Writing Is Working – I Promise

At a time when newspapers across the country are going out of business
or laying off writers, I took a long hard look at Mama Bee’s rant against the writing mums who dare consider themselves experts on working motherhood… and screamed.

At its heart, I think I understand what she was trying to say – that there is no cookie cutter solution for the trials and travails of the working parent. If you think a “10 Easy Tips to Wrangle Your Kids” list is going to solve your struggles, more power to you.

But in accusing mothers who write for a living of being “profoundly disconnected from its real trials and tribulations,” she betrays her own lack of understanding of the life of a journalist.

We work, generally far above the forty-hour work week – and not all of us from home. In fact, a fair number of journalists work out of an office, rather than as freelancers. I consider myself lucky that I spend a few days working from home, but it’s somewhat of a misnomer – working from home often means packing my daughter in her carseat and heading off with her to do an interview in the middle of a barn with a farmer concerned about milk prices, keeping one eye fixed on her at all times to make sure she doesn’t end up UNDER a cow. It means leaving my daughter with my husband at 6 p.m. to head to a five-hour-long town board meeting where I’ll listen to politicians sniping at each other about a whole lot of nothing instead of enjoying books before bedtime.

I know what it’s like to juggle the sitter’s schedule with my own, to go rushing around to find someone to watch my daughter on a random Monday when my daycare provider has a doctor’s appointment. I know what it’s like to call my boss and say, I’m sorry, I can’t go report on that fire right now because I don’t have daycare, and to hear him sigh and know that I just lost favour that the non-parent reporters automatically curry.

I also know what it’s like to try to work from home, to sit at a computer and try to write a story about parenting while my daughter screams from the bathroom or shoves a cup of juice in my face and asks
for more. I know what it’s like to be this close to missing a deadline and have to go clean up a water spill across the kitchen floor. I chose this, I know, but that doesn’t make it any easier. And for those who would say, well, hire a sitter on those days, I counter – where will I get the money?

Because as a writer mum, I also know what it’s like to struggle to make ends meet. Newspapers are closing. The paper where I work has cut staff, and that’s meant more pressure on the rest of us to produce, produce, produce. But where do I find the time? Where do I find the supplemental income when one of the magazines I write for shuts down, when the new editor decides she doesn’t like my style as much as the old editor?

No, I don’t know what it’s like to be a factory laborer, Mama Bee. I don’t know what it’s like to have regular hours, when I can punch in, punch out. News doesn’t happen nine to five – and daycares don’t take kindly to you showing up at 7 because a late breaking story kept you in
the newsroom. I don’t know what it’s like to be a corporate drone either, Mama Bee, to know exactly how much my paycheck will be week in and week out, to know I can make the mortgage and the phone bill.

But I do know how to write their stories. And that’s how they end up in the newspaper, on the Web, in magazines. Because the lady working at H&R Block might be a whizz-bang at my taxes (while I can’t make heads or tails of a tax form), but she can’t write a news story.

So I write, Mama Bee, because that’s my job. Which makes me a working mother.

Image: Medway