100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

by Sarah Ruhl

In the middle of that sentence my son came in and sat at my elbow and said tenderly, “Mom, can I poop here?” I think of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and how it needs a practical addendum about locks and bolts and soundproofing.

And then I had children. After which, I would add to Fornes’s thesis: Who always wants something from someone else? Only Americans. Criminals. And two-year-olds.

The word quirky suggests that in a homogenized culture, difference has to be immediately defined, sequestered, and formally quarantined while being gently patted on the head.

Sometimes I think mothers and fathers need to “come out” as parents in the theater, to make the work of parenting visible in a line of work that has so much in common with parenting in terms of dealing with irrational people much of the day and night and so little in common with parenting in terms of its schedule.

Shakespeare himself had real twins. One assumes, then, that he wasn’t interested in twins as a purely literary conceit. After he had the twins, there were apparently seven years, called the Lost Years, in which he did not write.