Making Time

Sometimes, people ask me, “Melissa, how do you find the time to be creative when you have two kids?”

This is generally the cue for hysteria-tinged laughter.  Because finding time is not something I do.  I carve time ruthlessly out of the flesh of an angry T-Rex while clinging to the side of an out-of-control bullet train with one broken arm and an alligator clamped onto my leg.  And now that I’ve written that, I need to draw it, because those are the rules of this blog:

More specifically, for the first year after I had my first baby, I didn’t find time to do creative things.  It was the first time since I was about 7 years old that I wasn’t working on a book, and aside from taking some sporadic notes on certain ideas I had for a later project, I was practically creatively dead.

If you’ve ever had a small baby who never wants to be put down and NEVER EVER SLEEPS, you might understand why.  I actually learned to surf the internet with my toe while nursing.  And I got voice software, but let’s say the technology was far from perfect.

Things got a bit better as the baby got older.  Then, finally, my kids went to school, and suddenly, for the first time in years, I actually had a few hours a day to myself.

Quickly, I learned that if I wanted to get creative stuff done in the extremely limited time I had available, I had to cut almost all other leisure activities from my life.  I allowed myself virtually no movies, TV, or internet surfing; limited social media; and even (sob) drastically reduced reading time.  It was tough, but it let me get a little writing in every day.

However, I may have overdone it a bit.

Finding a balance where I could fit things like hygiene and actual time with my husband into a day along with parenting and creative projects was difficult, but at times I managed to succeed for a while... though it meant never getting to experience many things that sounded wonderful, like Zombieland or Downton Abbey.  (For the record, I do mean to correct those sad gaps in my cultural education at some point.)

Then employment struck.  Now I work for the entire time my kids are at school.  When they come home, I have to help them with homework, spend some good mommy time with them, make them dinner, bathe them when possible, and get them to bed at a reasonable hour. When they’re in bed, I finally get to write...

...Or do I?

And what have we learned today?

Chasing down a bullet train while clinging to a T-Rex is way cooler.