Nobody tells you that some of your best writing happens in twenty-minute windows between school runs, snack requests, and someone needing you right now. But they do. And learning to find those windows changed everything.

It is 8:47 in the morning. The school run is done. My four-year-old has been dropped at his program. My daughter’s ADHD meds have kicked in enough to get her out the door and onto the bus looking reasonably like a person who owns a backpack with her actual books in it. The coffee I made forty minutes ago is still on the counter, cold, because I haven’t had a free hand since I made it.

And right now, right this second, I have approximately twenty minutes before the next thing on the list demands to exist.

This is The Pocket.

And I have learned, through trial and a considerable amount of error, to treat it like gold.

Before I became a published author, before I understood that the book I wanted to write was actually inside me waiting to come out, I would have spent those twenty minutes scrolling my phone. Loading the dishwasher. Starting a task I knew I couldn’t finish. Finding a hundred small ways to not quite rest and not quite work. The Pocket existed then too. I just didn’t know what to do with it.

Now I do.

But I want to be honest with you today, because that’s what this space is for. This blog is not a productivity hack post. This is not a list of tips from someone who has it figured out. This is a real, honest look at what it actually means to be a writer and a mother at the same time, with two specific, extraordinary, complicated, wonderful kids who need different things from me at different times, and still somehow building a book. Still finding the words. Still showing up for the story even when the story has to wait its turn.

• First, Let’s Talk About the Mental Load

Because we have to. We have to talk about it before we can talk about anything else, because if we skip it and go straight to the productivity strategies, we are pretending that the mental load doesn’t exist. And I refuse to do that. Not here. Not in this space.

The mental load is the invisible, uncountable, never-finished list that runs in the background of a mother’s brain at all times. It is not the tasks themselves. It is the management of the tasks. The remembering, the anticipating, the coordinating, the noticing what’s running low before it runs out, the tracking of who needs what, when, from whom, and whether anyone has reminded anyone about the thing that needs to be done by Friday.

Now add to that the specific, beautiful, demanding reality of my two kids.

My daughter is eleven. She is sharp as a blade and twice as quick. She can wire a circuit board with the focused intensity of an engineer twice her age, and she will absolutely forget that she was supposed to put her shoes on forty minutes ago. The ADHD is not a limitation. It is, in so many ways, the same thing that makes her extraordinary. But it means our mornings are not straightforward. They require a kind of gentle, steady steering that takes a specific kind of energy. Reminders without frustration. Redirections without escalation. Keeping the runway clear without becoming the villain in a story about why she can’t just do the thing.

My son is four. He is the sweetest person I have ever met. He is tender and smart and has a laugh that comes from somewhere impossibly deep for a small person. He is also autistic, which means that the world processes differently for him than it does for his peers. Transitions can be hard. New sounds can be a lot. Some days are smooth and some days require me to be a particular kind of present, patient, and tuned in to what he needs before he can fully articulate it. He is learning. He is growing. He is, honestly, something remarkable. And he needs me in specific ways that I have learned to read and respond to, and that reading and responding takes cognitive and emotional bandwidth that doesn’t just grow on trees.

That is my life. And I am not complaining about it for even a moment, because these two people are my pride and my joy and they are worth every single ounce of it. But I am naming it. I am naming it clearly and without apology, because any conversation about a mother finding time to write that doesn’t first acknowledge the weight of what she is already carrying is a dishonest conversation. And dishonest conversations help no one.

• What I Mean by The Pocket

The Pocket is not a long stretch of uninterrupted creative time. I want to be very clear about that, because uninterrupted creative time is the writing fantasy, the thing we imagine when we imagine ourselves as authors: a quiet room, a full coffee, hours ahead with nothing else demanding attention.

That is not my reality. It might not be yours either. And waiting for that version of the writing life to appear before we start writing means the book never gets written. I know this, because I watched myself not write for a long time while I waited for conditions to be right.

The Pocket is smaller than that. The Pocket is the twenty minutes between the school run and the first phone call of the day. It is the forty-five minutes after my son goes down for his afternoon rest before he wakes up and needs someone. It is the thirty minutes after dinner when my daughter is absorbed in whatever she is currently building or playing word logic games at her desk and the house has that particular quiet that feels, briefly, like permission.

Twenty minutes. Forty-five minutes. Thirty minutes.

That sounds like nothing. I promise you it is not nothing. The Ice Queen Ascension was built substantially inside those windows. A paragraph here, a scene there, a piece of dialogue that arrived while I was folding laundry and that I typed into my phone before it disappeared. The book that is now real and published and in the hands of readers happened, in significant part, because I learned to use The Pocket instead of waiting for the cathedral.

• The Problem With The Pocket (And Why It’s Not What You Think)

Here’s the thing nobody talks about: the problem with finding The Pocket is not the finding. It is the switching.

The mental load does not automatically pause when you sit down to write. You do not open your document and immediately enter a productive creative flow. What actually happens, at least in my experience, is that you sit down, open the document, read the last sentence you wrote, and then remember that you haven’t responded to the email from your daughter’s school. Or that you need to pick up a specific food your son will actually eat before you run out of it. Or that you have a therapy appointment Thursday you haven’t confirmed. The mental load follows you to the desk. It sits right next to you and politely but relentlessly insists that you attend to it.

I had to learn, deliberately and with practice, how to set the list down long enough to write. Not permanently. Not pretending it doesn’t exist. Just… parked. Temporarily relocated to a note on my phone so my brain could stop holding it. Five minutes of writing down everything that is shouting for attention, so that it has somewhere to live that is not inside my working memory, and then opening the document.

That transition, that deliberate act of parking the mental load before I write, is the skill. It is not a writing skill. It is a motherhood-plus-writing skill. And it took me longer to develop than I’d like to admit.

But I did develop it. And you can too.

• What I’ve Actually Learned (The Honest Version)

I want to share what has actually worked for me, in the specific, non-glamorous, real-life context of my actual days. Not in theory. In practice.

Keep the document open.

Not metaphorically. Literally. One of the smallest and most impactful things I changed was keeping my writing document open in a tab at all times during writing days. Not minimized. Open. Because the friction of finding the file, opening the program, scrolling to where I left off, can collectively eat four of your twenty minutes. When the document is already there, the moment The Pocket opens, you can be in it almost immediately.

Write one true sentence.

This came from something I internalized slowly from years of journaling, and it is the most reliable thing I know about starting. When The Pocket arrives and the mental load is loud and you have fifteen minutes and you sit down and nothing comes because the transition is too abrupt, the answer is not to think bigger. The answer is to think smaller.

Write one true sentence. One. About the character. About what she wants in this scene. About what the room smells like or what she is afraid of or what she would never say out loud. One true sentence always leads to another. The cognitive engine starts with one sentence. Every time. I have never written one true sentence and then stopped because nothing else came. It doesn’t work that way.

Stop mid-scene on purpose.

This is a strategy I borrowed from somewhere and have used until it became automatic: when I have to stop because a child is calling or the timer is up or the world is knocking again, I stop in the middle of something. Not at the end of a scene. Not at a natural break. In the middle of a sentence if I have to, or at a moment in the scene where I know exactly what comes next.

Why? Because when The Pocket reopens, I don’t have to figure out where I am or what comes next. I already know. The scene is already in motion. I just have to walk back into the room it’s happening in. The re-entry is almost effortless. Stopping at a natural break, on the other hand, means that next time I open the document I have to start something. Starting is the hard part. Continuing is significantly easier.

Let your kids witness the work.

This one matters to me in ways that go beyond productivity.

My daughter has seen me at the keyboard. She has watched me take notes on my phone mid-errand because a line of dialogue arrived without asking permission. She has watched me close the laptop when she needs me, without resentment, and come back to it later. She has a mother who is also building something, who has a creative life of her own, who demonstrates through ordinary daily action that a woman’s mind and work deserve space in the world.

My son, at four, does not understand the concept of a novel. But he understands that when Mama is typing, sometimes he can sit next to her with his own thing and we are just together in the same space. Him and his favorite blue beanbag chair, very rarely he reaches over and presses a key on the keyboard with tremendous satisfaction, and I don’t actually mind as much as you might expect, because the way he looks up at me afterward is the face of a kid who feels connected. Who feels included. Who knows that whatever I am doing, he is welcome nearby.

Children do not need to be kept away from the creative work. They need to watch us do it. They need to learn that the people who love them have rich interior lives and that is not a threat to being loved. That is something to be celebrated.

Release the guilt.

I saved this one for last because it is the hardest one and I am not going to pretend I have it fully figured out.

There is a specific flavor of guilt that comes with being a present, engaged, loving mother who also has a creative ambition that requires time and mental energy. The guilt says: if you were really a good mother, you wouldn’t need this. The guilt says: they are only young once and you are over there writing. The guilt says: the house, the list, the ten thousand things you haven’t done yet.

I want to say something plainly to that guilt: it is lying to you.

My children do not need me to have no life outside of them. They need me to be present when I am with them, to show up with attention and love and patience, and to be, in the fullness of who I am, a person they can be proud of. Modeling creative ambition. Modeling perseverance. Modeling what it looks like to choose something hard and keep choosing it even when it doesn’t happen on the schedule you wanted.

The book I’m creating isn’t meant to compete with my children. In many ways, it’s actually for them a way to show that their mother existed, worked, and grew, even during life’s in-between moments. It’s important to remember that your identity comes first; motherhood and being a wife are parts of you, but they don’t replace who you are at your core. Marriage and parenthood shouldn’t mean losing yourself.

• To the Writer-Mothers Who Are Reading This

I see you.

I see you with the browser tab open and the cursor blinking and the four-year-old calling from the next room and the list of things that were supposed to be done yesterday. I see you reading a blog post about writing time while technically using the only writing time you had today. I see the particular specific exhaustion of being the keeper of everyone else’s logistics while also trying to keep a flame alive inside yourself that nobody else can tend but you.

You are not failing because your word counts are uneven. You are not failing because you went three days without opening the document because the week was that kind of week. You are not failing because the book is taking longer than you thought, because the twenty-minute windows are sometimes swallowed whole by something that genuinely needed attending to, because this is not how the writing advice books said it would go.

The book is still there. The story is still there. Violet Falcone waited for me through every school run and every hard night and every day when the mental load won and the document stayed closed. She waited, because the story needed me specifically to tell it, and I was not replaceable.

Your story needs you specifically. It will wait.

Find The Pocket when you can. Write the one true sentence. Stop mid-scene so you know how to re-enter. Keep the document open. Let your kids see the work.

And on the days when none of that is possible, when the day is entirely your children and your family and the hundred small urgent things that make up a real life?

That is also the work. The living is the source material. The love you are pouring into those two specific small people is going somewhere. It is going into your understanding of what it means to fight for something that matters. It is going into every character who has ever chosen, against the odds, to protect what they love.

It is not wasted. Not one minute of it.

You are not just a mother surviving the chaos. You are a writer inside it, watching it, taking notes in the margins of the hardest days.

The Pocket will come back. It always does.