My five months of parental leave ends on Monday.
It’s hard to overstate what a gift the time has been. It is rare to get months away from work as an adult, and even rarer to get to spend that time with Anne, soaking up every minute with our new babies.
Besides time with our growing family, one unforeseen benefit of my leave was that I returned to regular writing in a way I hadn’t since creating this website five years ago. Since November, when Anne had the twins, I have published 20 new posts and created a new writing project, The Sunday Drip; in the five months leading up to that, I published zero.
Part of that increased productivity was due to the fact that I suddenly had much more material to write about. It’s no surprise that fatherhood, in one form or another, inspired a number of my posts over the past few months.
But the bigger reason for all the writing was that I suddenly found myself with a lot more time on my hands. More than inspiration or drive, we need time to pursue what matters to us.
A coworker once described her life as a series of different seasons, a framework that has stuck with me since. In some seasons, work took priority. In others, her children. During a family tragedy, or personal crisis, all else got dropped, only to pick it back up when life allowed.
The lesson, ultimately, was that you can’t fight the season in which you find yourself. At times, my coworker may have wished to be able to focus more on her career, or her family, but circumstances told her otherwise. And that was okay.
As I look back through my journal entries over the past two years, during a period in which I published very little writing, I am glad to have taken to heart the idea of these “seasons of life.” The one thing I didn’t do was despair over my lack of production – instead, I reminded myself that the reason I wasn’t writing was because I was doing other things that I cared about more.
In an alternate universe, rather than telling myself that I was putting my writing on pause, I could have convinced myself that I had quit the hobby altogether. That I was no longer a writer.
If I had done that, I’m not sure that I would have started writing again back in November. Even with more time on my hands, and fresh “new dad” material, that door might have stayed closed.
Thankfully I didn’t do that.
A recurring theme in my writing over the years has been the double-edged nature of labels. In some cases, they can be very helpful. For example, I have felt motivated to write because other people have called me a writer. Same goes for different athletic pursuits.
But labels can also be damaging, particularly when they say things about us that are critical or self-limiting. I want the flexibility to be both career-driven and a great dad, a writer and a good husband. You get the picture. If a family emergency sidelined me from my career for a year, I wouldn’t want to relinquish my identity as someone who cares about their job, and vice versa.
That does not mean that I can do all of those things well at the same time. As Ryan Holiday says: “You can have a great family, a great career, or a great social life. Pick two.” It is a mistake to think we can do everything at once, and the pursuit of that ideal more likely ends up with us doing a mediocre job of everything.
That said, I do think it’s worthwhile to believe, with conviction, that I can focus on doing one or two things well without ceding my ability to other things well later on. Labels should be fungible.
What I can’t do is delude myself about what season I’m truly in. Where I’m choosing to spend the bulk of my time. What my priorities are.
Because the truth is that no one can be a writer with only 30 distracted minutes of writing each week. No one can find a life partner with only one first date every six months. And I definitely can’t be a good dad if I let all the stuff I want to do with my limited free time crowd out time with my kids.
As the saying goes, “show me your calendar and I’ll show you your priorities.”
As Anne and I enter a new season in life, I am going to try to take these changes as they come. There is no question that I will have significantly less time to write. And chances are, that means I will publish far fewer posts than I have over the past few months.
And that’s okay.
– Emmett
What I’m Reading:
We Are All Savages Inside – Dear Sugar
“You know what I do when I feel jealous? I tell myself to not feel jealous. I shut down the why not me? voice and replace it with one that says don’t be silly instead. It really is that easy. You actually do stop being an awful jealous person by stopping being an awful jealous person. When you feel like crap because someone has gotten something you want you force yourself to remember how very much you have been given. You remember that there is plenty for all of us. You remember that someone else’s success has absolutely no bearing on your own. You remember that a wonderful thing has happened to one of your literary peers and maybe, if you keep working and if you get lucky, something wonderful may also someday happen to you.”