OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Children from Porlock

August 26th, 2008

Almost a year ago I wrote this little bit on trying to write when I get interrupted regularly, and I was thinking about that when the unreliable narrator asked me about multi-tasking yesterday. I was chatting with her while buttoning a child’s shirt and I don’t think she was asking if my kids were coping with getting mere shreds of my attention but, since I was having a good morning I told her that the multitasking that is the fabric of my life is, at its best synchronistic, things working in parallel to one another. Today, I was exhausted, tired from staying up too late reading, frustrated at how inefficient my own distraction was making me, completely unable to process the interruptions and the answer I would have given her about how the multitasking works would have been very different and involved words I am embarrassed to put into my blog.

Multitasking was probably hardest when I first had my second child, because it wasn’t multitasking, it was triage, it was trying to figure out, always whether the needs of the baby or of the two year old former only child were more urgent. And I’ve never been much of a multitasker. I still get panicky when I have three or more pots on the stove, all of them needing different kinds of attention. But, I have gotten better at planning when I make a meal, since a lot of the process is actually waiting, and so, possibly boring, but I’ve learned to chop vegetables while waiting for the water to boil instead of doing all of the prep work beforehand. It may also be that experience has made me a little better at also multipurposing my activities: if I involve a child in the cooking, the time has value in the time we spend together, in the learning the child is doing, his increased willingness to eat food he has helped prepare, in his not spending that time whining and fighting with his brother and causing me to want to pull my hair out, and, let’s not forget the value in the getting a meal on the table. But just as I am suspicious of zero-sum equations, where limited commodities like time spent on one activity can thus not be spent on other activities, I am also suspicious of trying to calculate the value of time spent doing one thing versus another.

But neither multitasking nor multipurposing is about the parallel, synchronistic thing. That’s more like… ok, back in college, trying to do a philosophy major and math minor and an idea would come up the same week in Hellenistic philosophy and in a logic class, which would feel really strange and random, or this summer reading Sophie’s World with the boys and watching the Cosmos DVDs we’d see the same themes reiterated and expanded and played back from different perspectives. It’s the way “Hawaii” will come up in three different contexts in three different conversations with three different people in three days until you think that the universe is sending you a message. And I know it’s really about the interested brain perking up at the things that interesting to it, taking notice, but there are days when I break away from thinking about how we construct metaphors by picking out specific features of items to listen to my kids in imaginative play using specific features of things to stand in for whole objects (a firefighter’s helmet becomes full protective gear, transforms a four year old into a powerful man). Or the violin teacher will talk about strategies for memorization, telling yourself the story of the underlying pattern of the music, and I’ll see the story-telling organization that goes on as my kids explain relationships of things to me. And then what the synchronistic, parallel thing of all the different parts of my life and interests working in concert with each other is more like a reminder that there is no conflict, there is only one task, only one purpose.

The un and I were tangentially discussing artist’s fellowships at the MacDowell colony, which is the sort of thing I sometimes fantasize about, imagining a day with no interruptions, no responsibilities except to think and to write. And at the same time I am terrified, like Stevie Smith, that without the interruptions I might have to GO ON. Or face some terrible emptiness. At this point, the prospect of more than a week or so away from them, I imagine missing them would be more of a distraction than having them around. And maybe it isn’t all so zero sum, maybe the time with my hands submerged in dishwater, dreaming, experimenting with different words without committing them to paper, is not antithetical to whatever it is I want to do. Even as frustrated with myself as I was today when an attempt to help a child find a part to something he wanted to play with ended up with a complete, thorough cleaning and organization of their room, taking several hours, and pushing a dreaded trip to Target for school supplies back one more day, and I kept thinking of all the other things I would rather be doing, and getting annoyed as I realized dinner was going to be a very late production, even through the growling of PMS and giving myself a time-out on the elliptical so I could remember how to speak kindly to them, I acknowledge that the life I have might not be an ideal life for a writer, but it is an ideal life for me. Their childhood is not going to last forever, and the balance of their needs and mine feels healthy and right to me, and they are teaching me stuff about how people work, about myself, that I would never have guessed possible before they were in my life.

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