The answer is I have a nanny
Plus: a calendar, minding your own business, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.
1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
The answer is I have a nanny
This week, a writer I’ve worked with a handful of times let me know she won’t be freelancing anymore, at least for a while, to refocus her attention on her primary career. Writing is a side gig for her, albeit one I believe she’d like to have as a main gig. But for now, she just can’t make it work given her other obligations, especially financial and familial.
And last week, before I spoke at a chapel event at Grove City College, I talked with an editing class taught by my friend and fellow author, Jeff Bilbro. The class was all girls, about a dozen of them, and when introducing themselves and discussing possible career paths, several expressed concerns about whether their interest in writing, editing, etc. would conflict with their desire to have a family.
Accordingly, one of the questions Bilbro asked was about balancing work and family life—you know, Can you have it all?
The answer is yes, significantly because I have a nanny.
I realize, of course, how that sounds. The cultural touchstone is Mary Poppins—and its unflattering portrayals of busy parents who are more devoted to jobs and causes than their children. Having a nanny evokes rich people who have maids and butlers and summer homes on Martha’s Vineyard. It does not sound very democratic, in the lowercase-d sense we Americans generally enjoy.
A 2010 Slate article entitled “No one has nannies” said just 3.5 percent of American families select this option for childcare. That very likely an undercount, post-pandemic, but I’m having trouble finding more recent numbers, and it’s certainly not the most common option.
Because of all this, I feel a little weird saying I have a nanny. I feel obliged to make sure you know that because of how expensive daycare is, hiring a nanny can be the more affordable option, depending on where you live, how many children you have, and how old those children are. For us, it has sometimes been cheaper than daycare and sometimes more expensive, but—especially at the height of the COVID era, when daycares near us were often closed and/or requiring masks once kids turned 2—an expense we deemed worth maintaining.
So why make this post, then? For the same reason I said basically the same thing to that editing class: This is how it works, and too many don’t realize that this is how it works.
Writers—especially female Christian writers, and especially female Christian writers trying to appeal to complementarian readers who might not approve of hiring paid childcare while the mother pursues a career—don’t often talk about these arrangements. But for most writers, arrangements must be made.
Yes, there are some successful writers who can do it on the margins, working late into the night or early in the morning, fitting a chapter here and there around a full-time job or full-time childcare, maybe even homeschooling, on top of managing their household and doing all the other things we all do all the time. I’m not one of those writers, though, and I’m not unique in that regard—so neither am I unique in having childcare (and in not having an option for informal care by family members).
And this need for big blocks of uninterrupted writing time during normal hours of the day doesn’t begin when you have kids. With or without kids, it’s something of an open secret that it’s very common for writers (again, especially female Christian writers) to have a spouse with a full-time, insurance-carrying job.
I do—and when I say the answer is I have a nanny, I’m being a little bit glib. The answer is also that I have a husband who is gainfully employed and more than pulls his weight with our children. Pre-kids, his more traditional career path was the backstop while I built up freelancing income during seminary.
Could I have done it without that support? Yeah, but it would have been harder and more precarious, and it would have taken longer, especially if I were holding down a full-time job at the same time.
This is true for many other writers as well, and, in some sense, I suspect it always has been. The great writers of old—you think they were writing while watching their own kids? Cooking their own meals? No, they had help, usually a wife in the sense of the famous 1971 essay.
We can divine this from accounts of their schedules: Sigmund Freud’s wife “laid out Freud’s clothes, chose his handkerchiefs, and even put toothpaste on his toothbrush.” Charles Dickens worked from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., “taking a brief break for lunch with his family, during which he often seemed to be in a trance, eating mechanically and barely speaking a word before hurrying back to his desk,” and then took a solo 3-hour walk before devoting the evening to dinner and leisure. This man was not doing the cleaning. Even the wifeless, like Jane Austen, often had servants.
Having it all is, in this context, a very modern notion. Dickens didn’t worry about having it all; he had the writing and meals someone else cooked and clothes someone else washed. Few professional writers have that today, but, behind the scenes, we do tend to have help.
2. What I'm reading this week
“Two thousand miles from home,” by Lily Hyde for Atavist this month. A remarkable longform piece, found via
, about a family with several new babies amid the war in Ukraine.3. A recommendation
The Paper Source wall art calendar. I’ve had them for well over a decade and just ordered the one for 2024. It’s a little frivolous—this is not a calendar you use for recording actual plans—but it’s beautiful, and more useful than you’d think.
4. Recent work
Keeping—and learning—the peace | Christianity Today
Christianity has anchored free societies. What happens as they deconvert? | Christianity Today
3 U.S. priorities amid the Israel-Hamas war | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
Being a ‘female Christian writer’ | You Have Permission (podcast)
5. Miscellaneous
While I was at Grove City, Bilbro recommended this forthcoming book to me, and I’m very intrigued. It’s called Why It’s OK to Mind Your Own Business, and here’s the description:
Every year, millions of students in the United States and around the world graduate from high school and college. Commencement speakers—often distilling the hopes of parents and four years of messaging from educators—tell graduates that they must do something grand, ambitious, or far-reaching. Change the world. Disrupt the status quo. Every problem in the world is your problem, awaiting your solutions.
This book is an antidote to that advice. It provides a clear-eyed assessment of three types of people who tend to believe and promote a commencement speaker’s view of the world: the moralizer, who imposes unnecessary social costs by inappropriately enforcing morality; the busybody, who thinks the stranger and close friend merit equal shares of our benevolent attention; and the pure hearted, who equates acting with good intentions with just outcomes. The book also provides a bold defense of living an ordinary life by putting down roots, creating a good home, and living in solitude. A quiet, peaceful life can be generous and noble. It’s OK to mind your own business.
Without having read the book, my inclination is to say we see a lot of high-profile moralizers and busybodies, especially online, but the pure hearted lead in sheer numbers. In some ways that’s good—I’d say this is the most innocuous of the three types—but good intentions and doing good are not the same.
