Parenthood and Memories

Shortly after I had my son, I was on a panel about being a parent and being a writer. Two things that had become oil and water after the first month. At the time, I hadn’t been a parent that long. I trusted that my experience, though new and had value but had a lingering doubt that I knew what the hell I was doing. There was one question I didn’t know how to answer, how does being a parent impact writing, or inform it, or change it? The content of my writing had not changed. But parts of me had. Newborns, babies, and toddlers don’t give their parents enough time to grapple with those changes, let alone understand how it changed their art.

Now, after four years of being a parent, I can say it has changed my art, but I don’t think it’s fair to give my kid the credit. I changed and grew as a person. We all grow or change if you have kids or not.

I just want to write. I want to write a hundred things. I want to explore a dozen different emotions. I want to write things that fill me with joy and then break my heart. I’ve never been a writer that wants to specialize in just one part of the speculative genre. I want to have seasons. I want my writing to reflect my life. This means that I might not know I’ve changed until five years go by and I read an old story of mine. I’ll be brought back to the smells, flavors, and emotions of that moment in time.

When I re-read my short story, “Eliam is Forever,” I feel transported, not to the doomed generations ship, but my couch in early December of 2020. It’s 3:45am, I just gave my 3-month-old a bottle, changed him, and swaddled him back to sleep. I’m not going back to bed. I don’t risk putting him back in his bassinet, he is beside me as I open my computer. Part of the reason I have trouble sleeping, I never get my words in anymore. I want to write endlessly. I lay in bed thinking of everything I could do, everything I could try. Sometimes, it makes me cry.

A story about a doomed generation ship makes sense when you’ve been trapped at home, trapped in a pregnant body, and then trapped without the ability to use your hands. (We don’t talk about what it’s like, only being allowed to use hands for newborn babies, and while most might think this is an exaggeration, for us it wasn’t.)

In fourth grade, riding the bus to school in the morning, I leaned by forehead against the glass. I was thinking about time as familiar streets slid by. I paid attention to where I was, always. When I got older, I wanted to be able to drive anywhere. Places change as time goes on, and things look different. And in my child brain, I realized that I had become one of those places where once there were only trees, or a cow pasture, and now it’s a grocery store. If I looked back, all I had were memories that were imperfect.

I panicked on the bus as my head hit the window when we went over a bump. I tried to hold all the small things we lose that make us who we are. And I thought, “Now is now, and it will never be now again.” I cannot trap time. But since that bus ride, this is a sentence I’ve said to myself in quiet moments and in moments that I never want to escape.

The small memories that I would like to capture in amber and hold forever. Those are also happening now. They come with full belly laughs and racing monster trucks down the driveway. They are lazy mornings when no one wants to get out of bed or singing in the car to lyrics so garbled no one understands them. Running around flinging a shirt back and forth because the imaginary Joker is coming and we have to shirt him back.

I have always been interested in secret history and small history. The histories that are glossed over in textbooks, left out because they don’t work for the fascist leaning asshats or the history most folks find uninteresting. Small facts that get lost and trapped in time and no one can ever really remember—a scent that became as popular as Tommy Girl when I was in middle school, or a saying left in 1931 that was used and tossed aside.

The writing thing, I used to believe was explaining myself and exploring. I wanted to craft the sky and show others what I could see. Some of that is true. Some of it is because I want to take endless nights and hold onto them forever.