'What projects don’t exist because I exist instead?'

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What projects don’t exist because I exist instead?

-Samantha Hunt

In Samantha Hunt’s memoir, The Unwritten Book, she takes an unfinished manuscript that her late father wrote and adds her own marginalia, footnotes, and interstitial essays to it. In part, it is an exploration of who he was and wasn’t to her, the conversations they had, the questions she never got to ask. It’s a beautiful, sprawling, sometimes messy meditation on the lack of neatness and closure we expect between those we love the most and ourselves, especially when death arrives. It’s also, largely, about the creative process. Hunt’s father, who was an editor at Reader’s Digest, never finished or published this novel, nor many other works he hoped to get out into the world.

When I read that line—What projects don’t exist because I exist instead?—it took my breath away. My own mother has talked frequently about the fact that parenthood is the best thing that ever happened to her and also that my parents’ failed agreements around shared parenting eroded her work life. She was a professor, a social worker, a community organizer, and so much more over the course of many decades, and yet, she always seemed painfully aware of all the other good trouble she could have made had she had the space and time. I can feel the projects—unfinished, never started, lost forever—heavy in her words when she looks back.

Her story has haunted me. When I was younger, I spent a lot of energy thinking about how I might repair this wrong—making my mom business cards, trying to be the loudest and most enthusiastic supporter of her art-making, and various other clumsy attempts to say: it’s not too late mom! I exist but so can you—fully realized, creatively alive, celebrated and resourced! My mom, a fiercely independent person who doesn’t respond well to being “fixed” (who does?!), put the cards in a drawer and continued to mourn her lost projects in her own way.

And yes, I know the oft-quoted Carl Jung idea: “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.” (My mom, incidentally, started the Jungian society in my hometown of Colorado Springs—a project that coexisted alongside little girl me.)

When Maya, my oldest daughter was born, I took a few months off and then jumped back full-force into work. I remember pumping breast milk in an interview booth at the Center for Investigative Reporting, praying the door wouldn’t accidentally open on the entire open-plan office. I tried to channel my post-partum anxiety and new learnings as a mom into weekly columns at On Being. Sure, I loved and love my work, but also I think I was trying to outrun what I saw as a generational curse. Do. Not. Let. Parenthood. Kill. Your. Projects.

My book, The New Better Off, came out one month after Stella, my second kid, did. I took her on a red eye in my lap to New York City for the launch event—a rowdy party in DUMBO with a bunch of my favorite people reading original meditations on generational notions of success (the subject of that book). I had handed Stella off to my friend Katinka so I could host the reading. Halfway thru, Katinka leaned over to whisper in my ear that Stella seemed hungry —Should I just nurse her? Katinka also had a brand new baby and breasts full of milk. Yes, please! I said. It takes a village, right? Plus, supposedly your kid gets an immunity-boost from other women’s breast milk. (It also begs a spin on the question, perhaps: what projects might exist if we all just lived more interdependently?)

On the plane ride home I remember having a lucid moment where I admitted to myself: Wow, that was a lot. Maybe too much? But mostly I just put one foot in front of the other and tried to compartmentalize how too much all of it has been.

I got good at holding a baby in my arms while answering emails on my cell phone and turning the stuff of motherhood into literary inspiration. John, their father, mastered sleeping baby on chest, laptop on lap. In some ways, the last decade has been one endless, frenzied loop of drop-offs, pick-ups, childcare, preschool, after school, school school, summer camp, sick days, work trips, and then of course the true peak of rubbing my belly and patting my head at the same time, covid-era simultaneity. I once logged off a work call and found Maya in a full headstand while attending online school in the kitchen—the perfect crystallization of that acrobatic season of our family life.

Lately I’ve been reckoning with the fact that—unless something hugely shifts in me or around me—I won’t be having any more babies. I’m 43. I’ve got two wildly different kids that crave my undivided attention. Our house is 1500 square feet. The climate is going to shit.

Getting to know my daughters has been the most miraculous, interesting thing I’ve ever done, the thing that has filled me with the most expansive love; so part of me is like: why not do that as many times as you possibly can?

But I don’t think it works like that, at least for me. I don’t love thinking about my love as a zero sum game, but I am old enough to know the wisdom of acknowledging limitations. There really are 24 hours in a day. My mental and physical energy are finite within each one of those days. I don’t exactly have big professional dreams these days as much as quiet, sacred ones. I know so much about who I am and what my gifts are, and have so many good questions to explore out loud these days. I am so clear about the delight I get from my projects, from my collaborators. I want to enjoy every minute of this midlife career moment.

And I can’t enjoy it when I’m exhausted or feeling like I’m a shitty mom and a shitty collaborator. That will still happen with just two kids, but the more I add—particularly in a country that doesn’t structurally support working parents for shit—the less supple and spontaneous and creative I can be. (Again, this is me. I know some women who seem to have a much deeper well of energy for kids and projects, and probably a different approach to it all—maybe looser, less intense—that makes more kids feel like a rising tide, rather than a drowning, situation.)

I comfort myself with the notion that if I don’t overextend my love for kids born of this particular family, I can heap extra love on kids who pass through this family—my kids’ friends and my friends’ kids, classmates, neighbors, my nieces and nephews. I don’t feel like I’m choosing work over a third kid, exactly, but I am choosing to honor my limitations, my deep love for the kids I already have and my overflowing delight in getting to know them, my awesome, enigmatic marriage that needs less, not more moving parts, the projects I am cooking up and also the ones I don’t even know about yet.

For me, having a third kid would be a bit like being the 50-year-old dude in the Porsche 911 with his much younger girlfriend riding shotgun—an attempt to deny the inevitable passing of time and narrowing of possibilities that comes with being middle aged by doing something my wiser self knows to be reckless. I’d be fine, of course. If I had the third kid, it would all work out and I’d say, “Can you believe we ever considered not having this kid?” And that guy is fine, too—eventually he sells the car and the girl ditches him, he sobers up and figures out that he, too, is going to die someday. Maybe his wife takes him back. Probably not. (She’s working on a new project that she cooked up with her extra energy and time. 😜)

Ultimately, midlife crises are all about one existential truth: life is finite. I’ve been feeling that in a big way—looking around at my people and my projects and feeling both completely blown away by how much I love this life I’ve been given and shaped, and also how sad I am that I only get to do this once. That’s worth feeling some feels about. And making art about. And good motivation for getting on the floor with your kid and actually listening to them when they explain that weird project they’re working on with matchbox cars, pipe cleaners, and LOL dolls tonight. Focus on what and who is already here, rather than the horizons you’ll never see.

As Hunt also writes:

“Despite my efforts, death continues to hurt me and lace my life with fear. I worry through the night. Sleep like a spotted thing. I move through the loves death might and will one day take from me. There’s a compulsion I feel to do every single thing right: light a candle in the morning when it is still dark, not yell at my children, cook food, serve people, help clean my mother’s house, stay off screens, keep myself beautiful and quiet and clean, and if I do everything right, death will pass by me and mine. Even in writing that, I know it to be untrue. There’s no right or good that avoids death.”