Becoming a parent is hard. Eight to 12 hours a day are spent breastfeeding or preparing formula milk and washing bottles. In addition, there is carrying, singing, soothing, putting to sleep, trying to sleep yourself and waking up to repeat this several times a night. So many new activities that before were unknown, filling up every day.

This is time that was once completely at your own discretion, and the new constriction is a shock.

But – after the necessary physical and mental healing – it is also what can make parents become creative about their use of time: being a parent can make you more productive by using the gaps in the daily routine. While enhancing productivity is a trope of self-optimisation content, this is not a capitalistic productivity. Caring for a baby can feel like a remove from the self previously constructed. To me, writing felt like an alleviation of this loss of self. Simply draft a paragraph, a few sentences, get on with a text as a means to stimulate the insufficiently challenged mind.

“I write in the small pockets of time that exist in between everything else,” says the Swedish writer Johanne Lykke Naderehvandi, when asked in a........

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