Writer Mother Monster: Katie Gutierrez, “I was surprised at the depth of my anxiety.”

“I was surprised at the depth of my anxiety.”
Katie Gutierrez is the author of More Than You’ll Ever Know, forthcoming from William Morrow in 2022. She lives in San Antonio, TX, with her husband and two children, ages 2.5 years and 3.5 months and describes writer-motherhood in three words as “never enough time.” In this episode, Katie shares that she signed her book contract while breastfeeding. She talks about exploring desire, challenging the messages about motherhood she’d internalized, and rethinking what she considers “writing.”

Writer Mother Monster is an interview series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice.

Transcript

Writer Mother Monster

Thursday, December 17 @ 6 PM (EST)
 Katie Gutierrez

Katie Gutierrez lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband and two children, who are 2 1/2 years old and 3 1/2 months old. She has an MFA from Texas State University, and her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Longreads, Catapult, and more. Her debut novel, More Than You’ll Ever Know, will be published by William Morrow in 2022. And she describes writer motherhood in three words as “never enough time.”

Lara Ehrlich   

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is writer Katie Gutierrez. Before I introduce Katie, I want to thank you all for tuning in and let you know that you can now listen to Writer Mother Monster as a podcast on all major audio platforms, or read the interview transcripts at your leisure, all on writermothermonster.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider becoming a Writer Mother Monster patron or patroness on Patreon. Your support helps make this series possible. 

Please also chat with us during the interview. Your comments and questions will appear in our broadcast studio, and we’ll weave them into our conversation. I’m excited to introduce Katie. 

Katie Gutierrez lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband and two children, who are 2 1/2 years old and 3 1/2 months old. She has an MFA from Texas State University, and her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Longreads, Catapult, and more. Her debut novel, More Than You’ll Ever Know, will be published by William Morrow in 2022. And she describes writer motherhood in three words as “never enough time.” Welcome, Katie. 

Katie Gutierrez  

Hi, hello. 

Lara Ehrlich  

Thanks so much for being here. Now, to get started, we were talking before the interview about the process by which William Morrow picked up your novel. Can you tell our audience here about that process? Walk us through, from going out on submission to signing that contract.

Katie Gutierrez   

Sure. And if you don’t mind, I’ll go a little bit farther back, just to give some context. So, I had initially gone on submission in 2017, and this was the book that had gotten five offers of agent representation within two weeks of querying. So, I was really excited and thought that a deal was almost a foregone conclusion based on what I’d been hearing from agents. We went out to about 40 editors at the time, and we got a lot of great feedback and some of the nicest rejections I’ve ever gotten. But nonetheless, still all passes. The end of that process was really crushing. I had a lot of fear that my agent was going to drop me. She told me something that I think I’ll always remember, which was that she would stick with me for a hundred books, if that’s what it took, because she believed in me that much. 

So fortunately, I kind of had another book idea at the time that I started working on during the submission process, which I recommend. And I started working on that right around the time that I became pregnant—my first pregnancy. I worked on that all throughout the pregnancy, or up until probably seven months, and then the pregnancy was painful and difficult, so I didn’t write from seven to nine months and didn’t write a word for the first probably four or five months after the baby was born. After that, I kind of got back to it. 

It’s taken from 2017 to this past September to finish that book. It took about a year to do the first draft, and then 18 months or a bit over to edit it with my agent who put so much work into it. She read that thing probably 20 times. So, we went on submission, and we had kind of a definitive deadline for when the revisions had to be done, because I was, at that point, due with our second child. We were wrapping up, and I think I was already like timing contractions. They were very mild, really sort of Braxton Hicks, but I was at the time where it could happen at any moment. I delivered the baby on Sept. 4. He was due Sept. 11, and on Sept. 11 we actually went on submission with a novel. 

At that point, I was ready, she was ready, but we were still apprehensive because it was during the pandemic, so we didn’t really know what that meant in terms of how quickly people were going to be able to give it reads, etc. But at that point, we also thought, well, November was coming up, the election, the holidays … we sort of felt like, if we didn’t go, then it would be a matter of waiting until the new year. And at that point, I felt like we’d been waiting for so long, I was ready to just get it out there. 

And on Monday, my agent called me at 9 or 10 in the morning, and she said that she had received emails from two or three editors over that weekend, saying that they had either finished it and loved it or they were still reading it and loving it. I was in bed with the baby and my husband and I, you know, started to cry. And she said she had cried, too, when she saw the first email. She had just put so much of herself into the process as well, I think. So, I said, “What’s next?” And she said, “Well, these editors want to talk to you. So, we’ll start trying to set up phone calls this week.” 

That week was kind of like this fantasy week that I think I’d daydreamed about my entire life and couldn’t believe it as it was happening. I think I spoke with five or seven editors that week, including an editor from the UK, who had gotten the book from a scout before we’d even gone on submission over there. And he made a preemptive offer, with what he’d read in six or seven hours. We hopped on the phone at about 11 p.m. his time and then closed the deal just short of midnight his time. It was like this complete whirlwind that day, and on Friday, Jessica Williams from William Morrow made the preemptive offer. 

I was at the park actually with both kids, the little one in the carrier and my 2 1/2-year old was climbing structures and asking me to come down the slide—which I couldn’t because I had a baby on me. But that’s when my agent called and said that we’d gotten this offer, and so I basically ran home to tell my husband—that’s being generous, a week after childbirth—but that’s basically how the whole thing happened. It was this whirlwind that seemed pretty unreal when I think about it and talk about it.

Lara Ehrlich  

So, talk a little bit about what we were saying before the interview—this moment of sending a contract while breastfeeding your child.

Katie Gutierrez  

Yeah, during those first phone calls, I was breastfeeding this new boy, which fortunately, that first week, it’s like they’re barely awake. So, I mean, that kid was passed out the whole time. Now it’s a bit different. 

This week, I got the US contract and in the UK contract in, and any time I tried to sit down at my computer to actually look at them, it was like, my toddler came in and she was a baby shark. And then, you know, my newborn, my infant, was hungry. So, I ended up just kind of sitting in the dark breastfeeding, looking through the UK contract on my phone and signing it through DocuSign—you know, while breastfeeding my baby in the dark. And like I mentioned to you, you have this fantasy, as a writer, of what these moments will look like, and I never once envisioned it looking like that. But it also felt completely right for where I am in my life right now.

Lara Ehrlich  

Oh, yeah. That’s amazing. And congratulations again. What is the book about?

Katie Gutierrez  

It’s about a woman who is secretly married to two men at the same time in the 1980s. She lives in my hometown of Laredo, Texas, which is right on the border of Mexico. And it’s also about the true crime writer who becomes obsessed with her story today. It explores motherhood, as well as female desire, and also the moral ambiguities of true crime, including what is owed to the subject of any story and who gets to tell which stories. It’s trying to do a lot. And I hope it’s successful at some of it. But yeah, that’s what’s on my plate right now, working on revisions.

Lara Ehrlich  

Well, that sounds wonderful. I’m a true crime fan and, of course, a fan of any book that tackles motherhood and complexities. It sounds great. Talk a little bit more about female desire. You mentioned that as a theme of the book. What’s the interest there in tackling and exploring female desire?

Katie Gutierrez  

With this particular story, I think about how we, as a country, tend to romanticize con men. You know, we make movies about them—Catch Me If You Can cast Leonardo DiCaprio. And it’s this very romantic, idealized vision of a man who’s a rogue and doesn’t go by anyone else’s rules and is smarter than everybody else. And he acts in his own best interest in a fun way, or at least, that’s how it’s shown in the media. 

I think about it in terms of men who are living double lives, who are married to two women at the same time and have two families. I’ve always been really fascinated by that kind of story. I realized, at one point, that you never hear that about women. So, I think as a writer, you come across these ideas that kind of percolate in the back of your head for months or years, and this had been in my head for a long time. 

I wondered what it would take for a woman to live that kind of double life. And what would make it different than when a man does it? Is anything different? And if so, what? I think in the book, the idea is that, yes, something is different. She’s not doing it for any kind of financial gain, which, I’ve done a lot of research into men living double lives, and that’s a really common through-line. And so, it’s really about the emotion. 

She’s a mother, at the time, of 12-year-old boys, she’s a successful businesswoman—a banker—and she meets another manager in her travels, but she still loves her husband. So, for her, what she is trying to explore, I think, is who she is and both of these relationships that her desire is rooted not so much in the sexual aspect of it, even though that’s there, but more about a curiosity about herself and who she might be in these different relationships and in these different lives. I think that is a component of female desire—the desire to be known, to be seen, and to discover who we are in these different environments and relationships. So, it’s just something that interests me.

Lara Ehrlich  

I agree with you. And I’ve heard that from other guests, too, that there is a desire to explore female desire that way, because as you said, men are often very free to explore male desire, and women’s desire is often depicted by men in a very different way than women experience it. So, talk a little bit about creating a female character who is doing something that some may find immoral or unlikable.

Katie Gutierrez  

Yeah, that’s one of the most interesting things about the process of editing this book. It’s told from her point of view, as well as the point of view of this aspiring true crime writer, and on the surface, the woman who has this double marriage is the one who is doing this very taboo, very unlikable thing. But throughout every single draft that I’ve written and revised—her sections are almost untouched from the first draft, and it’s had a few readers, at this point—the consensus, or lack of consensus, has been on the secondary protagonist, feeling as though she is kind of unlikable and she is acting in ways that different readers haven’t quite understood, whereas the woman who lives the double life, everyone who’s read the book so far has been like, “Yeah, I get that. But it’s the other one that I’m kind of confused about. I don’t know how I should be feeling about her.” 

I think part of the experiment for me was to look at a person who is acting in this ostensibly amoral way and see if I can portray her in a way that very quickly makes her actions understandable. I think that’s part of the fun of writing for me. If we can do that with a character—if we can take this character who’s acting in these extreme ways or these unlikable ways and still make them understandable in some way to the reader—I think that is when you’re succeeding as a writer. That’s kind of part of the project that I wanted to undertake with this.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, that’s great. This is such a basic question, but did you always want to be a writer and a mother, or did one sneak up on you?

Katie Gutierrez  

Yeah, great question. I always wanted to be a writer, since I was a kid. There was a project in like, third grade to make a little illustrated book in class, and I think that was the point from which there is no return for me. But the mother aspect, I always assumed that I would have kids one day, but it wasn’t that same kind of burning desire that there was to be a writer and for it to be my career. 

In my 20s, motherhood was very much not on my radar. I just wasn’t in a rush at all. And then I was diagnosed with PCOS, and so it turned out that I was infertile. So that kind of put this whole other spin on things. I’ve always been someone that when I’m told I can’t do something, I really kind of tackle it. Like, a lot of times. And so suddenly, when I was told that, like, “Hey, you know, you’ve got a 1% chance of conceiving naturally,” it was like, oh, God, well, let me do everything I can to see if I can make this happen. 

And even at the time, it wasn’t so much that I just wanted a baby that badly, it was just that I wanted to have that option. I wanted to be able to make that happen for myself and make that happen for my husband and me. It took about a year, maybe more. We tried fertility treatments, and that ended up being a diet thing, to correct my hormonal imbalance, and it was actually the day that we were scheduled to go in for an IUI that I found out I was pregnant. And even at the time, I was overjoyed. But it was also like, right along with that feeling of joy, this feeling of fear and this feeling of, Oh, God, you know … what did I do? Like, what is this? What is this going to mean for my life? That all kind of came up, and it was not as simple of an emotion as getting that phone call from the nurse. Because I still didn’t really have an idea of how motherhood would fit into my life, and I didn’t really have an idea of what kind of mother I would be, to be honest.

Lara Ehrlich  

Did you have expectations for yourself of what kind of mother you wanted to be or what you thought the experience might be like?

Katie Gutierrez   

I think, obviously, I think about having a great relationship with my mom. I’m really fortunate in that regard. So I always thought of the things that I love about our relationship. Our first time was a girl, so I wanted us to have a relationship where she feels safe with me, where she feels she can talk to me about difficult subjects, where I’m able to encourage her curiosity and just kind of give her the space to be herself, which sounds really cheesy. But I want to be able to give her that room to grow into who she wants to be, including making mistakes, but I also want to be able to guide her—obviously, every mom wants to guide their kids in some way. 

I think the biggest thing in terms of what I hope for myself as a mother is really just that my kids always feel safe with me, safe telling me about any part of themselves at any part of their lives that they need help or support with. I think that if I can achieve that one thing, as a mother, I would be happy. And also being able to raise kids that are empathetic and good people. That’s top of the list.

Lara Ehrlich  

What surprised you about the experience, once you actually became a mother?

Katie Gutierrez    

So, you’d asked about the writing, and obviously, we’re here to talk about writing and motherhood, but I think my biggest fear around becoming a mother was that suddenly I would no longer be a writer, like I wouldn’t have the time or space. 

When we were on submission with the first novel at the time and it didn’t work out, I had this overwhelming sense of, Okay, I’ve got this. I’ve got one more shot. I’ve got to finish this book before I have the baby, and we’ve got to go on submission and try to make this happen, because I don’t know what it’s going to be like afterwards. And I think that I was really wrong about that. I think that I had internalized that being a mother is like anathema to being a creative individual, to pursuing any kind of art. 

So that has been a big surprise, in terms of how much being a mother has positively impacted what I do, even though it’s actually getting to work, getting to write, is more complicated. 

As far as motherhood itself, I think, off the bat, I was really surprised at the anxiety. I’m not naturally an anxious person. I’ve never struggled with depression. I’ve never experienced anxiety to any debilitating level. And when I first had my daughter, I don’t know if it was a combination of sleep deprivation, postpartum anxiety, or if it was just regular first-time mom anxiety—there’s no way to know—but I all I know is that I spent those first few months not sleeping, and even when I could sleep, I wasn’t sleeping, because all I could do was imagine every single worst-case scenario that could happen to this completely helpless baby. 

Being a writer, your imagination is pretty vivid. And I felt like I had to follow each fantasy through to its conclusion. And so I was surprised at the depth of that anxiety, the depth of my fear around losing my child and how that fear never will go away, how it just becomes sort of folded into your daily life as a mother. 

If you focus on all of those what-ifs, I think it’s very hard to function. So what has surprised me is the depth of that emotion and experiencing this range of emotion, the love and the fear and how they’re both intertwined, and how much that feeds into the work that I’m trying to do.

Lara Ehrlich  

No, there’s so much there. I also struggled with that sense of anxiety and following those stories from the “what if” all the way through to the conclusion of those horrible daydreams. I totally was right there with you. If I don’t follow it through the course, then it will happen. So, I have to fully imagine it, so that it won’t happen.

Katie Gutierrez  

Yeah, that’s kind of wild to hear you say that you experienced it in the same way.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yes. Totally. I think it’s a typical anxiety process where you’re sort of anticipating the the bad thing so that you stave it off, right? If you expected it, it won’t happen. It’s the unexpected things that get you. So how does that feed into your work? How does that depth of emotion, not just love for that small child—or small children in your case, that you’ve brought into the world—but also the fear surrounding their loss fit into your craft?

Katie Gutierrez   

I would like to think that it makes it richer, more complex. Like, when I started working on this book that just sold, I think I was more focused on that aspect of female desire—the marriage—because at that point, when I started outlining it, I wasn’t pregnant yet. So, my head was more in that relationship space, the marriage space. It became a lot more of a book about motherhood, as the pregnancy progressed, and I had the baby and then I’m pregnant again. Nothing literal has made it into the book, but just those emotions and also how contradictory it is at the same time, because you can have this this fear around losing your children and fear about your own mortality and them losing you and the grief of this idea that you might not get to see them grow up because you’re not here, something happened to you. 

But then also, for example, I just worked on a story for Texas Highways Magazine. My husband rides motorcycles, and I kind of fell in love with riding with him but hadn’t ridden for years, since I was pregnant for the first time. So, the whole idea for the story I pitched was “how do you manage the idea of risk in motherhood?” Because when you start to think about risk, and you start weighing what could happen to you, what could happen to them, it can become this very debilitating thing, where you end up being very overprotective of them and kind of isolating yourself in order to protect yourself and keep yourself here for them, when in fact, that might not be the best version of yourself. 

So I think part of these emotions is very contradictory, and that’s what I wanted to explore in the book. As much as this is my daughter, as much as my protagonist loves her children, she’s also not willing to not have this affair, and she ends up really potentially sacrificing her entire life with them and their life and their psychological and emotional lives by having this completely different marriage with another set of children. 

So again, going back to the idea that like none of these emotions are simple and we don’t stop being ourselves, we don’t stop feeling or having our own desires or the desire for adventure. We don’t stop feeling these things because we are mothers. I think it becomes a question of how do you balance these very deep emotions or live with the imbalance? I don’t know if that answers your question. I got a little distracted.

Lara Ehrlich  

I’m not sure if the audience got to see your daughter. I saw her down in the expanded view. She’s adorable. Yeah, I think that was part of my fear, too, of becoming a mother, that you would lose yourself. You’d be subsumed by motherhood and by someone else’s identity, and then you become, simply, Mom—and Mom is not a simple thing. But I was afraid that it would be a monolith, like I would become Mom, and that’s it. But that doesn’t happen. And I don’t think we hear enough from women who maintain their selfhood and their passions and desires and careers in vocations. That doesn’t go away, once you become a mother. But it’s hard to maintain.

Katie Gutierrez  

You really have to sort of insist on it, you know? You have to see the value and the worth in your own identity, and then insist on whatever ways you can maintain. Sometimes it’s 15 minutes a day, but it’s important. It’s all too easy to become subsumed by this role, because it is all consuming. But I think, at least speaking for myself, it would lead to a very unhappy whole person.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, and exactly what you said, speaking for yourself, so everyone, of course, is different. That’s why I’m talking to so many different women about their experiences. And for some women, you know, maybe it’s okay to be consumed by motherhood for a while or for longer, and that brings someone joy and satisfaction. That wasn’t ever something I wanted for myself. And it sounds like for you, too, that you had things you wanted to hold onto—your writing career and your selfhood—and you’ve managed to do that. So, can we talk about how you’re managing the logistics of writing with two small children?

Katie Gutierrez  

The timing of selling the novel was really pretty perfect. For the first couple of months, it was with my editors, and I was waiting for them to give me back their notes and see what the revisions were going to look like. I was in this kind of limbo, where I wasn’t working on anything new, I wasn’t revising, but I had, for the first time in 18 months or longer, nothing to do. And that was a perfect time to not have anything to do, the first two months of having a baby. I got the edit letter right before Thanksgiving, so ever since then, I’ve very much had something to do. It was an intense, really brilliant letter, that kind of relit this excitement to go back into the book and try to make everything that’s in there even richer. 

But then the struggle really started. Obviously, we don’t have any childcare right now, and we don’t live in the same city as my parents, so every day, it’s kind of different. 

The days when I’ve become the most frustrated, the angriest, and the worst version of myself—you know, the monster, to my kids and husband—are the days when I wake up with this really urgent need and expectation that I’m going to sit down for at least an hour, and revise one chapter or write 500 words or whatever.  When I set these really concrete goals for myself, and then the day kind of explodes and none of it happens, that’s when I find myself extremely resentful of my kids, my husband, the fact that he doesn’t have to have a baby at his boob every two hours. 

And my husband is a total equal partner in childcare and I’m extremely fortunate that he can work from home and participate as much as he does in child rearing, child caring, but that’s when this furious resentment happens. 

It’s the days when I kind of really let go of control and just kind of tell myself I’m going to touch the work at some point today. That’s my only goal. I’m going to touch it at some point, if it’s working on one sentence, so be it. If it’s 15 minutes, so good. If I get lucky and they both nap at the same time, I get two hours, I’m gonna do that, and those are the days when things go the smoothest for me, when I can appreciate being with the kids but also whatever time that I actually get to work. It’s the days when I don’t set any expectation for myself, except just that I’m going to touch it, I’m going to move it forward in some way. 

I was thinking about practical strategies for moms in this position, especially with newborns, and for me, what works best at this time is when I read books that seem to be in conversation with what I’m working on, that feels like I’m touching work, and that helps me. I’ve read more this year than I have in any other year in recent history. It’s a lot of middle-of-the-night Kindle reading, but I’m doing a lot of reading. And it’s also kind of giving myself permission to daydream and to use those daydreams as also touching the work. 

I think it was Alice Monro who said that part of her process for months sometimes before she even would sit down to work on a story is just sitting on her porch and daydreaming. And that really resonated with me, because I am not really a fan of sitting at my computer and looking at a blank screen. I am somebody who has always thought best if I’m out on a long walk, or if I’m moving around somehow. 

So, I’m taking this time to be really active about using my daydreams for the revision process. That way, again, I’m touching the work. It may not be anything that I’ve done on my computer that day, but it’s in my head, and when I get the chance to sit down, even if it is for 15 minutes, it’s like, straight to it, no procrastination, there’s no going online and looking at Twitter. So that kind of helps me, to give myself permission to use that daydream time. 

The middle of the night is a great time for those half-dream connections that your mind makes when you’re in the middle of a story. So those are the mental strategies that are working for me right now. Some days are better than others. Some are extremely frustrating, and other days, I feel okay about where I am and I know the work is going to get done. It’s just going to get done at a different pace.

Lara Ehrlich  

You know, the message that we all hear, as we dream about being writers, is that you have to have a schedule, you have to write every day. And then you see these successful writers, like Hemingway or Faulkner, who are like, “I write from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m., and then I have a long lunch and walk, and then I write again from 3 to midnight” or whatever, and it’s so damaging, to think that that is the way that you become a writer. 

And I hear that again and again, particularly from men, although not exclusively, that stringency and the idea that you must be sitting with your notebook, writing by hand for a certain amount of time a day, when that’s not real life, particularly for women, particularly for mothers, where daydreaming is writing and taking a walk and thinking through a plot point is writing and reading something tangential to your own work that is in conversation, that’s writing. I think that’s really valuable to hear, as another writer mom, that all of these things are writing, and that it’s not exclusively sitting in front of your computer for like, six hours a day, because that’s not possible.

Katie Gutierrez  

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, all the other men who do have those schedules, the ones who have kids, like I want to know, who’s watching the kids? You know? What did the children’s mother give up in order to be in that position of primary caretaker? Or do they have full-time help? Are the kids in childcare? All of these things. 

I think in the past, there’s been this conversation around writing as this very solitary, strict, strictly scheduled or regimented existence. There’s so much happening in the background in this patriarchal society and sexist culture that was not talked about. I think all of these conversations around what does it really take to make a book happen? Or what does it take, behind the scenes, for a father who is a writer to make that book happen? And what does it take, behind the scenes, for a mother who’s a writer to make that book happen? 

I think the pandemic is heightening all of these conversations, because, as we’ve seen, it’s women who are leaving the workforce at a much more alarming rate at this point than men—and it makes sense, because men are paid higher on the dollar for the same work. So when a couple is sitting down to determine who should give up their job to homeschool the kids during a pandemic, it ends up being the one who earns less. It’s the woman, typically. 

So I think all of these conversations we’re having now around what it takes to make these things happen are so valuable. When I had my first baby, I was kind of freaking out about the fact that I hadn’t written in months—there was just no time she was napping or sleeping—and I felt like, Oh my God, am I ever gonna write again? Like, how is this ever going to happen? 

It was incredibly valuable and encouraging to hear from other writer moms on Twitter who had published books, saying, “I wrote this book over five years during my kid’s nap times.” Okay, five years might be like, “Oh my God—it’s gonna take five years?” But just hearing that wow, this book was written entirely during your baby’s nap times? That was huge, as a new mom, to hear. I think it’s really important and hopefully valuable to people to hear that, how these things are getting done.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, and it’s definitely a counterculture. It’s a minority of voices that are countering this age-old perception of writing, as you said earlier, as being incongruous with motherhood, and that to be a true writer with a capital W, you can’t be a mother with a capital M. Because those are the narratives that we hear growing up. Right before I got pregnant, and I’ve talked about this before, a book came out of essays by women writers who decided not to become mothers and about that choice, and it’s a perfectly valid book to have published, but it just adds to that conversation in that sense that you can’t do both. 

And there are not enough voices out there saying, “Yes, you can. And here’s how you do it.” 

What were some of those messages that you heard growing up that you’re now realizing are not valid or not applicable to you, as a writer and/or a mother? We talked a little bit about the expectations you had for yourself and about the belief that we hear from above that you can’t be both a writer and a mother. What are some of the other beliefs that you held around writer motherhood that you’re challenging now, by doing it?

Katie Gutierrez  

I don’t think it was anything I explicitly heard as a kid. My mom always worked, growing up. She had a full-time job, and both parents were entrepreneurs. They worked together in a lot of different capacities, but it was always both of them full-time. So, I’ve never had this idea that the mom should stay at home and that’s how it’s done. I’ve always had the example of a mom who took us to and from school and was the PTA president and took us to all of our extracurricular activities, but she also had a full-time job. Now that I look back on it, I really don’t know how she did that. In no way am I writing for 40 hours a week and trying to make everything else work. I don’t know how she did it, but she was the example I had of working outside the home alongside being a very present mother. 

I think it was just more internalized. I think that fear of losing myself as a mom—or losing the desire to write, because writing has always been who I am—would I be angry? Would I be resentful? Would I ever be able to be happy if I wasn’t also writing? All of those questions were internalized, but growing up, it was very fortunate that both of my parents were extremely supportive of my writing. 

I left my full-time job a few years ago, so that I could focus on my writing, and my dad was really instrumental in giving me that push to do that. I think that I had enthusiastic, supportive voices growing up. So that’s also what I hope to do for my kids. I want to care what they want to do. If they are passionate about something, I want to be able to encourage them to pursue it. I don’t know if that exactly answers your question, but I think it was more about challenging my own internalized perceptions about what it would mean to be a mother and a writer, more so than to challenge anything that I heard explicitly as a kid, because if anything, I got the opposite message.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah. Isn’t that funny, though, that you had those positive messages from sort of external places from your parents and from the world in which you grew up, and yet somehow still internalized these fears and impressions? 

Katie Gutierrez  

Yeah. So true. 

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah. They’re just that strong, I think. So, what do you hope that your daughter will take from you as a writer, from seeing you writing, from reading your books someday?

Katie Gutierrez  

It’s interesting to think of her reading my books eventually. You know, she likes to come into my office, and just yesterday, this feels like one of those bad moments, but I hand her my phone so she can just be on my phone while I work for a little while. If she’s awake and the baby’s asleep, that’s what we do for small amounts of time. But yesterday, she came up and wanted to use my phone, and she said, “Mom, you want to do some work today?” And I was like, “Yeah, I mean, I actually would like to do some work today.” She said, “Okay, let’s go to your office. I’ll use Mommy’s phone. Mommy do some work.” 

So, we came into my office, and she kind of came up to my computer and was just, like, looking for really the first time, watching me type, watching the words on the screen. We always read books before bed, but in the last couple of weeks, she started to figure out that I could just make up stories and we didn’t necessarily need books. I’ve been making up stories for her before bed. Today was the first time where I said to her, “You know how mommy tells you stories before bed without books? You know, this is what Mommy does. Mommy is writing stories.” And I held up a book and said, “Mommy’s writing these books.” And I could see her trying to, like, put it together. It was a strangely emotional moment for me, having this small child who was starting to understand what I’m doing when I’m not being present with her. 

I felt very proud to say to her that I’m still doing this. Even if the book hadn’t sold, even if I didn’t have that sense of, writer with a capital W, even if I was still working on the book and we hadn’t gone on submission, I felt very proud to show her that I was still working on it, even if it means not being present with her in the same way. 

I hope that as she gets older and goes to school that I’m writing more, and when she sees the actual physical copies of the book, and if she is old enough to actually read them, I hope she feels proud, whether or not she likes the books, whether or not it makes her feel weird to read them. I think that’ll be strange in some way, because she’ll be getting access to some parts of me that she obviously doesn’t see as her mother. 

But I also hope that when those days come, it’ll bring us closer. Hopefully, she’ll be able to see me as more than just her mother and, I don’t want to say “do it all” … one of my best friends said, “Once you have kids, you can do it all, but you’re to going to do any of it very well.” And I think about that a lot. I think it’s so true. Maybe I’m doing it all, but I’m not doing any of it particularly great at any given time, you know? I’m just kind of doing it. I hope that she eventually sees that and sees that it’s possible, and I hope that she is able to internalize that, if she wants kids one day.

Lara Ehrlich  

I love that. I’ve heard something similar: You can have it all, just not at the same time. That’s really hard for for me to tell myself because I do want to do it all at the same time. 

Katie Gutierrez  

I just texted a friend the other day—it was one of the bad days when I had four separate breakdowns of crying—and I said, “I feel like I’m failing on every front.” I was snapping at my daughter and I was so resentful of this baby boy who just wouldn’t sleep. Every time I sat down, I had to get back up. I felt like everything I was trying to do, everything I was trying to be, was a complete failure. Some days are just going to be like that.

From the outside, it does look like these things are at least being managed, they’re moving along, but really, on a day to day basis, it can very much just feel like I’m failing at every everything that I’m trying to do. And then you have to just know that tomorrow’s another chance to try and fail a little bit less. 

Lara Ehrlich  

It’s so important to express that and to put words to it, because I think, at least in my experience, as women, we try to look as though we have everything under control, right? Like, we want people to think that we’re under control, that our houses are clean, that our kids are well adjusted, that we’re super women. And we’re not honest with each other about struggling and how hard it is because that shows weakness, or we perceive that that might be weak, and particularly in a male-dominated world, you don’t want to appear as though you’re not managing everything. 

So, the more people who say, “I might look like I have it together, like I’m managing, but I feel like I like everything’s falling apart all the time.” That’s the reality of it, right? I’ve never heard one writer mom who said, “I’ve got it all together.”

Katie Gutierrez  

I mean, if somebody does have it all together, then good for them, if that’s how somebody actually feels and is living, but yes, it’s certainly not my experience, and not the experience of any writer I know. We’re just constantly texting each other: Did you get to do anything today? Nope. How about you? Nope. Are you sleeping? Nope. How about you? Nope. It’s just muddling through and doing what you can. When it comes to the work, it’s just trying to trying to do something that feels like you’re touching it every day. And then when it comes to your kids, trying to have at least a couple of moments where you are trying to enjoy them and not just thinking about what they’re taking you away from. 

Lara Ehrlich  

We were talking before the interview about the fact that you’ve now gone through the newborn phase twice, and that you learn each time that things change so quickly. And For me, four years old is so different from four months old. I thought, Oh my gosh, my daughter can now play by herself a little bit and I can sit here and get a little bit of work done! I hear five is the magical age. It’s so important to talk to women with a range of children of different ages and experiences and support each other and have these conversations to help us realize that we’re not alone in the challenge that is motherhood and writing motherhood.

Katie Gutierrez  

That is definitely something I keep trying to remind myself of, when it comes to the baby, is trying not to wish this time away, because it does go quickly. I look at my daughter, and she’s so big now. She’s so independent, and there are times that she doesn’t want to be with me, she doesn’t want to play with me, she’s fine playing by herself, or playing with her dad, or when my parents are around, forget it, I’m dead to her. The time when they do need you 24 hours a day feels so long and endless when you’re in it, but when I look at my daughter, it’s proof that that doesn’t last forever, and it’s gone before you know it. And so that’s also something that I try to remind myself when I’m feeling like particularly frustrated—because so much of my days are frustrated—trying to remind myself to enjoy this while I have it, because it’s not long. 

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, but not to feel bad if you’re not enjoying it, or if you’re frustrated, or if you feel like you would rather be working than building the fifth tower out of blocks or whatever.

Katie Gutierrez  56:38  

Yeah, exactly. I think about how we are living in a very privileged way, and during a very unprivileged time, because we have two parents in the household, who are both equal participants in childcare. And it’s still really freaking hard, so I think about single moms, or single dads, or people who are in abusive relationships, or people who are at more of an economic disadvantage than we are. If things are so hard for me right now, for us right now, I think it’s so much harder for so many other people. And I think that it is good to acknowledge that.

You don’t have to be sitting at your computer to be writing, but it’s also okay to just not be writing. It’s okay to do absolutely nothing that touches on your work, because you’re also a person apart from being a mother, and apart from being a writer, and you need to be able to occasionally take care of that person, as well. Let’s become the monster, right? 

Lara Ehrlich  

That’s, I think, a very important point. And I’m glad we’re ending on that point, because it is so vital to be kind to ourselves. And I know that sounds like such a therapy thing to say, but it’s true. This is an unprecedented time that reveals cracks that are so deeply embedded within our society and our culture, as you said earlier, that it’s important to remind ourselves and others who are listening that we don’t have to be writing the great American novel right now or to write anything at all.

Katie Gutierrez  

Right now, I think it’s just about surviving. We just have to get out of this and in whatever ways that we can, while still kind of keeping ourselves somewhat sane.

Lara Ehrlich
 Part of that is talking to people—family and friends and doing things like this. So, thank you so much for taking an hour out of your crazy existence to talk with me. It’s incredibly refreshing. I hope you’ll come back when your book comes out, and we can do another talk and your kids will be older. Do you know when it will be up for pre order? 

Katie Gutierrez  

I don’t know about pre order. It’ll be published I believe in summer 2022.