The Happiest Farmer

In which M.M. De Voe reconciles motherhood, art, and identity…and continues to pack lunch.

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NEW YORK-

An extremely successful friend of mine once advised me on career choices: never do anything as a career that others will do for free.  I ignored his advice.

First a singer, I became an actress, then finally, a fiction writer. Genius.

Still, I worked my own hours, did what I wanted, had a blast. At cocktail parties my executive friend would look down her dirty martini at me: “Oh what a fun job, wish I had the time, but (smirk) someone has to make money…”

It was always a sore spot.

The minute I discovered I was pregnant, I went headfirst into the business of writing.  I finished a novel manuscript so fast, you’d think an alligator was eating me from the feet up as I scribbled. Then I wrote a short story. And another. As soon as they were edited I’d send them out.

It became an obsession: before the baby was born, I had to BE someone. But I found it was nearly impossible.

Still, I couldn’t let my life take a turn for the domestic. No way.

Most reasonable mothers give in to the maternal instinct to actually mother their kids.  The number of mothers willing to nurse their baby while typing a graphic sex scene are few and far between.

I did.

I started identifying with the writer-dads instead. These seemed more my type: hyperaware of impending college tuition while offering a pacie to quiet the rosebud lips, they were chained to their writing careers and willing to write anything—anything!—so long as they got paid.

Yet that, too, left me wanting more. After all, I’m a wordsmith. An artist, not a pen-for-hire.

I needed help. What I wanted was community.

So I started a professional organization to help others in my boat: men and women who were dead serious about their writing careers but felt the 24/7 yank of parenting veering them dangerously far off the course they’d set when they decided to be an author. Parents who loved their children, but who couldn’t put down the laptop anymore than they could ignore their toddler when the kid ran a fever.

“Oh, you’re a writer?” moms on the playground ask me, amid discussions of their own line of skin care products, or beaded handbags. “Have you published anything?”

Yes. Yes I actually have.

“You have? But when do you find time to write?”

I make time.

Because despite the fact that I work from my house, surrounded sometimes by piles of kid laundry, sometimes by piles of toys, parenting to me isn’t actually my first career of choice (oh God, here it comes, the slough of flames from the irritated stay-at-homes) please let me repeat: for ME it isn’t.  Other people, yes—they have made it a career. They actually do the work. It puts me to shame. They’re great at it. They’re so good at parenting that I often wish I could hire them to take on my own two kids for a week or two—I adore my kids as people, but parenting them? Making sure they have entertaining, fun, and educational things to do? Making sure they’re washed and dressed? No. Not for me. If you paid me a baseball player salary to make lunches I think I’d find a reason to quit.

Admitting this isn’t easy. I’m female. People expect me to love motherhood.

Not so.

I love my kids passionately. I would do anything for them, including make lunches. But parenting?  Wiping jelly off a new shirt for the fourth time that week? Enforcing tooth brushing? Playing warden over breakfast to ensure everyone actually sits while eating? Explaining terrorism and revolution and inoculations and advertisements and jealousy and horror movies and trying to make it clear that just because Mom or Dad acts a given way doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for their offspring?

Where’s the joy in that? I don’t see it, and to me that’s really sad—because I look around and really, everyone who has an XX chromosome seems thrilled to do all those things, feels flattered even, feels fortunate, lucky and blessed—yes!  And so many of them choose to devote themselves full time to this blessing, this joy.

I can’t explain what it feels like to know that my kids will grow up wondering if their mom even loved them all that much—just because I can tell you how very, very often I’ve asked them to please be patient with their Lego creation, their Princess curtsey, their finished jigsaw puzzle, while Mom types just this one more sentence.

The funny thing is: it’s all in my head, and the rational part of me knows it. My kids have no doubt that I love them. None. It’s ME who worried and frets about what they will think of me. ME who worries if it’s possible I’m neglecting them in my full-on pursuit of career.

Them? They’re crazy about me. God knows why. I’m not very nice.

On the other hand, what my distance has given them is a fierce sense of independence. My daughter is barely four and can read. She’s cuddly when I’m willing, but the minute I tell her I have to work, she pulls out her own VTech laptop and works right alongside me. Neither kid has ever been afraid of a new situation, a new room, or new people. They stride right in and do their best to figure out what’s expected of them—and then they excel.

Parenting didn’t teach them that. At least not my parenting. Or maybe it did. What they are becoming—what I’m seeing in them—is the blossoming of what will eventually become adult responsibility and self-motivation. They’re amazing, these kids—they’re burgeoning like show pumpkins in a garden: sweeping eager tendrils to steal nourishment from any given hothouse flower, growing like mad.

And I’m the farmer who looks thoughtfully over his garden and shrugs at the power of nature over nurture.