Dealing With Mom Guilt as a Writer
After my post last week, it got me thinking, there was one topic that I scratched the surface on, but it deserves a deeper perspective. I published a post last week on writing well and in it I talked briefly about giving ourselves permission to write and how that is so hard as moms.
Our ability to give ourselves permission to write and find space and time to write is preceded by our ability to let go of any guilt that we feel.
So let’s go ahead and address the elephant in the room, writing and mom guilt. It’s not even just mom guilt we experience, but the infamous guilt of not writing when we feel like we should be writing. So how do we deal with this? We can’t avoid it (although I would love to be able to title this post, “How to avoid mom guilt”), but how can we best address it as both a mom AND a writer?
Moms who write, or have a desire to write, have a hard time carving out space in our day to sit down and write. It feels guilty. It feels selfish. We only think of the 1000 other things we should be doing or need to get done. Our kids might not be entertained by us, and they might have to entertain themselves. The dishes might not be done right away, and the laundry starts to pile up.
This again is another excerpt from my blog post last week, but let’s expand on it further.
As a mom who writes (and not only writes but I also run my business from home) It can be extremely challenging to juggle all of the things (household chores, taking care of the kids, writing, meeting with clients, etc..)
We have placed these expectations on ourselves that are impossible to meet. I think the number one reason that we experience mom guilt as it relates to writing is because we have bought into the lie that:
IF WE DON’T DO ENOUGH, WE’LL NEVER BE ENOUGH
As a result, we feel guilty taking time for ourselves to write, or even just to find time for ourselves.
How do you know you’ve done everything you need to do to be able to carve out some time for you to write even as your family is around you? Do you even reach that point where your house is perfectly clean and you are satisfied with the time you spend with your kids?
I don’t. Enough is never enough for me. The biggest shift in my writing experience and writing practice came when I stopped looking at my writing as a luxury and started viewing it as a necessity.
I joke with my kids and my husband that my morning pages are my sanity. I can tell a difference on the days when I don’t get my morning pages done.
For me, writing my morning pages (journaling) is not something that I do if the stars align and my kids are angels in the morning and everything is smooth sailing which makes it super convenient and easy to write. It’s something I do in the middle of the chaos, in the middle of the mess. My kids are often running around being a little too noisy for my liking and my baby is almost always on my lap, making it impossible to write legibly (which is ok, because morning pages are essentially a brain dump, and I don’t really need to be able to read my writing). My writing time hardly looks picture-perfect. By releasing the need for my time to write to look a certain way, and by placing propter importance on my writing time, it becomes easier to seek out opportunities to write.
Writing serves us as we are serving others. As a writer we pick up our pens (or start typing on the keyboard) with the goal in mind to serve our audience, but very often we quickly find that what we are writing is what we also need to be reminded of.
So let me ask you this question, If we write for the benefit of others, is it truly selfish?
I realize that I’m mostly referring to my fellow non-fiction writers, but fiction writers also can relate to this.
If you write non-fiction, you most likely desire to inspire, encourage, or inform readers. If you write fiction, then you desire to give your reader entertainment and an escape from reality.
Both genres of writing seek to serve others. As we write, we expand our capacity to serve others.
The capacity to love others through our words.
The capacity to encourage others through our words.
The capacity to comfort others through our words.
What if we looked at this expanded capacity to serve others outside of our home through our words as a God-given assignment. Your desire to write and share your message with others is a God-given desire.
Writing in any form in response to deep desire of your heart is an example of obedience to God.
To honor Him with our time, as well as our words.
And to take that one step further, to lead by example for our children.
At my baby’s dedication, there was a youth leader that spoke up and provided one piece of advice that absolutely struck me. She said that one of the things she regretted when her kids were little and wish she had done more of was open up her bible in front them. She wished she would have had her quiet time, not when it was quiet at the crack of dawn while they were still asleep, but in front of them so she could talk about Jesus.
So many of us are stuck on this idea that it has to look a certain way or be a certain way in order for it to count. (this goes for bible study and/or writing)
Solo, solitude with slow sips of morning coffee and deep dives into my bible and journaling or writing completely uninterrupted are not possible for me during this season of my life.
However, making time to honor God by being obedient and following through with the nudges to write is.
One small simple shift for our writing time we can make is “I get to” instead of “I have to”.
One is rooted in opportunity.
The other in obligation.
In the “I get to”, we seek out the small spaces in our day where we can write. We welcome those spaces with excitement, expectation, and humility.
In the “I have to”, it’s all about pressure and demands. We set high standards for ourselves and when we don’t meet them, we feel like a failure.
It’s when we view our writing time rooted in obedience with the opportunity to serve others well through our words that allows our mom guilt to take a backseat.
Still in the car.
But a little less loud.
