Little Labors

Lots of writers have children

Sometimes those children write memoirs. It is rare that the memoirs are happy memoirs. This may say more about the nature of memoirs than the nature of being the child of a writer. (Whether being the child of a writer is really any worse than being the child of an accountant professor grocer realtor regulator will remain difficult to say since selection bias — children of writers more likely to write — makes memoirs, in relation to this question, a more than usually problematic dataset.) There is a certain consistency of complaint, I have noticed, among these memoirs: the child comes to show something to the writer-parent, who is writing in a room at home during the daytime hours, and the writer-parent says to the child, I can’t right now, I’m working. There are also often descriptions of the looming, hostile, uncompromising door of the home office. Apparently it is very troubling for children to see their parents working, at least doing the kind of work that does not make itself visibly obvious, even if the total hours of work, and thus parental unavailability, are equal (or more likely substantially less) than the working hours of a parent simply leaving the house, to go, say, to an office, where the equally mysterious work of “office work” is, in the child’s imagination, if they are interested in the imagining, done. Presumably these doors are simply the wrong doors on which to be knocking. I have consistently had a difficult time believing these memoirs, not that one has to believe memoirs, or that belief is what memoirs are there for. But the door seems like an obvious screen door. But screen for what?

I have never been the child of a writer, nor been a writer who had a child. (Being a writer who has a baby is really nothing like being a writer who has a child.) But I was once taking care of a three-year-old child, my niece, while I had no choice but to, in at least a minimal way, be working as a writer at the same time. It was the first time I was having a story of mine published in a major magazine, and I had to go over edits on the phone at a specific time, a time which overlapped with my picking up my niece from her preschool and then passing a couple hours with her, in a nearby Starbucks, until her parents were home — I didn’t have a key to their apartment. My niece was and is an unusually easy, flexible child. I took her to the designated Starbucks, though the original reason for going to the Starbucks, which was Internet access (this was more than a decade ago), proved dysfunctional that afternoon. Regardless, I opened my laptop and tried to take the editorial call. It was a call, then calls back, it was going back and forth. My niece was annoyed that I wasn’t speaking only to her. I promised I would speak with her soon. I continued to speak on the phone, with the editor. At one point, in between phone calls, my niece told me she wanted to go to the bathroom, so I brought her to the bathroom. Once were in the narrow stall, she took my phone from my coat pocket and threw it in the toilet. The phone did not work after that.

It is nice for children when their parents have offices outside of the home and are not seen to be doing work, I note to myself today, as the puma weeps while I speak on the cellphone, briefly, for work.