Writing When They Go Off To School: How To Reorganize Your Writing Life During The First Days Of Child’s Starting School Woes.

Writing When They Go Off To School

“Don’t you miss your free time? Your kid should be in school already!”

It really is true what they say—life with a child is life barraged with constant change. You hit it off with the newborn phase, where you’re constantly pouring love, energy, and every inch of yourself to make it through your first year as a mom. Then the toddler phase comes, and suddenly those little bundles of joy discover their legs, and off they go—bruises and cuts be damned.

Nap times still exist, but no longer does the playpen or pack-and-play contain their desperate need to explore and test their own limits. Now the time to write becomes scarce because toddlers need constant supervision and help with absolutely everything they do. By the time the newly evolved schedule is done, you’re pulling your hair out when the “four o’clock gremlin” comes out—yes, this is a thing. An absolute real thing!

You muscle through, and you end each day too exhausted to even think about returning to the keyboard. When you do have the energy, the little one is teething, they’ve caught a cold, or they thought they could handle their bicycle-style walker and ended up with a bad spill. Yes, that last one is a personal example, but far from unique to what other moms have experienced, I’m sure.

Then one day, my husband mentions our little one is ready for school.

This, you can imagine, came with a multitude of reactions typical of a new mom. Denial, panic, immediate refusal, and tears. How could my one-year-old be ready for school? He was too young, he wasn’t ready, he still needed me, and I wasn’t ready. How would either of us cope? I’d just adapted to the toddler system. Now the system was changing again—only this time my child wouldn’t be with me.

“Shouldn’t that be what every mom wants?”

Yes, yes, it should. We send our little ones off to begin their journey of going to school, and we finally get our free time back. Only, everything’s changed. You spent the last year or so on a rigorous schedule where your entire existence revolved around your child. No free time. Hanging out with the girlies usually meant the girlies came to see you before nap time. Your entire day was controlled by the baby’s schedule you punched into that nifty phone app you found. Now another new phase begins that’s about to shake up the whole routine.

So what are you supposed to do now? The little one’s schedule was always prioritized over your own; you sacrificed your normal schedule because your child counted on you to. The system’s changed again, and by this stage a lot of mothers get lost in how to adapt to this new phase of life. I know I did.

Let’s face it, the first day of school is brutal. The first week you’re hovering by the phone waiting for the school to call you—any excuse to rescue your child from this new life experience that was thrust upon them. The weeks following, you’re trapped in a subliminal trance heavy with anticipation and grief. You’d been looking forward to time alone, but now that you have it, you’re lonely and miss your little one. The routine you used to follow before becoming a mother just doesn’t seem to click anymore. The checklist you used to zoom through on a daily basis now barely gets its third item crossed off before you’re distracted by worries wrapped around your child.

As hair-pulling as the at-home routine was, you miss them. You feel so alone without them, you question what you’ve done, and you couldn’t possibly write with all of these horrendous emotions.

Which is totally fine.

It took me months to get back to the keyboard confidently. To return to critique group with actual pages. To allow myself moments to draft, journal, and write about my work in progress (WIP). Things were different. I stepped back from my graphic design business to care for my child. I no longer had clients to call or email. I didn’t have to check leads anymore because I was no longer pursuing them. As someone diagnosed with ADHD, yet another change in schedule proved a particularly difficult hurdle to get over. I’d jot down my list to check off as I went, set alarms on my phone to keep me moving—only to barely get past item two or three on the list. Going from having my son full-time at home to having him off to school was disorienting, to say the least.

I felt so guilty not being able to pull myself together day after day, watching opportunities to be productive just tick away. There went time to get back to drafting my WIP. I could have offered a little freelance work to earn some money, but I’ve been doomscrolling instead. My motivation was shot. I was still exhausted from what was, and now my mind could only worry about my son’s day at school.

“This sounds miserable. How am I supposed to get motivated?”

It does sound miserable, because it is. Here’s a statistic I heard from my therapist that made me feel better, especially in retrospect to where I am today. By nine to ten months, just under sixty percent of mothers in the United States are working. This is in large part due to the fact that it can take up to two years for some women to recover from childbirth. Two years. By the eighteenth month of my son’s life, he was attending his first day of school.

Within the torrential weeks that followed, I strong-armed myself into attending critique group. I forced myself to jot down outlines for my next chapter. Got myself to read the next book on this year’s reading challenge. I was averaging two to five hundred words per hour to show for it. At first, this was devastating. What happened to the thousands of words I could average within an hour or two? Where was my motivation during the newborn stage when I still managed to draft entire scenes for a chapter? I felt like such a failure for what little progress I was making until therapy brought me to a necessary realization.

My mind and body were still recovering, but I’d accomplished a lot more than I thought.

Recovery wasn’t just limited to my physically recovering from a cesarean birth. My mind still needed to adjust in a way I hadn’t expected. No doubt this is true of every mother that ever was. So where does that leave you?

Take your time getting back into the swing of things

No, it’s not the most satisfying answer in the world, but it’s the most honest. Your life has changed forever since having a baby. Having that baby made you have to adapt to your new life of remaining constantly in your child’s orbit. Then they grew to the toddler years, and you had to adapt all over again.

Now they’ve gone to school, and you’ll have to adapt again to that change. I’m in a very fortunate position where I am not a mom who had to return to work immediately after my child was born. My heart goes out to every mother who did, because I’m still struggling to get through this change from home.

No matter your situation, there’s nothing more justifiable than your needing to take time after the momentous occasion of becoming a mom. You’re entering the phase where you have time to yourself again. Time you’ll have to relearn how to make use of. Every aspect of your life has changed, and that leads you to your next step.

Take it slow; do a little writing here and there when you can manage it. Push yourself once in a while, and take it easy all of the other times until the ratio between those two choices starts to shift. The guilt and longing you feel to get back into your creative flow mean you want to get back to it, but it’s ok to need more time. It’s ok if you’re only managing one hundred words on the page—that’s one hundred more you didn’t have before.

Reconstruct your schedule (again)

Here’s another topic we’re revisiting from a previous post in the series. You’re going through constant change, and now you have to restructure your day-to-day. Again. I mentioned earlier that I put alarms on my phone, all kinds of alarms. Alarms that told me to wake up, eat, get in the car to pick up my son from school. It wasn’t until the app I used to assist me through my son’s feeding and diapering schedule that I depended on my cellphone so much. I even began to set reminders to set time aside to write. Nowadays my weekly schedule looks like this:

• Wake up, get dressed and grab purse

• Load child’s backpack and water bottle into car while dad feeds him breakfast

• Pour coffee and head to school for drop off

• Return home, have breakfast, drink coffee and shower

• Writing time for blog, social media posts or WIP

• Eat lunch, grab purse, pick up child from half-day at school

• Prepare snack and bottle, nap time for mom and tot

• Dad comes home, snack time, read book

• Dinner time, bed time for tot, bed time routine for family starts

• Sleep

No doubt by the time I get used to this routine, it’ll change again because my son will be ready to move on from half to full days. Until then, the above chicken-scratch list is what’s working for me. It’s also offering me satisfactory results. Satisfactory’s such a bottom-of-the-barrel word, but it’s what I can manage right now, and that’s ok. In fact, with the changes I’m anticipating regarding my son’s daily schedule, I’ll be going from satisfactory to good in no time!

The same will happen to you, writing mom. Push yourself when you can, rest when you need to, and recover. The sooner you allow recovery, the sooner you’ll be rebuilding your confidence with your keyboard. The words are there, waiting to spill out of you, and they’ll be there when you’re ready.

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Until next time, from the Writing Nook