WHERE THE TIME GOES
The real reasons I can’t get my work done
Let’s just start this one in the most obvious place on the page: “A woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is to write…” This is Virginia Woolf. In 1928, she was asked to give two lectures on women and fiction, which later expanded to become Woolf ’s most famous essay, “A Room of One’s Own.” It is in this essay, that Woolf asks, so memorably, how Jane Austen managed to write
Pride and Prejudice with no private study to work in; how Jane Austen wrote Pride and
Prejudice in a “general sitting room” full of “casual interruptions.” Woolf ’s conclusion — essentially, that Austen was Austen, and that the novel is a lesser form (the sort of stuff, according to Woolf, that can be slapped down in a sitting room) — I always found weirdly unhelpful, especially in such an otherwise generous, useful essay.
Yes, Austen was Austen. Then there are the rest of us. I am not sure if I am about to write a Lean In- style column, because I have not read Sheryl Sandberg’s bestseller on women and work and continuing gender inequality, and also, I am not even sure what I am dealing with here is an issue of sexism.
When I write “here,” I mean where I am writing from — a room of my own, a place rented for a few months, on the other side of Montreal from my home.
It took me a while to see that such a place would help my problems, because the bouquet of issues in question was as intertwining as life itself. I had to begin picking apart: My day with my daughter began at 7, and even though a superb nanny came at 9, my writing work only ever seemed to begin at noon. I love to feed my family, and yet I was losing weight because I was always too busy to eat myself. Every day, when I sat down to work at my desk, I would find the work not done the day before, or the day before that, or that day before that. I began waking up with a start, at 3 a.m., a tickertape parade of unfinished business raining down on my brain: the book that needs finishing, the research that needs doing, the column that needs writing, the feature story with the killer due date. This year, I beat my blown deadline record by handing in an essay to a weekly magazine a magnificent, career-shattering four months late.
I decided to keep a log. Like a dieter tracking calories in order to see just where the pounds were coming from, for a few days I wrote everything down to see where all my time was going. A sample day:
7:15 a.m. wake, make breakfast for Mike, Bea
8 a.m. play with Bea (Mike leaves for work) 9 a.m. Kay arrives.
9:15 a.m. Supermarket, buy bathing suit for Bea’s swimming
9:45 a.m. Scheduling discussion with Kay 10 a.m. Email
10:30 a.m. Email 11 a.m. Plumber
11:30 a.m. Shower Noon Organize Bea’s lunch 1 p.m. Write (eat lunch at
desk) 1:30 p.m. Plumber 2 p.m. Write 2:30 p.m. Plumber 3 p.m. Play with Bea 3:30 p.m. Plumber 4 p.m. Write 4:30 p.m. Prepare dinner 5 p.m. Kay leaves. Play with Bea, finish making dinner. 6:30 p.m. Mike home 7 p.m. Dinner 8 p.m. Pyjamas, teeth, stories (Mike at yoga) 9 p.m. Clean up 9:30 p.m. Invoicing I got into the habit of phoning my mom, and complaining to her. The woman always does more, she would say. The mother always does more. The men, they don’t even know what we do in the day.
Amazingly, this seemed to be kind of true. Mike could win the Dad of the Year award — anyone who knows him knows this — and yet I would tell him about my struggles with work and he would instantly lay my problems under the banner of time management. I had an office at home, I had a caregiver to take care of Bea. What more did I need? I was too undisciplined, he told me.
But I am disciplined. It’s the leaking pipes and everyone’s meal requirements and the beautiful little girl with needs and the other 17 tons of life swirling around me at every moment that are not disciplined. For all kinds of work you need different things. For weightlifting, you need muscle mass. For writing, you need blocks of quiet. Your quiet is your power. Bea began coming to my door, putting her mouth to the wood, and cooing “mamamamamama.” Try finishing a sentence to that chorus. Your heart melts. Your words evaporate.
Never mind that Mike was making his easy assessments from a cool, glassy office on the other side of town. Never mind that he was thinking that if the wife didn’t deal with the organization of childcare, house care, life care — the plumbers, the doctor’s appointments, the food in the fridge — it would all work out anyway. Once in a while, he would hear my complaints and command me not to make dinner. So don’t make
dinner! he would say. He was happy with a can of tuna.
And that would make me even more angry. Because the implication was not that I was overburdened, but rather that I was making a big production of things. In anyone else’s hands, it would be as easy as opening a can of tuna.
Was all this about sexism or freelancism?
I would put myself in Mike’s position — an office on the other side of town — and him in mine — an office in the middle of the home — and could very quickly see how that change would mean he would be the one spending two hours with plumber. If it was discovered, at 2:30 p.m. on some crazy deadline day, that there was no milk and no juice and no diapers, it would be Mike blowing his deadline at the market, not me. Man, woman, it didn’t matter. It was all about location.
But then when I would float the idea of an office outside of the house, even one rented only for the summer, and Mike would balk, once even stating that if I really wanted an office outside the home, I would have the sort of job that provided one, it began feeling like something having more to do with what I “deserve.” It began feeling, yes, like an issue of feminine worth.
And in an odd way, it fit in with something else I had noticed, curiously and continually, since having Bea. At parties, dinners, when being introduced, people stopped asking me what I did for a living. I sat next to a lawyer who talked to me for two hours about a case of his involving patents on a tree-resin molecule, and he asked how old my daughter was, but never about my livelihood, my ideas (which happen to be my livelihood). Before having a child, people always asked. But afterwards, for reasons I can only associate with perceived unimportance, curiosity dried up. Perhaps, upon hearing that I am a mom, they imagine my answer will be too boring to bear: I make glutenfree doggie biscuits when I am not helicopter parenting. Something like that.
So I looked, a bit, and without permission, for a room outside the home, and soon a suitable room fell into my orbit. I have it for the summer months, and I see it as an experiment in reclamation of necessary parts of myself, the parts that only thrive in solitude and quiet. Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice in a common sitting room. When people would come in she would put a piece of blotting paper over the sheet she was writing on, in order to maintain her privacy. But I am not Jane Austen. And I don’t yet know what will happen when the plumber needs to call again. But I have a feeling I will be able to say, to Mike, “Well, I am at my office, and on deadline, can you go?” Then, it will be so clear, that the only fair answer is “Yes.”