QWF Writes

Tag: parenthood

  • Hello Baby, Bye Bye Books by Mike Steeves

    Hello Baby, Bye Bye Books by Mike Steeves

    Man holds baby while reading a book

    My daughter was born on August 25, 2014, and during the interminable lead-up to her birth I was, like all new parents, subject to a deluge of unsolicited advice, warnings and thinly-veiled threats from family, friends and complete strangers about what I could expect as a new parent. One of the warnings I heard most often was that the time I had for reading was going to be severely curtailed.

    Maybe my friends didn’t appreciate how dedicated I was to my routine, because I soon discovered that it was actually pretty easy to carve out the three hours I needed in order to stay on top of the steady stream of books that I had begun purchasing early on in my wife’s pregnancy as a way of offsetting my anxiety over not reading enough.

    For starters, I used to bike to work. But once I realized that I could eke out at least forty minutes of reading on my daily commute, I started taking the metro to work, thereby forgoing the last form of physical activity I practiced with any sort of regularity.

    Another threat to my reading habit was the immense amount of time required to help my daughter sleep. Newborns spend a lot of time sleeping, but they are notoriously bad at it and require assistance (referred to as ‘soothing’). This basically amounts to walking the streets of your neighbourhood with your baby stuffed into one of those obnoxiously priced “carriers.” Once I was over the new-dad jitters and was no longer trying to impress passersby with the baby I had strapped to my chest, I got into the habit of doing laps around the pond at Parc Outremont while reading from a book that I held in front of me. I made my way through Michael Hamburger’s translations of Paul Celan this way, and while I typically have little memory for poetry, many lines from this work are now frozen in place, triggered every time I pass a fountain or leafless tree. And one of the most memorable reading experiences of the last few years is the time I spent on a cold bench at Parc Saint-Viateur with my daughter sleeping in the carrier as I read the final pages of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams while kids dressed up as penises made their way to Halloween parties.

    Happy Halloween

    ” …the time I spent on a cold bench at Parc Saint-Viateur with my daughter sleeping in the carrier as I read the final pages of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams while kids dressed up as penises made their way to Halloween parties.”

     

    My aforementioned friends, the ones who warned that I would have to sacrifice my love of reading to my role as a new dad, were also an enormous tax on the time I had for reading. By refusing dinner invitations, birthday party invites, brunch for babies, etc., typically blaming my absence on my daughter, I was not only able to keep up my reading schedule, but, after I had refused enough of these kind invitations, they no longer came in with any regularity, which also spared me the enormous time-suck of responding in a considerate manner something to the effect that “I would love to! But…”

    While it turns out that my friends were wrong about finding the time to read, there is one aspect of parenthood they were right about, but that I’d never taken very seriously: I may still manage to find a comparable quantity of time, but the quality of that time has been seriously degraded. I can sit for hours with Knut Hamsun’s Pan in front of my face, but I regularly find myself rereading the same line over and over again. Or an hour passes and I don’t even make it to the bottom of the page I started on. I’ve managed to read an impressive number of excellent and difficult works, but I’ve hardly retained anything. Within a week or so of finishing a book, I even struggle to remember what I had just read (except for the Celan). So while I have plenty of time to read, I can’t maintain the level of focus and attention I had in my pre-paternal reading sessions.

    Which brings me to the final obstacle to my reading habit – writing. Before my daughter was born I used to try to write at least a few lines every night, but even this small commitment now seems to take an inordinate amount of time away from doing the thing that I really enjoy (it would be quite a stretch to say that I enjoy writing). On account of the soul-wearying exhaustion I feel at the end of every day, I find it pretty easy to excuse myself from writing for the night and to settle into a good book. And by “settle into a good book” I mean “read the same line over and over again until I eventually pass out on the couch.” My friends say that it’s perfectly natural to neglect my writing for the next year or so, and that eventually I will find the time and energy to start up again. I hope they’re right. Goodnight moon.

    Bookjacket_M Steeves

    Mike Steeves lives with his wife and child in Montreal, and works at Concordia University. Giving Up is his first full-length book of fiction. Connect with Steeves on Twitter @SteevesMike.

    Photos: Via Flickr; no changes made (top); Mike Steeves (Halloween); Nikki Tummon (headshot)

  • Writing Post-Partum by Darrah Teitel

    I have this memory that I can’t shake. It is from a time of rebellion. I was in university, a baby feminist, aspiring playwright and general know-it-all. I was listening to Tori Amos’s latest album, Scarlet’s Walk, written post-partum. It stank, I declared to my roommate. Tori had lost her edge. She was writing about domestic themes, instead of masturbation and hating God. I began cultivating a theory: babies killed the cool in female artists.

    A few years later, I was in Montreal studying playwriting at The National Theatre School and Maureen Labonté was giving a class on this Canadian playwright none of us had ever heard of, Gwen Pharis Ringwood. Ringwood had written the award-winning Still Stands the House before getting married in 1939 and having four children. Although she continued to write, her main commitment, until the 1970s, was her family. A mother herself, Maureen raised her eyebrows at me. She knew it would plague me. The next few plays I wrote were explorations of why maternity and feminism were incompatible. I wrote one play about the contempt that ambitious, public women have for maternal, domestic women. I wrote another about how cool and sexually experimental Mary Shelley was before she accidentally had babies. And then, because I had tempted fate, I fell pregnant myself.

    And then, because I had tempted fate, I fell pregnant myself.

    What I knew of parenthood was that it is exhausting; I’d be harried with responsibilities but also full of joy. Though I wished this joy for myself and ultimately chose it, a fear began to grow alongside my fetus. I had learned that in order to write, a girl needs time, money and a room of her own. But I work for the federal Status of Women Critic, and I know the statistics. They show that the gender wage gap grows exponentially as soon as women become parents.

    Even if I tried to ignore the socio-economic barriers, I couldn’t help but notice the interpersonal ones. Many of my childless friends stopped inviting me to hang out, just assuming I was never doing drugs or having hot sex again. The fact that these assumptions were largely correct for the time being didn’t make them less upsetting. I found community elsewhere, which is to say online. One third of the blogosphere is composed of mommy blogs. Many mommy bloggers are really good writers who are totally obsessed with the experience of motherhood. They made me feel less lonely and for that I am thankful. I’ll digress to note that there is no daddy blogosphere.

    When I became a parent, I discovered that there is a fourth thing a girl needs in order to write. She needs something to write about. The greatest threat to my writing career was actually myself, or loss thereof. My plays usually discuss liberated feminine bodies, and they make my parents blush from their seats in the audience. Since having my son, I can’t even watch upsetting scenes from Game of Thrones without covering my eyes. I am not who I used to be.

    The greatest threat to my writing career was actually myself, or loss thereof.

    It’s hard for me to admit that I’ve changed. I’m not sure that I’m okay with it. But now, for the first time in two years, I have managed to get the time, money and space to write. I have a residency at a supportive theatre company, and my wonderful boss is willing to give me some time off to write. These opportunities are essential to writers like me, and are also so infrequent that I feel like the luckiest girl in the world. That’s three out of four. As for number four, it’s coming. I find myself faking it a little, but starting to feel glimpses of the real thing. Like learning to have an orgasm with a new partner, I must familiarize myself with a new body and for the first time, the new body is my own.

    I have come to realize that there are women with small children working, writing. When I was at rehearsals for my play, The Apology, I had a nursing five-week-old in a sling. Joan MacLeod came up to me and welcomed me to the club. On Mother’s Day she sent me a section of Kim Collier’s Siminovitch Prize acceptance speech from 2010: “In a lot of ways I felt like a pioneer – creating ways for these two huge commitments to live together. And I believe one of the great gifts Jon and I gave to our theatre community was an example that it was possible, that family can be the centre of your life while your theatre work is too. To all women director/creators with children: bravo, be brave and break the mould – carry them in the hall, breastfeed between the seats, go on tour together, whisper about process and actors and what worked and what didn’t. Include your kids in your life, let them learn from your passion.”

    And so this is where I am at: I have vowed not to confuse first words or breastfeeding with interesting material for plays, and this article is the closest I plan to come to mommy blogging myself. But I’m writing through my fears. And sometimes, I even write about the kid.

    Darrah Teitel is a playright and graduate of the University of Toronto and the National Theatre School of Canada’s Playwriting program. Her plays have been produced across Canada and her journalism, fiction and poetry have appeared in various periodicals and journals throughout the country. Darrah’s play Corpus is the winner of the Calgary Peace Play Prize, the In The Beginning Playwriting Award and the 2011 Canadian Jewish Playwriting Award. Her play The Apology was nominated for the Dora Mavor Moore Award and the Betty Mitchell Award for best new play. The Apology won the Calgary FFWD Audience Choice Award for 2013. She was a member of the Banff Playwrights Colony in 2007, 2011 and 2012, and was a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellow. Darrah is currently the playwright-in-residence for the Great Canadian Theatre Company and is working for the NDP Status of Women Critic. Corpus will be produced by Teesri Duniya Theatre in November 2014 in Montreal.