Jolyn Young

I wrote this 10 years ago but never hit “publish.” Perhaps this post will encourage a mom in the thick of motherhood’s most pressing demands while trying to maintain a shard of her former self and grow new skills alongside her children. Or, it might remind someone that her decision to not have kids was definitely the right way to go. Either way, you’ll see what (who) interrupted me at the end and was the reason I never got around to polishing up and posting this.

As a mom who stays home with my baby and works full-time, my schedule is filled with a series of interrupted projects. A fragmented mental state is difficult to work with as a writer, but I’ve adjusted my method so that I don’t have to focus on any one particular subject for longer than nine minutes.

I usually have a system of baby care/writing/housework/playtime/TV break (what’s the point in working from home if you can’t enjoy an occasional Roseanne marathon?), except for when it’s writing/baby care/TV break/baby care/housework, or maybe housework/baby care/baby care/writing/baby care. I basically have no system.

Researching articles and copying and pasting notes, contact names and phone numbers is pretty easy to do with half my brain distracted by handing out animal crackers and accepting sloppy kisses from my toddler. When I’m really interested in cloud seeding and want to be a bookworm and read about it for 13 hours straight but Grace is teething and needs to be held, I close my laptop and tell myself, “Well, at least I got some notes done” and snuggle my girl.

Plink, plink, plink….

Writing coherent, flowing articles is tricky when my mind feels like a puzzle map of the United States where each state is a different color and all the pieces beginning with “I” are missing. Instead of trying to write an article start to finish, now I copy and paste from my interview notes onto a fresh document all the quotes I want to use, in any order. The next time I look at it, I clean up the grammar, add a description of who said what and why, and close my computer. The next time I look at it, I put the quotes in a flowing order and add a few connecting sentences. The article slowly writes itself, as long as I give it a generous head start on my deadline.

Plink, plink, plink…

Before I was a writer, I was a full-time cowboy. Now, I’d rather stay at home with my baby than ride all day, but I still like to improve my roping skills. My husband is a dedicated dummy roper, and he got me roping the dummy nearly every day when I was pregnant. At the time, I thought (and said), “What’s the point? I’m too pregnant to ride, I don’t even know the next time I’ll get to rope live cattle, it’s winter, the future is too far away, I’m out of breath,” but I kept throwing those loops even after Grace was born. Sometimes I would get her dressed for outside and strapped in her stroller, and she would have a meltdown after I threw only five loops. Then I said, “Well, at least I got to throw five loops” and tend to the baby.

I wanted to forefoot a horse last year, something I had never done. `1`12212121111121Jim taught me to forefoot horses on the dummy, and I roped that sawhorse at least five days a week last summer.