pulled in the driveway and got in the house, I tried to take my baby from my husband’s arms to give him a big snuggle. He began to cry “Dada! Dada!” arms outstretched away from me.
What I’ve Been Up To:
Planning: You heard it here first, I’ve got actual book tour dates! If you’re receiving this you might want to mark your calendars. More info and pretty graphics and conversation partners and probably other things, forthcoming.
For now, SAVE THE DATES:
Seattle, WA, Elliott Bay Books June 18
Bellingham, WA, Village Books, June 20
Portland, OR, Powell’s Books, June 24
Corte Madera, CA, Book Passage, June 25
West Hollywood, CA, Book Soup, June 26
La Jolla/San Diego, CA, Warwick’s, June 27
(Yes, then I will promptly pass out for a week)
Writing: Over at Gilmore Women I spoke to the brilliant and hilarious Rahawa Haile about her relationship to Gilmore Girls for our new series, the Gilmore Women Questionnaire. I also wrote about masculinity in the knit-a-thon episode of Gilmore Girls, and how the show was so rude to Kiki Smith.
Consuming: Reading this important Q&A with
over at ; getting misty at this moving interview with Tessa Hulls about her forthcoming graphic memoir and the hard work of book-writing and family and isolation; cheering on the gay humpback whale sex photos because, come on, can we just drop the idea that the heteronormative patriarchy is “natural” charade already?! ; trying to process the massive death and destruction happening in this world.
Thanks for reading! My So-Called Feminist Life is a weekly newsletter wrestling with feminism in today’s world. I encourage conversation in the comments if you wish to share your own thoughts, feelings, memories, opinions. If you’d like to support this project financially, you can become a paid subscriber.
You can find me on Instagram: @maggiejmertens
Pre-order my book Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (Algonquin Books, June 18, 2024) from your favorite local bookstore, request it from your local library, or push this quick pre-order button from Bookshop.org
I love this so much--and I agree, traveling for writing/work has been so good for me, and for kids' relationship with their dad.