I Can’t Write Anything Meaningful When My Kids Are Around

It is 7 a.m., the first morning on the road for our five-day trip back to Arizona. My son was still asleep in our rooftop tent parked at the Des Moines KOA. My daughter is behind me, braiding my hair (maybe for the first time? I was hoping for a more sophisticated roadtrip lewk) while my to-do list from the five-plus projects I’m always working on started scrolling through my brain.

It has been weeks since I’ve written anything for Substack, despite having a dozen good ideas sitting in my notes app waiting for their turn. Because, as the title of this suggests, I can’t write anything meaningful when my kids are around.

And yet, fun has been at an all-time high these past six weeks — vacation mode fully activated while we visited Minnesota. This had led to exhaustion, existential crises, and sunburns. Worth it.

Now I’m standing in the gravel eating a hard-boiled egg out of my cooler.

“Let’s go, Mommy,” my daughter says, because I told her we should take a walk before we’re stuck in the car for five more hours. So, we do laps around the RV park staying in sight of the rooftop tent in case 6 year old Aero emerges, bedraggled and likely to pee in the grass some place even less appropriate than the spot I will find him if I’m not fast enough.

While we walk, I largely tune out my daughter, telling me about the graphic novel she has been loving lately. The to do list is still scrolling and I intermittently find myself thinking again - I really truly can’t write anything meaningful when my kids are around.

I’m stuck on this thought.

And wondering, what does that actually mean when I say/think it? First off, what does meaningful mean? I guess I mean meaningful, full of meaning, for ME. Writing that feels like it captures my meaning and also means something to create and then to have read by others. Impactful might be a better word.

Does it mean I wish I would have alone time to write instead of being with them? No. Does it mean I’m a bad mom with bad boundaries? Should I be able to write something that I deem meaningful with them in the house with me? Perhaps.

Or is this sentiment/realization something else entirely? The truth of it feels important enough to share here now, while I can write since my kids are decidedly NOT around. They are with their dad for the night.

I am angry beneath it all. That I have things I want to say (who knows if they are worth saying) and the amount of time I have to say them feel limited. I feel clogged up with thoughts and ideas and musings and potential cool things to say, share, shout.

Now in real time I am wondering, would I REALLY write so more much if they were in school though (we home school)? or didn’t exist (I don’t wish this). Would I write something important and world changing that might go into a college course, or a library, or get consumed by AI and then used to change the world long after I’m dead?

In any case, “meaningful” writing requires a kind of deep dive my brain can’t do when someone is asking me where their water bottle is, when the next bathroom stop is, or why the egg yolk looks “weird”.

Maybe it’s not about boundaries or motherhood at all, but about the sheer physics of attention — how it can only be in one place at a time.

So for now, the deep dives will have to wait until I have some time where my children are not around, like tonight. Until then I’ll continue to write tiny whisps of ideas from the front seat of the car when we pull up to the gas pumps, from the tiny chairs at the library kids’ section, from the sticky tables at the Trampolinium, in whatever pocket of quiet appears before someone yells “Mom.”