Whisper it: becoming a mum can make you a more productive writer | Tania Roettger

Parenting requires extensive time for feeding, bottle preparation, washing, soothing, sleep routines, and repeated night waking. The loss of personal time can feel like a shock, especially before physical and mental healing. After recovery, the daily constraints can lead to creativity and more productive use of small gaps in routine. Caring for a baby can feel like removal from a prior self, and writing can provide relief by stimulating a mind that lacks challenge. Writing can happen in brief pockets of time, supported by surrounding sounds like a child playing or baby breathing. Typing while breastfeeding or holding a baby can produce substantial progress, even when movement is limited and the caregiver feels unfree.

"Eight to 12 hours a day are spent breastfeeding or preparing formula milk and washing bottles. In addition, there is carrying, singing, soothing, putting to sleep, trying to sleep yourself and waking up to repeat this several times a night. So many new activities that before were unknown, filling up every day. This is time that was once completely at your own discretion, and the new constriction is a shock."

"But after the necessary physical and mental healing it is also what can make parents become creative about their use of time: being a parent can make you more productive by using the gaps in the daily routine. While enhancing productivity is a trope of self-optimisation content, this is not a capitalistic productivity. Caring for a baby can feel like a remove from the self previously constructed."

"Simply draft a paragraph, a few sentences, get on with a text as a means to stimulate the insufficiently challenged mind. I write in the small pockets of time that exist in between everything else, says the Swedish writer Johanne Lykke Naderehvandi, when asked in a documentary what she needs for writing. She has four children and has published three novels since 2020. She needs to be surrounded by sounds, she says."

"Sitting around holding a sleeping baby is an experience of being unfree. If you move, the baby might wake up. The impossibility of doing anything else made me feel like a captive. At the 2022 Berlin literature festival, the Colombian writer Pilar Quintana talked about how she wrote a large part of her novel, The Bitch, in the notes app of her phone, typing while breastfeeding or holding her baby."

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