My daughter brings more illnesses from preschool than art projects. The thing that costs $1000 a month and is supposed to buy me three workdays a week sometimes robs me of that time.
After having a cold every other week in the Fall and spending Christmas quarantined with an infectious disease, I was hoping the barrage of illness would be over and I could get back to work and writing in January. The Tuesday after returning to school Sophia padded into our bedroom at midnight, wheezing like she couldn´t catch her breath. Oh, no. Was she sick?
By morning, wheezing had progressed into droopy eyes, a slight temperature, and a wet cough that likely would linger for weeks. How many client sessions would I have to cancel? How short would I be when the time came to pay the next month’s tuition? How long before I could send her to preschool again? I wanted to punch the wall and kick the cat. Instead, I dropped my expectations, a sport at which motherhood has made me excel.
I stumbled through breastfeeding, changing a soggy diaper, and guessing at what Sophia might be willing to eat. Bananas or pears? Yogurt or toast with almond butter? Calm on the outside, inside I was still fuming at the universe for taking from me the childcare for which I pay so dearly.
I usually love taking care of my daughter. On our days together we have lots of fun: toddler yoga, music class, play dates at the park, or trips to the library to try to satiate her voracious appetite for literature. But it’s a lot easier to enjoy mothering when my needs—especially my intellectual needs—are met. To stay sane I must have time alone to write, and to continue to have it, I need to make a minimum amount of money.
It was cold and rainy, and there was no way we could play outside, so I decided to indulge her in a little screen time. We cuddled up under a fuzzy blanket on the couch and I played her favorites. Songs with clever rhymes filled the airwaves.
My child thus happily entertained, these lines came to me: “Singin’ the sick baby blues, Gotta pay my mama dues.” I reached for my notebook and poured out the first draft of a poem or a set of lyrics. More bad ‘80s rap than blues, the lines tumbled out with a beat box backdrop only I could hear.
I always get some hokey lines in the first draft. I played around with word order and made a rhyme list. Listing sets of rhyming words is a fun, obsessive-compulsive game: school rhymes with drool; solution with delusion; village with spillage; PJs with DJs.
Soon, I´ll be able to make rhyming lists with Sophia´s help. I have taught her well, curating her library with books I can tolerate reading a hundred times. Many favorites are rhymed, some in flawless trochaic tetrameter, like this one by Judy Sierra “Although the gazelle couldn´t spell very well, like everyone else, she had stories to tell.”
My two-year-old budding poet is known to run through the house, naked from the waist down, yelling, “Belly, belly poo, I can´t find my shoe,” and a variety of words that rhyme with “ducks” and “socks”, which I pray she never says in school or I could get into real trouble.
Until Sophia can be my cowriter, I write alone. Before lunchtime I’d produced:
Deep into winter, brr, it´s cold,
Outside pours freezing rain.
You woke up wheezing, now you´re sneezing.
Baby, you´re sick again.
Forehead hot, rattle in your chest,
No way can you go to school.
Eyes are sad like a little hush puppy,
Yet mama has to play it cool.
Singin’ the sick baby blues,
Gotta pay my mama dues.
No childcare means no business.
How can I do my job?
I´m losing my income, losing my mind,
Wanna hang my head and sob.
No choice but to surrender,
Today it’s you and me.
Let me find something healthy for you to eat.
I need some strong coffee.
In our PJs, bed-head flyin’,
Get some videos on.
To hell with the plans I´d made for this day,
For now let´s have some fun.
Singin’ the sick baby blues,
Gotta pay my mama dues…
If I had acting talent, I could´ve stuck a thermometer in Sophia´s mouth, teased our limp hair into a bed-head tangle, and made our first ever music video. I can see us punching the air with index and pinky fingers sticking out, Sophia in footsie pajamas and I in my bathrobe. Alas, I don’t have it in me, but I´ll take the small victory lap knowing I wrote something on a day with no childcare.
Do you have a creative craft? In what ways does it feed your soul? If you are a parent or busy person, how do you make time for it?
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