Children have needs, not just wants. They all need attention–interactions with parents where they are truly seen and heard, not just noticed as barriers in the path to adult ambition. Some will require more than others…and some of those special-needs situations require a lot more money: more trips to more expensive doctors, hospitalizations, surgeries, therapies. It’s a rare other parent who has the resources to pay for that (insurance managing, far too often, to set unrealistic bounds on reimbursement for a child’s long-term problems…and some parents face this alone.

So the writer-parent who hasn’t already established a writing presence faces severe challenges…and a longer period of being a parent than others. (Our son is 26. Just this year he was able to move into an apartment, but he’s still under guardianship and still needs our support.)

What this meant for me as a writer was that I could not write as I had been writing: I had to learn to use every spare minute from parenting an autistic kid for writing–or quit. Writing was my safety valve–the only place where I could control things. Those five minute/fifteen minute/half hour snatches of time to exist in another place, a place apart from money problems, the constant worry about our son’s future, the struggle to help him, etc. were like whiffs of fresh air to someone smothering.

In the “real world”, I had to do all our son’s therapy (we couldn’t afford anything else) and later homeschooled him for twelve years, transitioning him back to public school for high school. Although I finished the next two books by the time our son was 13 months old, my first fiction sale was six months away at that point…and the books didn’t sell for another two years…by the time they came out, my mother was in her final decline. My grandmother died. My mother’s health had never been good, and then went downhill fast–she died a few months before our son was seven. My husband’s mother had cancer and died a little over a year later. Although a small country day school had accepted our son for a couple of years, he could not stay there longer–it was for kids up to age five. There was no respite care. No other family members to give us a break. And since I was home-schooling (our small rural school could not provide the special resources our son needed, such as daily communications therapy), no writing time during the school day.

And yet, in those years I was constantly writing something–first short fiction (easier to sell, until the books began to work) and then a book a year plus some short fiction. I learned to hold sentences, then paragraphs, in my head while teaching our son, doing laundry, cooking…then run in and type them. It was not a natural way to write for me. It’s still not. Gradually it became possible to set the oven timer for 15 minutes…half an hour…during which our son would occupy himself while I wrote.

This mode of writing changed what I could write. Science fiction, yes. Light fantasy, yes. Nonfiction, certanly. But the kind of fantasy of my first books–and what I’m writing now–no. I need to be alone, not interrupted, immersed, to write it. Our son’s living in the city now. I can put my concerns about him in another part of my head (it feels like) for the hours of work, and sink into my “big” world. And I love that. But would not give up the years of difficulty and the mental skills I had to learn to keep going in spite of everything. (They could have been shorter…I’m not THAT slow a learner.)

Perhaps the greatest benefits to being a writer-parent (benefit to the parent-as-writer) are the very things that impede the writing. Having to attend to another, willy nilly, day or night, in spite of your moods and ideas…having to become aware of the individuality of another…aware of your own nature (as revealed in your parenting and in your child)…having to develop that flexibility, that responsiveness to the moment…can enrich what you write, expand your range, deepen characterization, and provide endless incidents.