Recently I was on a panel with two friends, speaking to college student about what it means to be writers. It was a career development panel. We were invited to talk about what it meant to be “professional” writers. But each one of us had day jobs, some of us more than one. And so what the students got instead was an impassioned panel on day jobs, how we all make our writing work around the drudgery of our every day tasks. Perhaps I imagined it, but the organizer of the panel looked rather put out. It felt like we were squashing dreams, stomping on the idylls of eighteen year olds, scaring them with talk of W-2s and freelancing. During the Q+A, a student asked a question about form, and my friend responded by talking about her newly published short story collection. She explained that she wrote short stories in part because she did not have the time to write in the sustained, focused way a novel would require. I was listening, thinking about what a smart interrogation of craft and daily life that was, when she mentioned me. “..and Nina, I presume you also write essays for the same reason.”
I was thrown off balance for a moment, quickly shifting into agreement. But in truth I’d never thought about it before; how my propensity to write shorter things is shaped by the amount of time I have. How even the novel I have been tinkering on and off with is built up of disparate viewpoints, all about a thousand words long, a word count I can squeeze out at the end or beginning of a work day. After hanging up the Zoom call and leaving the panel, I found myself reflecting on what immense things I could write if given the time.
Said a different way: my favorite painting in the Art Institute is the Georgia O’Keefe’s Sky Above Clouds. The painting is eight feet high and twenty four feet wide. It hangs above the stately back stair case of the Institute, so big and so expansive it feels less like a discrete work of art and almost like a piece of the museum’s architecture. I’ve always loved it because I like to imagine what it would be like, how good it must feel, to unfurl your creative vision over such a large expanse. It makes my soul stretch. Could I make something as big as Sky Above Clouds if I wasn’t beholden to my nine to five? Or rather, when I pose such a question to myself I realize there is a yearning in me to unfurl in a similarly grandiose fashion. To make something huge, ambitious, almost architectural. What I’m trying to say is, when I talk about writing and money, I am talking about time and also of freedom.
—
I learned first of money when I was small, listening to my parents argue about my mother’s spending. Of course my memory of these arguments is shaped by the brute force of a child’s emotion, which is to say, the memories are vivid but not very clear. I just knew that my mother spent more money than my father would like on things like organic groceries and school supplies. It terrified me to hear them squabble. I was a worry-full bookworm who had read too many stories of Victorian era children landed in the poorhouse because of their parent’s squandered fortunes. Any time money was brought up, I felt a gut-icing terror. Money, I was convinced, would be the downfall of our family.
Looking back on it now, I’m sure those arguments were likely the regular marital squabbles of two people who share a bank account. I also think about the things my mother was using money on—Japanese lessons, hormone-free milk, regular trips to the bookstore—and I see all of these objects as bids to shore up our childhood. I understand, in hindsight. After all, if I were alone, alienated from my community and family, living in the woods far away from anything recognizable, I too might start spending large amounts of money to ensure the comfort and well being of the people I loved the most. It would be one of the only things I could control.
Which is why I remember getting my own money as an instance of great determination. I was about eight when my father told me I was going to start receiving an allowance. But the allowance wasn’t simply for me to use to buy things I liked. Instead, he asked that I follow a formula: save 30%, give 10%, and use the following 60%. Saving money may feel painful at times, but think of it as paying yourself first, he told me. We sat side by side at the kitchen table, doing sums in a shiny green notebook, my father showing me how my weekly ten dollars would be divided up, to savings, to charity, and to my self. I put everything he said to memory. If I could just do this, I would be safe forever. In the same way I believe my mother spent money to control an uncontrollable circumstance, I latched on to the 30-10-60 formula as a magic spell, a way to ensure stability, self-sufficiency, something akin to money-holiness.
I still save 30% of our income, give 10% of it, and obsessively track the remaining 60% in a Google spreadsheet. My ability to control my finances remains deeply linked to how in control of my life I feel. Frugality occupies a similar moral space to efficiency, productivity, beauty; a stick that I use to measure my worth and beat myself into submission. These days, frugality feels increasingly untenable. By the second half of every month, my voice gets more and more shrill as I communicate to Jack what is left of our allotted funds. The addition of our baby and her needs seems to be stretching the perfect fiscal equilibrium I’ve cultivated all these years. We’ve had to dip into our savings to cover costs over the last year more than I would like. Every time I feel like I am sinning, like I am inherently a less worthwhile person because I cannot control my needing.
—
A pitfall of the personal essayist (me) is the propensity to take responsibility for things not entirely their fault. On a narrative level, taking responsibility allows for the necessary drama to propel the essay’s plot. It would be boring, say, for me to explain that I am my family’s main breadwinner, that we live in a capitalist economy that essentially tells people to make money or die. Far more interesting is the self-flagellating emotional genesis of my fiscal sensibility.
I read back what I have written and see that my writing, though sufficiently dramatic, is at odds with itself. I begin by talking about writing, freedom, the constraints of a work day. Then, I talk about the reasons why I have seemingly chosen to be not free, to prioritize my careful life of budgeting. I am irritated by the cognitive dissonance of the two sections. I play around with deleting them, rearranging them, stretching and shrinking them. But I cannot shake the feeling that they must both exist in tandem. I realize, now, that I’ve written an excuse. That, taken together, describing a desire and then describing why I cannot have it, is a way of letting something off the hook.
But for what? Or for whom? Am I trying to reconcile myself to the bosses of the world, to the white man with the crew cut who receives the benefits of my work-day labor, making over one hundred times what I make? If my inability to make big, Sky Above Clouds, type work is the fault of my emotional knottiness, who is in the clear?
(Am I making excuses for capitalism???)
—
When I started my corporate job, I knew, dimly, that I wanted to have a child in the near future, so I chose the health insurance that would pay the most for a large in-hospital procedure. This was a good choice, in that it allowed us to pay $200 out of pocket for the $50,000 procedure of my emergency C-section. But it was also a bad choice in that my insurance does not (easily) pay for therapy, which means I haven’t seen a therapist since 2022. Recently, in an attempt to fill that gap, I started seeing a Spiritual Director. Spiritual Direction, is sort of like faith-based life coaching. The directee meets regularly with their director, talking about things in their life that they are seeking guidance on. The director does not offer prescriptive advice, but rather listens in a reflective, in my case, Ignatian way. In this way, you’re encouraged to take note of God, or the Universe, or whatever you call the thing that is burning and true in side of you. And in my case, it is also important to note that it is often donation-based or completely free.
At my first session, clutching at the water glass my director offered me, I felt nervous and unsure. Why was I there? What was weighing on my heart? I was aware of a general malaise languishing in my soul but nothing as acute as psychological distress. What would I talk about?
The answer came swiftly. I only wanted to talk about one thing; birth and vocation. Or rather, the way having a child has acted as a clarifying brush-fire in me, clearing away dead concern and ambition, leaving behind only that which is most important. There is nothing like a baby to impress upon you how fleeting time is. Every day, she is different. Every day, she changes. Every day, she reminds me that someday I will die and it is a profound tragedy to waste the short time we have here together.
In a way, I am talking also of money. After giving birth, I find myself less and less able to bow my head to the laptop, to feel sufficiently engaged in meetings, to circle back. It seems an injustice that I must take time away from her for anything that isn’t writing. I feel less and less able to make excuses for capitalism. If it is not writing and it is not the people I love, then why must I waste my time on it?
Would you say this is a calling? My director asked. Yes, I answered, from my gut, without thinking. She then posed this question:
What becomes possible when you take seriously that you are called to make things and care for the people you love?
—
So far, the only thing that has come of this questioning is this meandering essay and a small breakdown.
Last Wednesday, I found myself hunched on the living room floor, sobbing in a way that inspired nausea. Earlier that day, the stash of frozen breast milk I’d carefully built up over my maternity leave had run out. I assigned great meaning to that stash of frozen milk. It was my insurance, my freedom, the milk that was not supposed to be used for me working in the office but instead the milk that might allow me to go on a small writing retreat, the milk that would tide my daughter over if my Friday AM writing sessions ran long. Instead, my milk was used to supplement my in-office work days because when I pumped in the office, it wasn’t enough to offset my daughter’s hunger.
I was so exhausted that night. All day, I’d run back and forth from meeting rooms, up and down flights of stairs to carry myself dutifully to the Mother’s Suite, a windowless conference room painted in watery blues where I sat and attached myself to the sucking of a breast pump. I believed that the milk I produced while I was away from my baby would be enough to feed her the following day. Instead, there was only the cold sucking of the pump, not convincing enough to my hormones to let down the same amount of milk I could produce if actually breast feeding. Not only did I feel that I was failing to feed my baby sufficiently, I failed to procure the only other thing that mattered to me; my time and freedom, however fleeting, to write. How cruel, it seemed, that the thing I did to make money so my family could live was not only taking away precious moments with my daughter, but also starving the space I had to make things.
I just want, I heaved at Jack, to feed my baby with my body.
But that isn’t entirely true, either. I want to feed my baby with my body, and I want to take a long walk in the morning. I want to touch the doe-eared velvet buds of trees, preparing themselves to explode into Spring and explain to her that the seasons will soon change. I want to ask Jack if he remembers what it was like last spring, when everything became verdant, and it was like the whole world was reminding us of our daughter’s name, which means green. I want to write long essays and short ones, I want to finish my screenplay and I want to teach my students and not have it be a financial worry that I teach them. I want never to feel the slack slick feeling of having done nothing but followed up on emails all day. I want not to feel that I am wasting my one wild and precious life. I want to go to the doctor and get a prescription and not dither at the receptionist’s counter about whether I can afford the extra exam. I want to feel that my body is not a machine to make profit, but rather an embodiment of spirit, a vessel for kissing and dancing and eating delicious food. I want not to stare at my spreadsheet, hoarding my cash for the day that a small emergency befalls us. I want my sister to be paid commensurate to her expertise and experience, I want her never to have to work 90 hours in a row. I want there to be enough to go around. I want a world where there is enough to go around. I want that for all of us.