Since watching “Annie”—a perfect movie made in 1982—a few nights ago, I have taken to playing the song “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” in my kitchen while I do the dishes. It’s sung by ragged orphan girls as they stomp around, mopping and scrubbing, instead of doing what they want (resting and playing): in short, a thrilling anthem of domestic self-pity.
About this development, my teenage children have little to say. They sometimes do the dishes, but they have busy evenings of schoolwork and sports, and they’re accustomed to a certain amount of grumbling when I’m left holding the bag. Now it is simply set to music. That is all.
Yes, yes, I know I’m the adult! I know keeping the house in order is, ultimately, my job, on top of several other jobs. I’m not living in a fantasyland in which I don’t have to waste my time on drudgery. As the orphan girls bitterly put it:
Santa Claus we never see.
Santa Claus – what’s that? Who’s he?
No one cares for you a smidge
When you’re in an orphanage.
To the writer, having to shoulder day-to-day responsibilities can feel like no one cares a smidge. We crave a lot of a time alone, in a fine house overlooking an English garden, a life in which some lesser being accommodates our every need and eccentricity while we are WORKING ON OUR NOVEL.
But sadly, that is not the life most of us get. In his 1995 comic novel about an aging failed novelist (the spirit animal of all novelists), Martin Amis writes:
Nothing ever happens to novelists. Except—this.
They are born. They get sick, they get well, they hang around the inkwell. They leave home, with their stuff in a hired van. . . . They get married in registry offices. They have children in hospitals—the ordinary miracle. Their parents die—the ordinary disaster. They get divorced or they don’t. Their children leave home, learn to drive, get married, have children. They grow old. So nothing ever happens to them, except the universal.
Normal things happen to the writer, but she is not a normal person. Like a teenager, her main attitude is ironic detachment, and she doesn’t care for grownups much. They are too dull, too staid. They’ve “gotten with the program.” She has not. And yet—outrageously—she has to act like one, most of the time.
Joyce Carol Oates, a genius-level novelist in the form of a petite, unassuming woman, recently wrote:
The “self” is, at its core, radically young, even adolescent. Our “selves” are forged in childhood, burnished and confirmed in adolescence. . . . Since I began writing fairly seriously when I was very young, my truest and most prevailing self is that adolescent self, confronting an essentially mysterious and fascinating adult world, like a riddle to be solved, or a code to be decoded. The essence of the adolescent is rebelliousness, skepticism. It is very healthy, a stay against the accommodations and compromises of what we call adulthood, particularly “middle age.”
This is absolutely true. Oates herself has spent decades cultivating ideas in solitude, writing novels in her head while running and taking long walks, and living an idyllic writer’s life. As a young woman in a stable, comfortable marriage, she had no interest in becoming a mother—a state of mind she plays with in her hilarious 1968 novel Expensive People, narrated by the neglected son of a monstrously self-absorbed female novelist.
My children, I like to think, have fared somewhat better. In fact, they’re not so different from me. My 16-year-old son is a talented artist; on weekends, he holes up in his room, drawing for hours in his sketchbook or on his new digital tablet. No one makes him mop floors or squander his spare time. Often, I bring him a cup of tea or a sandwich. He is developing his inner self—creative, self-directed, fastidious about his craft—and in this, he must be supported and respected.
Not long ago, exasperated that I had so much to do, I put it to him this way:
“How would you feel if someone took your sketchbook away and said you couldn’t draw for two years, you’re too busy? You’d be frustrated, right? That’s how I feel.”
Since then, he’s pitched in more around the house, and my daughter has stepped up, too. In a healthy family, everyone must be allowed to be a person—a monkish contemplative, a princeling for an hour—not just a harried functionary trying to make it through the week.
And in fact, I love having teenagers around. Their curiosity, optimism, and energy are contagious, and they are role models for me, in a sense. The essence of youth is the desire to engage with the world on your own terms, before it grinds you down. Creative people can’t afford to lose this instinct; it is their molten core. Up to their elbows in quotidian dishwater, they must preserve a questing adolescent soul.
So I relate to Duffy, Tessie, Pepper, and the rest of Annie’s gang. They are scrappy girls in challenging circumstances, doing the things they have to do, not shutting up about their feelings. On the contrary: They’re singing, dancing, turning cartwheels, while they work!
I think the kids would like me to find a new dishwashing song, however.
This is something of what my early STSC vid was about:
https://polarisdib.substack.com/p/symposium-3-procrastination
There's this banality of chores that seems like a personal affront to the creative impulse, that on the other hand is required to recognize your mere humanness and where it stands in the cosmic order of things. It's why less moneyed artists both resent rich artists that have assistants and domestic services cover the banal stuff for them, and would immediately start paying for those services once they got the money themselves.
Guess what I am humming right now? 😂 I loved how you mentioned giving your kids that time and space to create.