I Worked My A** Off For This

Carving a career out of quiet moments, when none are guaranteed

Note: I’m supposed to start by telling you what these weekly newsletters will contain. But, in true “me” fashion, I can’t just do what I’m told.

Instead, an essay.

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THIS IS HOW IT ALL BEGAN

Becoming a mom marks the death of the person you were and the birth of a new version of yourself. Sometimes you like that new person, and sometimes she feels like a stranger.

I realized I was that stranger when I woke up in a house with two tiny sons, three dogs, a weird lizard and a container of grubs to feed it, a tank of always-dying fish and a tall, handsome partner with a job that required at least 60 hours of work per week, including Saturday night meetings and full days of work every Mother’s Day. I was mom-ish, bedraggled and a master at compartmentalizing chaos.

I was on my own with the kids pretty much all the time, and I liked it. I parented in ways that felt right — allowing them to roam the canyons with big sticks and buckets for collecting insects or watching TV with them under a blanket. The weekend time they spent with their dad was fun and focused on emotional connection; we did our best to be sure they had what they needed.

The boys were typical in their volume (loud) and willingness to scrap (always), but stayed gentle in ways that made me proud. I delighted in standing at the washing machine pulling treasures from the pockets of their little sweatpants and elastic-waist jeans: rocks and bottle tops and random coins, candy wrappers and dollar bills folded up tiny. I liked being a mom, it suited me. It still does.

Despite all the noise, my life as a full-time mom was too still. My mind was quiet.  

Before I became a mom, I never sat still. I dated beautiful people and funny people and even some very mean people. I had a starter marriage that ended peacefully and quickly, and threw myself into a glamorous retail fashion job where I was surrounded by hilarious, dynamic women, each of them uniquely scarred and low-key brilliant.

We crashed Hollywood Hills parties wearing 4-inch heels, cut in line to get into clubs, and looked cute in bars hoping eager young men might buy us drinks — or even better, food. We were perpetually broke, knew each other’s ATM passcodes and shared boyfriends back and forth. It was intimate, dysfunctional and glorious. 

A few years into our wild life, I applied to UCLA as a transfer student. I had dropped out of college twice before, but this time I felt it would stick. I balanced full-time work and full-time school while juggling dates, friends and my little dog, Gretel. 

That’s what I was doing when I met my now-husband. Both divorced, we were committed to never marrying again. Despite being so busy in our individual lives, we decided to have a baby just three months into our relationship. It’ll be fun, we thought.

It was. It was also way, way harder than we could’ve imagined.

We didn’t know ourselves at all, and knew each other even less. We didn’t get married until our boys were older, thinking we were doing our relationship differently — not realizing that cohabitating, having babies together, sharing finances, monogamy, and an impossible set of expectations for one another was doing the same thing as everyone else.

After the birth of our oldest, I surprised myself by deciding not to go back to work. Some of us cannot imagine what motherhood will feel like until we’re in it, and I was much more attached to that little baby than I’d imagined I could be with any human being. I needed him close.

The org chart of our new family worked for a while; one parent working and the other solely dedicated to the care and comfort of a tiny bundle. But it wouldn’t always. As the recession gained steam, both of our respective industries began to implode. A second income was no longer an option because high-quality childcare would’ve cost more than I could earn. We had two little boys, a mortgage and a minivan. I loved my babies, but felt trapped. Worse, I was so deeply bored that I felt it in my bones. An ache.

Somewhere amid the unfolding chaos, I dreamed of writing. It felt natural, as I had always heard stories in my head, complete with dialogue and romance and running narratives. If I tried it, I didn’t want anyone to know.

And so I wrote a secret novel. I wrote it the only way I could: in the time after I put my boys down for the night, when they begged me to sit at the end of one of their beds until they were asleep. I built a world in a Word doc while leaning against their wall, legs crossed on a rocketship-themed duvet, their tiny noses snoring a few feet away.

I wrote a whole damn book between the hours of 8pm and 1am. It wasn’t a good book, but it was a book. Reviewing it even then, I knew it wasn’t strong on plot and the structure was a mess, but there were a few undeniable gems inside.

Maybe someday I’ll be a good writer, I thought with a flush of shame.

The problem was, writing felt like an inherently egotistical pursuit. In order to believe your work could be chosen for publication, you had to believe you were special — and where I grew up, few things are worse than being a girl who believes she’s special. 

But once I started pushing aside that shame, I couldn’t get enough. I still can’t. Sitting at a desk with a keyboard, time compresses. An hour feels like five minutes, and five minutes is never enough. I always want more, even though most of the time I cannot have it.

Next, a friend and I created a semi-anonymous Tumblr that people seemed to like, and a few months later, I was offered a staff writing job at The Good Men Project. By the time I left, I was their top editor. I joined YourTango seven years ago to write and edit, and I’m still there.

If this sounds like another smug or self-congratulatory “how I manage to have it all!” story, let me make clear that it’s come with some dark consequences. I do not, in fact, have it all.

I have received death threats from groups whose attention I never hoped to attract and have been canceled and called-out by people that I wanted to like me. I have said the wrong things and written the wrong things and taken the wrong sides, and, yes, I have had to apologize. I’ve had a dozen publishers pass on a novel my agent worked hard to sell. I’ve lost friends and lost respect for friends in very public ways.

I have cried over my writing so often that now I see it as part of my process. Whether it’s heartbreak evoked by my own memories, the terror of exposing myself as a selfish jerk for writing in the first place, or the devastation of realizing someone who matters to me probably won’t like what I’ve written, crying is my thing.

There have been multiple times my husband has asked me to quit my job or take a break from a writing project, stating that it wasn’t worth all the stress. Every time he asked me to quit writing, or even gently suggested I pause for a while, my heart froze up. Building a career has given me a voice and a purpose beyond being someone’s partner or someone’s mom. It’s not a hobby, it’s part of who I am.

This is even more true now that we have a daughter. I want her to see the value of her mom’s career, of being a woman who actively works toward her dreams. Like so many women before me, I want that room of my own and the time to disappear into my process. Or, as Mary Chapin Carpenter sings, “pens that won’t run out of ink / and cool quiet and time to think” without mounting resentments or things falling apart around me.

But life isn’t always like that.

The most honest thing I can say is that I worked my ass off for this career, just as I have for my family. Every single thing I have achieved, professionally, has come from pushing against my own shame and stretching the limits of my family’s patience: my editorial job, my bylines in The New York Times, the book proposal I co-wrote about raising teenage boys, the thrilling meetings with big publishers and so much more. 

This is a set of facts, not a brag. Or maybe it is a brag, and maybe I’ve earned it.

For a girl from a long line of stoic and overly-humble midwesterners, these are hard words to write. My great-grandfather believed we tempt God when we talk about what is going well, and somewhere in my DNA I believe that every positive word I’ve put on this page is a precursor to being pecked to death by a mob of crows or wiped out by a tsunami. Or worse, scorned by my audience, rejected by publishers, dismissed by my agent, and exposed as a talentless hack. 

Yet here I am, starting a Substack. I worked my ass off for this, and I hope you’ll join me for the rest of the ride.

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About this Substack:

In the future, Zooming Out (that’s the name!) will be a weekly newsletter with stories, recommendations, and advice about the following:

• raising emotionally healthy kids

• issues facing boys & young men today

• the changing face of masculinity in society and how that affects boys 

• family equity and marital structure

• adapting to the new paradigm of women as earners in society…

• … and how this system drives so many wives and mothers to despair and depression

• the ways in which we carve our identities into a world that wants moms to disappear into their families

• anything else that feels relevant to the lives of women and our children 

As time goes on, I will be adding some video content and other types of interactive media.

So welcome, and I hope you stick around. 

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