The Stay-at-Home Creative

A long-winded apology for not writing

One of the most common decisions in preparing for a birth is, “How are we going to manage childcare?” There are tons of ways that people juggle work, life, and childcare, but I want to focus on one that I’ve seen play out many times in other people’s lives, and the one that I’ve been living. This particular scenario starts out with the classic dilemma of, “Do I keep working this job just to put my entire salary towards childcare and only see my child a little bit each day, or do I spend basically all day everyday with my child?”

If both adults have jobs that they care about and are roughly equally paid, then it’s a tough call. But if one is working a job that they really dislike or doing freelance work, then people generally tend to take the more stable option. Many of the creative people I know either work jobs simply as a means to get by or use their craft for freelance work, and when babies came, they stayed home.

Doing anything when you’re the stay-at-home parent can be a challenge. Everyone has a different tolerance for how much they can manage outside of the straight childcare. I know that before Henry’s birth, the amount of stuff that my wife, Olivia, and I thought I could get done while staying home with a kid was much higher than my actual bandwidth once he was born. My goal was 20 hours of part time work a week, and I figured I would continue trying to practice my solo material everyday (Grandchildren was also still active, practicing and playing out).

In hindsight this seems like an outrageous pipe dream. I struggled to hit 10 hours a week (which became our new goal), and working on my solo material became a crapshoot. Some days I could squeeze in a little, some days nothing at all. At the beginning, I would hand Henry to Olivia right after she got home from work, run downstairs and practice until the next-door neighbor kid’s bedtime at 7:00.

It quickly became too much for Olivia to get home and transition right into childcare, so I started playing during Henry’s naps. The hour and a half that I usually used for work would get split into 45 minutes of work and 45 minutes of practice. I always practiced second so that if he woke up it would cut into the music and not the paid work. While I played in the basement I’d keep a video monitor on my keyboard, and once he woke up, end of practice—even if I’d only been playing for five minutes. Then at night, I’d make up the 45 minutes of work and do another half hour to hit my two-hour quota. Sometimes I could ease that a little by squeezing some time in between Olivia coming home and Henry’s bedtime.

And that’s the ideal situation. The whole routine could easily get thrown off track by any number of derailments. Henry falls asleep for five minutes in the car on the way home from the grocery store? No nap; throw both work and practice out the window. Or maybe he just doesn’t settle down for his nap and I have to keep going in. Or maybe both Olivia and I were up all night because he wasn’t sleeping well—he didn’t sleep well for the entire first two years—I might need a half hour nap when he naps just to be able to function. Or maybe after a full day of childcare, work, and cooking, by the time he’s in bed at night I just can’t push myself to do an extra hour plus of work.

In 2021, Henry started at a cooperative daycare, and I harbored delusions of previously unimagined vistas of free time. Three solid hours? Are you shitting on my face?! One of the most common things I heard from other parents was that it feels like as soon as you get home you have to go back to pick them up. During that time I was able to exercise and get pretty much that same hour and a half that I was looking at when he was napping. So we’re back to the same place, but I also had to fulfill co-oping shifts and other parent duties, which ended up being much more intensive than I’d originally predicted. Once you throw in holidays, sicknesses, and other days off, it starts creeping back into the same equation.

Now, after five years of scrambling, Henry’s in a public school until 3:00 and I’m still trying to figure out how to maximize my schedule. The plan was to bump up my paid work significantly, but the times I seem to be extending are my exercise, music, and 90210 watching (at night). I also have added this writing to the list, and I’m hitting a little bit of a block. After dumping everything that I’d been working on for a long time onto the site, I found things getting harder as I pushed into the unthought-of territory. What do I really want to write here? My head’s always full of ideas, but turning those into actual pieces doesn’t always happen easily. Sometimes it does, though. Right now the music seems to be flowing much more easily.

My intention was to knock something out quickly every week, but I’ve been struggling to sit down to it. We also just hit a week of Henry being home sick, which decimates my focus. I think that’s the most difficult thing about trying to get work done around a child’s schedule: zero ability to focus. Having a set schedule with multiple hour blocks dedicated to specific tasks is simply not on the table. So you’re stealing chunks here and there, always with the looming possibility that it can come grinding to a halt at any time.

But I have been writing down post topic ideas, and I’m hoping that getting this post out helps to get me past the blockage. As I settle into a routine, I plan to carve out a set amount of time every day or every week to work on these posts. I can’t promise what kind of output to expect, but the goal is to post something regularly. Hopefully every two weeks, and if I’m feeling froggy, every week. I’ve also been thinking of doing interviews with the other people I know who are in similar stay-at-home roles and are creatives. If I get those together, they’ll be here. If I collect enough, I’ll make a section. Depends on if I can get out of this bed.