I used to think of my days in full chapters. Clean slates. Mornings with momentum. Afternoons with deep focus. Evenings for winding down or, if I felt inspired, spinning something up.
Then I became a parent.
Now, every day is a half-day, and not the kind from school with early dismissal and ice cream after. I mean a life lived in fragments. A timeline littered with interruptions. A rhythm constantly broken by logistics, laundry, 2:30pm pick ups and the question, “How do we get through the summer?”
There is no such thing as “getting ahead.” I don’t finish things anymore. I pause them. I bookmark thoughts mid-sentence. I return emails while boiling pasta. I write in the margins of time, and I edit in my head while brushing tiny teeth.
When creative inspiration hits, I can still feel that old charge, an electric and obsessive spark under the surface. Historically, I’d dive into a hole and not emerge until the thing I wanted to make was done. That kind of manic, singular focus used to define how I worked. I loved it. I was addicted to it. I still am.
But life doesn’t quite allow for those spirals anymore. Not when the diorama project for school is due by 8am, the meetings with NY start at 7am, and someone needs a snack, a hug, or a Band-Aid every 45 minutes.
The to-do list grows like moss. It sprawls and multiplies with no regard for your ambition or your energy. For every thing I cross off, three more things appear. Most of them are things no one else even notices: dentist forms filled out, room pick up for a clothing obsessed tween, performance reviews for peers and financial forecasts for my office.
There’s a quiet heartbreak in the invisibility of it all. But also, strangely, a kind of pride. Because despite all this, I still make things. Not always the things I want to make, or in the way I’d like to make them. But I create. I find cracks in the schedule and plant ideas like wildflowers in sidewalk seams.
I’ll never “catch up” again, and that used to terrify me (truthfully it still does). But now I know, at least intellectually, that I’m not here to catch up. I’m here to be here and do the best that I can.
So if you're reading this during your own five stolen minutes on your phone, in the bathroom, in the car waiting for pickup, just know: You’re not alone. You’re not behind. You’re a human under a waterfall, doing your best to breathe and build and make, one half-day at a time.
And with that, my five minutes are up. I’m off to peel a carrot for a very specific, very impatient five-year-old who I love with my whole heart and who stands, alongside her sister, as one of the two greatest things I’ll ever make in my whole life.
I LOVED this! I'm a dad, and still, it ALL reosnates {except, I don't have any dealings with anyone in NYC because "eww Kevin"}. With tears of greatfullness, thank you for creating Ali, we all appreciate your craft.
Gosh, Ali, I needed this today. Nobody really talks about this and so many creative people either hide this side of life or don't have the pressure of kids layered on. I used to think that time passing would give me more creative space as the kids got older and needed us less. Newsflash: that hasn't happened, at least not yet. I also write ideas while boiling pasta or reply to a comment during a 3 minute pause from work because goodness knows I'll forget to do it if I wait until I get home and have to see how the science test went (potentially not great, which means consoling my kid will be my evening) while also making sure my daughter has enough food to eat before dance because anticipating others' needs is our other other job. It's a lot and yet, like you, I am still making things. Somehow. People ask me all the time "how DO you find the time???" and truthfully, I don't really. I squeeze it in. I borrow from something else. I feel bad about always having to choose something that abandons something else. I thought that 15+ years into this parenting thing I would have either come to terms with the lack of 'me' time or figured it out. I've done neither. But that's ok too. I have a beautiful mess of a documentary of my family's life along the way and a hodge podge of creativity trailing in its wake. Thanks for sharing what so many of us feel, Ali!