Happy, happy Mother’s Day, everyone! This is my first Mother’s Day as a mama, and it also happens to be my little Ami B C’s eight month birthday—happy birthday, baby bean! This week, I bring you the close of my discussion of the AWP panel, “Barefoot, Pregnant, and at the Writer’s Desk: Managing Motherhood and the Writing Life.”

Hope Edelman is a nonfiction writer with five books to her name. Like Kate Hopper, Edelman said that before motherhood, her writing days were unstructured. Not so, now that she’s a mother. To work her writing time into her hectic mommy-life, Edelman keeps an office outside of the house and schedules writing time around the family schedule. In addition, Edelman has become a binge writer: she’ll often check into a motel something like 100 miles out of town—far enough to justify not popping home for dinner, but close enough that if a true emergency arises she can easily get back home—and spends the entire weekend just writing.

Edelman said that she sees her life as a sort of pendulum, which swings back and forth between her life as a mother and her life as a writer. She doesn’t seem to have much trouble maintaining the right balance between the two, and she says her kids really don’t have a problem with her disappearing sometimes to write—though her husband, she pointed out, doesn’t always like it.

Edelman gave a hilarious list of things she can’t do because she’s a mother and a writer, but she followed it up with a list of things she can do only because she’s a mother and a writer: her writing is enriched with details and a range of emotions that she’s only privy to as a result of the experiences she’s had as a mother; she’s much better now at budgeting time (though part of that is a result of reduced expectations); she can help her kids with their English homework way better than most parents can; she can offer her kids the exciting, interesting experience of going on a book tour.

Edelman said that of course motherhood has cut into her writing time—of course she could have written more books by now had she chosen not to have children—but she doesn’t mind. She’s focusing on the children she does have, not the books she doesn’t. I LOVE this attitude—this is exactly how I feel. I know I’m less productive now that I have Amalie, but that’s okay with me. I’d much rather have Amalie than the extra stories I could be writing.

Jill McCorkle is a fiction writer who has published eight books to date, five of which appeared on the New York Times notable list. Immediately after becoming a mother, McCorkle noticed the effects of motherhood on her writing. She’d been struggling with a novel that was just not working. After having the baby, she was able to go back into the draft from a new angle, focusing her attention on the character of the mother in her story, and suddenly the whole novel came together.

Like the other authors, McCorkle said all of her established rules for writing went out the window after she’d had a baby. She had to really convince herself that writing is a legitimate way to spend her time, that it does count as work and it’s okay to set up boundaries to make sure she has time to do it. Still, she noted, “Some of my best work has been written in the carpool lane or outside the grocery store . . . No one ever seemed to mind if I said, ‘I’m going to the grocery store to get dinner.’” So she would drive to the store, spend five minutes quickly shopping, then spend another half hour sitting in the car writing in a notebook.

She would also just take little notes throughout the day—everybody can find a minute or two to jot down an interesting idea, an image that really strikes them, a sentence or two that will evolve into something greater down the road. She would store these notes away until she was able to scrape together a chunk of time to write. Writing, for McCorkle, is not like a faucet that she can turn on and off, but rather, “a slow, steady drip.”

Like Edelman, McCorkle felt that being a writer enhanced her as a mother, and her children have developed a true appreciation for literature. No doubt the same will be true of Amalie. At a reading this weekend, someone was marveling at how well Amalie does at these events, and I pointed out that she went to her first reading when she was only two or three weeks old. She attended her first conference at five months old. She’s growing up in a house with overflowing bookshelves. She’s growing up surrounded by writers—not just her parents, but the vast majority of her parents’ friends and colleagues, too. She’s getting a very different view of literature than most children do, and I just don’t see how this all could not affect her (I believe in a good way).