In the beginning I had no idea what I was getting into, either with mothering or with writing. I used my old grad school computer, and then when it died, my partner’s lap-top, for long letters to my best friend about the raucous world of pregnancy when we first moved here for my partner’s new job. When Nora Jade was born, I scrupulously recorded her pregnancy and birth story, then her newborn story, and soon got the idea to write a newsletter for our extended family called “The Nora News.� The Nora News captured all of my ticklish delight in becoming a new mother, her latest incredible developments (like crawling backwards), or passions (like little sticks). In these sneaky ways, my tiny roly-poly daughter lured me into light-hearted mothering essays camouflaged as harmless family newsletters. I found myself saving up tidbits for the next edition of the Nora News, wondering how soon I could pop out a new edition without seeming too eager, and narrowing the margins to fit it all in a single front-and-back page.

When my second baby was a newborn, I put him in the sling and tapped away at the little laptop. I added “The Miles Gazette� to my newsletter efforts and no longer cared how many pages I sent or how often.

As the weeks went on, more and more things needed to be written about than could easily be discussed with extended family. My tumultuous tandem nursing experiences prodded me to write my first personal essay. This essay evolved from a blissed-out earth mother la-la piece, to feverishly questioning why tandem nursing wasn’t working, to a more complex exploration of breastfeeding, boundaries, and my relationship with my 2 1/2 year old daughter. That essay became my medium for transforming into a mother of two. While I wrote, my new son nursed and napped against me in the sling and my daughter role-play with me that we were girls meeting at a park. As I began to feel a sense of resolution with our tandem nursing upheaval, I stopped overhauling and began to polish my essay.

I lay awake at night dreaming of being published. I was also doing some craft projects at the time, too, elaborately painted chairs or mobiles fashioned with felt and sequins, and was wondering if I could ever make money from them. After nearly three years of pouring myself into mothering, I craved a taste of connecting with the larger world, earning money, satisfaction, or ideally both. The only problem was that creating one mobile was fabulous fun, reproducing it was tedious hell. Late one night, when we should have been asleep like our children, my partner Ben and I talked and talked about how I might be able to channel my creativity. He remarked that the most likely way he foresaw for me to make a living out of my art would be as a writer, I did have some raw talent, and what better way to allow someone else to do the reproducing? A book, he said. I laughed. Not out of the question someday, maybe. Magazines articles, I thought, for now, if I’m lucky.

After my partner and a good friend critiqued my tandem essay, I got up the gumption to submit it to Mothering Magazine. Two weeks later, I got their polite rejection. I was dejected. Did they really have a backlog of breastfeeding essays, or did the essay lack something, that SOMETHING that published writers DO that I DON’T? I began writing other essays, about story-telling, about role-playing, about my daughter’s bathroom-avoidance-rituals, submitted to even less likely publications, and suffered a pile of rejections.

Every now and then, I would pick up my tandem essay. I scrutinized it for what it might be lacking. After a few months, I decided that I needed to slow way down, take an independent study from the local university, take the time to acquire the skills of a publishable writer. Once resolved, a fit of restlessness seized me and I got off the couch and hastily emailed my tandem-nursing essay off to La Leche League’s magazine New Beginnings. Feeling reckless and a little giddy, I sat back down. Then I got back up—had they responded yet? No? Ah-ha, they’re ignoring it, they hate it. Why did I submit it?

A week later I received a short email from a “Katherine at LLLI,� inquiring about my writing experience, and in particular, had I ever written or considered writing a book? It was 6 PM on a Friday. I responded quickly and prayed that she hadn’t left yet for the weekend. Four excruciating days later, I received a call from Katherine. It seemed La Leche League International’s Publication Department was overdue to produce a tandem-nursing book. The more we talked, the more we felt that we had a match. Before I knew it, I was writing a proposal, signing a contract, and beginning work.

For a solid year, I was in a sustained panic. I had such high expectations of myself, of what the book could be, and so little time to inch it forward. I tried working after the children went to sleep but this only yielded disaster; the next day I would be depressed, cranky, and, on top of all that, too foggy-headed to write when my baby napped! For over a year, my best, often my only, writing time was during my baby’s nap. God save anyone who disturbed these priceless naps. Before and after the naps I stole one minute here, two minutes there. I could shoot an email to a researcher in London while my partner made breakfast and held the baby. I could read the abstract of a medical paper while watching my children in the baby pool.

As a friend I was insufferable, reluctant to spend any child-free time (that most precious of all resources!) for one-on-ones with friends, and once the subject of my book came up I couldn’t shut up. Christmas Eve I forced myself to go caroling with our good friends, but my heart was back home in the laptop. On my birthday, though, with the luxury of a full day to do with as I pleased, I knew just what I needed: as much writing time as my toddler son would allow. I wrote for hours and hours. For the first time I felt like I could walk away from the book, temporarily sated. What a gift!

During that first year, I felt like I had this universe of stories, ideas, and questions swirling around above my head like a huge amorphous appendage up there. When my body and mind were required by my children, which was most of the time, I felt that universe hovering in wait. I was getting it down as fast as I could, and pushing for answers as fast as I could, but it felt impossibly slow.

My baby always woke up halfway through his nap to get nursed back down. The monitor would crackle with his first cry, I would leap over the baby-gate, run around the doll tea party, skirt the big dump truck and land in the bedroom. I would lie down panting and hold Miles’ warm body close to mine, listening to his sleepy suckling and watching my interrupted thoughts buzzing around my head like bees. Periodically my partner would abscond with the laptop for days or weeks at a time, with the flimsy excuse that his research money had paid for it and he needed it to do his work. Once we lugged his huge office computer home and hooked it up. Once I borrowed a friend’s. I begged, borrowed, and considered stealing to keep my fingers connected to a keyboard.

As I grappled with the unfamiliar task of writing a book, I was often confused about how to proceed, but I could usually identify the next thing to try. Like magic, each baby step thrust me ever forward with tremendous momentum. I was getting somewhere, I was getting there! I felt like I was in the passenger seat, the universe was driving, and all I had to do was stay in the car—holding on for dear life! I worked on our old dining room table with the laptop perched on the edge, nearly engulfed by the sea of my daughter’s pictures of big girls with missing teeth, four-year-old girls with toothy grins, babies without any teeth.

Nap by nap the chapters took shape. After a year, the momentum began to ebb. I had the material all basically down. A big unruly creature, way longer than it could or would be, but it was in the computer now, not hovering weightily over my head. I tried to revise it a bit more, a bit more, UGH. After a year of researching and writing, my brain was allergic to the manuscript. My friends, well-trained by now to ask all about The Book were now told NOT to ask. Anything but The Book! I began catching up on my email. Finally I opened up an email to Katherine, attached the unruly chapters, and hit “send.� I took a shower. I cleaned the house. I read to my children. I made Christmas cards with my daughter. I sent the first Nora News and Miles Gazette in a long time. For two months, I didn’t even peek at it.

The revision process was a piece of cake compared to writing. It would sweep through and then be gone, always coming back, like waves, but always receding again. For one solid and crucial month, my partner set out a 3 X 5 card with “THE EDITOR IS IN� in big block letters, and worked every evening on the book, critiquing and brainstorming with me. Now that I had taken a long break from it, I was ready to hack away at redundancies whip it around into better organization. After I formally submitted it to my editor, more waves of revision still kept coming and going. Indeed, even after it went to the printer, waves of now-panicked revisions came and went!

Twenty months after that first email from Katherine, a book emerged from the printer: Adventures in Tandem Nursing: Breastfeeding during Pregnancy and Beyond by Hilary Flower, with a bright painting of a soaring mama on the cover. LLLI airfreighted it to their international conference in San Franscisco, the long-awaited debut. The finish line. My family flew out to meet it. I got to hold that shiny book in my hands, dress up more than I had since my pre-mothering years, meet some of the wonderful mothers who contributed their stories to the book, sign books like a real author, and I even got to present a session with Peggy O’Mara from Mothering Magazine. Peggy wrote the forward for my book. Someday I will have to tell her how Mothering’s rejection of my tandem essay made “our� book possible (earlier that spring my essay finally found a home in another of my favorite magazines, HipMama). The conference bookstore there sold out of the 400 copies of Adventures in Tandem Nursing.

Now I am home and that book sitting on the tabletop in my study, and I am planning another book. Or two. Holding my book, it is easy for me to say yes I am a writer. Like my partner’s oceanography, my writing makes me happy. It uses my skills and talents and even lets me indulge my hermit nature while contributing to the wide world. It’s been hard to claim not just because of the lack of money but because I have never settled on anything for long. An English major (writing papers). Then an M.A. in geology (writing a monster thesis). Then a manager at a domestic violence/ sexual assault advocacy center (writing handbooks and pamphlets). Now writer-mama. Next career—trapeze artist (writing circus promotions)? Or have I been a writer waiting to emerge all along? But whether I’ll be doing this forever, whether I’ll ever make money on it, it’s my work. I have begun to tell people I am a writer and my partner describes his pleasure at telling his colleagues: “Hilary takes care of the kids and she is a writer.� We are a dual career couple. My children see a picture of themselves with me on the back of a book. Sometimes my daughter makes books with strange plots: “Teeth. Then the world was all teeth. It had changed again,� and I tell her she’s a writer just like mama, making books.

For me, being a writer means wearing shoes around my house so that the cheerios and crumbs don’t stick to my feet. Being a writer means a constant do-si-do between my own creative preoccupations and my daughter’s. It means I bring my daughter to work every day, and I dip a boob down to nurse my toddler while I type. It means I work part-time, every day, sometimes every minute, a moment of writing, a moment of admiring my daughter’s latest drawing of a girl with a loose tooth. It means that sometimes I must work on call, and when my muse grips me I can barely leave the computer, to pee, to make lunch or to wipe my child’s butt, until I reach the last sentence. If that happens on a weekend my partner can be on book-, butt-, lunch-, and park-duty and all is well. If that happens during the week or while he’s on a trip, my children eat wheat thins and run around the house in their nighties all day. My friend, who is a potter, tells me that artists are selfish by nature. When I watch my daughter create, I know differently. When my daughter is into a drawing, she won’t pee or eat or do anything for anyone either, and she dances around narrating her picture in an ecstatic trance dance—for hours. I love the artist in her and in me, even if it pulls me at times from being the best mother.

Some day I will have a real desk. Some day I will have a chair that doesn’t try to spit me out. Last week I am proud to say we forked over our credit card number and ordered me a computer of my own. But, unlike Virginia Woolf, I don’t need a room of my own. My children, whose demands make writing so difficult also make writing so necessary. In my child-free days, my own growth edges were just that -- the edges of my life, and I went about my business at a secure distance. Now I live right there at the edge, the edge of my understanding, of my patience, of my sense of humor. Edges are dangerous, exciting, and what a view! And if I write here, at the edge of my table, the edge of my concentration, I know I’m thrilled to be here.