A Day In the Life of the
Work-at-Home Writer Mother
By
Elaine Beardsley
6:30 am alarm rings
Realize that although you worked till 2:00am you still have to get up to make
lunches and give kids some kind of breakfast. Even if this means ripping open a
package of something and pouring hot water into it, at least it shows that you
care. Ask husband (who has already dressed and left ten minutes ago) to reset
the alarm. Turn over and fall back asleep.
6:42 am
Eleven-year-old comes in asking where the green sweater with the blue alligator
pin is because it belongs to her friend Sammy and she has got to return
it today. You mumble something about dirty wash and turn over and go back to
sleep.
6:44 am
Eleven year-old returns to ask why she has nothing clean to wear. Even
though her drawers are stuffed with perfectly good clothes, you mumble something
about the dirty wash and turn over and fall asleep.
6:59 am
You tumble out of bed, throw on some old sweats, find the one slipper that
hasn’t been eaten by the dog, search until you find another one hopefully made
for the other foot, and head downstairs.
7:02 am
Crusted and puffy, you pour boiling water into something called Cinnamon Roll
Crunch. You intend to add an apple for extra nutrition, but after cutting off
the brown spots you realize there’s only core left. You toss the apple and
remember that there’s an orange around somewhere. You retrieve if from the back
of the produce drawer--the drawer that falls out every time you pull it--and
carefully cut the orange into one perfectly divided half for each kid. Hey, you
saw “Sophie’s Choice;” you’re not about to favor one kid over the other even if
it is only an orange. The kids complain about the orange and you are comforted
in the fact that with you around at least no one will get rickets. They can’t
say you don’t care.
7:13 am
You turn to making lunch. You pull out the store-baked turkey, store-baked
because, hey, bologna has nitrates. The turkey smells a little dicey, but as it
was $6.99 a pound, you slop on extra mayonnaise and hope no one will notice.
You include a note saying “Mommy loves you” in their lunchboxes even though
your son did say, “I hope you trip and fall today” after you took his Gameboy
away for the seventeenth time this week. At least while he’s hating you he’ll
know you have feelings.
8:02 am
Your daughter dropped off and your son safely on the bus, you pour a second cup
of coffee. You discover that the milk is all gone so you search for that box of
rice milk which no one wanted but which will make you perfectly happy. You
pour yourself a big glass of water too, and head upstairs to your “office.”
Then, rubbing out the sloshing drips of coffee with your torn slipper, you head
up the stairs until remembering the dirty wash (it’s hard not to remember when
it’s facing you in a mound the size of Mt. Helena and just as reactive). You
stop to throw a load in the washer. Only thing is, there’s a load that’s been
in the washer for two days and it smells like a marsh swamp. You run that one
through again and make a mental note to put the other load in an hour. Then,
heading towards the office, you forget your coffee and immediately forget the
wash too.
8:09
am
You enter your office, returning not once but twice, once for the coffee, and
once for the ice water which you have also forgotten.
8:16 am
You like it up in your office, because although it’s freezing in the winter
(it’s over the garage) and a sweltering hellhole in the summer, it’s yours. You
flip on the computer and wait for it to boot. While it’s booting you make a list
of the calls you’ve got to make that day: follow-ups to people who’ve expressed
interest in your projects, the mechanic to see if the heap of van that’s sitting
in your driveway is worth repairing, to the tree guy who was supposed to plant
the four freezing sycamores that were dumped on your front lawn instead of in
the earth as they had promised, the twelve mothers, three administrators and
assorted other personnel involved in your son’s school talent show—the one you
promised to run, and which your son said he’d only appear in when the devil
wears a spangled polka dot bikini (get the picture, mom?)—but finally, before
you are actually forced to make any of these calls, the computer screen appears.
Breathing a sigh of relief, you toss the list aside and punch up Word. That was
close; you nearly made the calls this time.
8:21 am
You check e-mail first, because it’s part of your ritual. Every writer knows
about rituals: break one and you can’t write. At least you think it goes that
way, you’ve never tested it. Open e-mail, respond to half of them, ignore the
others, pass around the good jokes, delete the bad ones, read your writer’s
newsletter from Jade, then a quick trip to E-bay to see how your auctions for
that screenplay software is doing--damn, it’s up to $94.00! You can get someone
to write your screenplay for that amount.
9:02 am
The part of the day you like best. You’ve got exactly 5 hours and 3 and a half
minutes until your first child comes home, in which to work on your
screenplay/novel/food article/ground-breaking play. 5 hours and 3 minutes, now,
as you punch up solitaire. Just one game, really.
9:47 am
After losing four times you go back into Word, and remember the letters you have
to compose for the talent show. Plus there’s that mailing to get out to market
your last play. Some theaters accept e-mail queries now of course, but what the
source books don’t mention is that e-mail queries are more readily ignored than
the plays sitting in the slush pile under the assistant-to-the-assistant
artistic director’s Birkenstocked feet. So you type out letters to five
theaters, address them individually, and tell them exactly why they should
produce your play next season instead of that Wendy Wasserstein piece (that
would be in the year 2016, in theater-time).
11:04 am
You settle back to write. How much you’ve waited for this, anticipated
this...the phone rings. You know it’s a telemarketer because of the lack of
caller ID. But you rationalize; maybe it’s one of those talent show moms with
whom you have to speak. Answering will save you a call later. You answer.
“Mrs.
Beessley?” A gruff voice followed by a cigarette inhale and a pause.
“No.” She’s
not in.” You curse yourself for picking up the phone.
“Tell her
the County Sheriff’s office called. No message.”
This is
your husband’s fault. How dare he give money to people. Now they’ll call every
day until they get every last penny.
11:07 am
Back to the drawing board. The keyboard beckons. That step outline for the
screenplay has your name on it today, hmmmm....ring.
“Hello,
Mrs. Bearslii??”
”No.” You hang up.
Now what
was it you were going to do? Oh right. But then you remember the play going up
next month at the museum. The rehearsals start next week, and you promised,
promised that you’d get the rewrites done in time for the director to go
over them. Good-bye for now, screenplay.
1:52 pm
Whew, that’s done. Now wasn’t there something about...ring!
“Mrs.
Beardsley?”
You get
ready to hang up.
”It’s the school nurse’s office. I’m sorry to have to tell you this—“
“What
happened?” You panic.
“Nothing to
worry about but—“
But? But
what? You wonder: Typhoid? Tetanus? Diphtheria? Anthrax???
“Your son
swallowed a button.”
“Excuse
me?”
”As I said, it’s nothing to worry about. Just watch for it in the next day or so
to make sure it passes.”
Passes
what? An exam? The grade? The football?
You hang up
the phone after thanking the nurse profusely. God, school nurse. Now that’s a
ghastly job.
2:08 pm
You resign yourself to not getting to the screenplay today, and pull out the
pile of plays written by your high school students instead. You call them “your
students” when their plays are good, and someone else’s when they’re not. As
you turn to the twelfth play about girls in a prep school whose primary desire
in life is to be popular, you realize your residency at the local prep school
for extra income has turned into an overwhelming task. But it fills your soul,
you tell yourself, and besides, what other job pays fourteen hundred bucks for
teaching kids how to write plays? Except for the fact they’ve never seen
one, unless you count ”Annie” and “Lion King On Ice.” Well, it sounded easy at
the time.
2:47 pm
Daughter arrives home from school. You ask how her days was, and after making
her a nice bowl of something from the closet, ask if she minds if you go back up
to the office.
“You love
that computer more than me,” she accuses with a pout.
"Don’t tempt
me" you want to say, but offer your most heartfelt denial instead.
“Sure you
do, Mom.”
You stand
there wondering how your child ever got so good at mind-reading when she changes
the subject.
“Can I go
to the teen center Friday night? With Annie and Sammy and Kelli and Alexa?”
“Depends.
Are there boys there?”
“It’s a
teen center, Mom.”
You feel a
little drained. “Do they make contact?”
“What?!” A
look of horror passes your child’s face as she realizes this is going to turn
into an inquisition.
“Do they
dance with you?”
“Sometimes
they dance. And sometimes--” her look betrays her desire to volunteer just
enough information to get you to trust her and no more. “Sometimes we go out.”
It’s your
turn to be horrified. “What? You mean like going out?” You hide the rush
of blood to your head, the shock that your little angel may actually be
contemplating things like dating.
“Oh, Mom.”
(roll of eyes) “It’s virtual going out. Like virtual dating.”
“Oh, is
that all.” You act confident, like you know what on earth she’s talking about.
Are you really that old?
“We don’t
do anything,” she explains.
You thank
God for small favors.
”Can I go?”
“Depends.”
Meaning, of
course, she can go when the devil wears a purple polka dot bikini, or something
like that.
3:24 pm
Your son comes home. This kid you call the “the challenge.”
“Hi honey.”
“Hi Mom.”
“Don’t
watch TV, honey,” you say as he flicks on the TV with the channel changer.
“Wha?”
“Don’t
watch TV, honey. Until you do your homework”
“Hu? What
homework?”
“Don’t you
have homework?”
“Wha? Uh,
nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Uh—“
“Not much
homework, you mean?”
You’d like
to read his reaction but it’s glued to Sponge Bob, so you read his planner
instead. Math, Science, English, a project for health involving cut-outs of
food. Guess who’ll be helping him with that project at the last minute?
You
remember the button.
“Are you
all right?” you ask, motherly concern overcoming you.
“Whaddya
mean?”
”The nurse told me you swallowed a button.”
“Wha? Oh.
That wasn’t me, it was Jeremy. We only said it was me cause he’s scared of the
nurse.”
As he turns
back to the TV you wish there weren’t laws against strangling him.
3:25-9:41 pm
Snacks, homework, arguing about homework, throwing homework, finding clean
uniforms, driving to softball practice, driving to lacrosse. You wonder what
made you think you could do it all. Dinner, dishes, more homework, food
cut-outs. You rue the day you got hooked into believing that having children was
a necessary endeavor.
9:42pm
Tucked into his room, you trip over the discarded clothes, plastic
racetrack and dollar-store soldiers, climb the ladder to your son’s loft bed and
kiss him good night.
His arms
reach up to smother you in a sweaty bear hug. “I love my Mommy!”
What a
precious boy.
9:49pm
Wade through personal diaries, reams of paper on which imaginary classes in
playwriting are taught, step over doodles, angel-winged bears, a heap of
clothes that contain “nothing to wear,” lean over and find your daughter in the
mess of her bed.
“You’re the
best, Mommy.”
Okay, maybe
you’re not so bad after all.
9:49pm
You actually speak with your husband and remember there is yet another part of
you for which you want to find time in the day.
11:47pm
Gentle snores coming from the three bedrooms, you write. The words flow; the
blocks crumble away. How you wish every day could be like this.
You look at
the clock. It’s 3:13am. God, you love what you do.
Elaine
Beardsley has written for the page and stage for ten years. Nonfiction work
includes WORKING IN COMMERCIALS (or, How to Act and eat at the same time),
published by Focal Press/Butterworth Heinemann. This book comes from her
experience as a New York City Talent Agent with Abrams Artists and Associates.
She has co-written the nonfiction KARMASCOPES with renowned psychic Joyce
Keller, and is currently editing SEVEN STEPS TO HEAVEN for Simon and Schuster. Her research on the former Yugoslavia has produced a novel and a play.
Beardsley was a contributor to NEW YORK NIGHTLIFE MAGAZINE for two years,
writing travel articles and quizzes.
Her stage
works have been seen along the Eastern seaboard, in New York City and
Baltimore. She has shows running this year at the Maryland Renaissance
Festival, Baltimore Museum of Art, and touring widely with CTA, in Maryland.
Beardsley
teaches drama and playwriting in Maryland schools, and is a founder of
Baltimore’s Fifth Wall Theater Company (http://www.fifthwall.org). She has
lectured and taught extensively, has appeared on radio and television in
connection with her research and experience as a talent agent.
Beardsley
is a recipient of the Maryland State Individual Artist Grant, a member of the
Dramatists Guild of America, International Centre for Women Playwrights, and
Playwrights Forum in Washington, DC. She graduated from New York University
with a BA in Writing in 1992.
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Writing
and Illustrating Children's Books
