I Live With You (27 page)

I didn’t begin writing until I was thirty and had had my first child. (I had three, so I had to struggle to get any writing time at all. Most of the time I went around feeling as if I couldn’t breathe.) I never really had writing time until my husband moved to California to teach at Cal Arts. For nine or so years we had a bicoastal relationship. Both of us got a lot more work done that way.

This conference must be full of mothers? Maybe having as hard a time as I had. I wondered what my kids felt like with a mother struggling to write all the time, so I asked them.

One daughter wrote back: “Having a Mom and Dad who were doing their art in the house made making art normal and casual and an integral part of life. It made us kids do art also.”

Another daughter wrote: “Getting put to bed and hearing the sound of the typewriter and knowing your mom was right there, was reassuring.” (She said, We didn’t know till later Mom was putting us to bed earlier than other kids.)

My son wrote: “I remember being proud and inspired by my mother …. I would never have tried to write if it hadn’t been for her.” His note was full of how unfair it was that Ed got to do his art with no hassle and that I had to struggle for every minute. My son would fit right in here.

I want to set the record straight about me writing in a playpen. It isn’t explained properly… and never has been, ever. OK, you put your desk in the corner of a room. You take apart one corner of a playpen and open it out. Remove the floor. Attach the corners to the walls on each side of the desk. The area will be three times again as big as a playpen. The kids are fenced out and can’t reach your papers. Mostly mine were hanging over the fence talking to me. My kids did
not
yell and rage outside it, as has been written. After all, I had learned to mother from that Frenchwoman who looked after us. I wasn’t quite as good as she was, but almost. The kids came first. They were happy. I was the one who wasn’t. I was suffocating there. But now I have all the time to write I want.

Except when I have to write a speech.