The other night, after re-settling my daughter Iris back to sleep, I dragged myself up to the top floor of the house, opened the skylight to the dark winter night, and looked up. My eyes, stuck in an ongoing pull between sleep and seeking beauty, found and followed the curve of the Plough, then jumped across to the North Star. The cold air met my warm cheeks, and the gentle caregiver bit of me met the raging restless bit. I want to pack a bag and walk and walk and keep walking all day, and camp under those same stars, and sink into a deep sleep and dream, and then wake and write about it all and more, and then come home.
But my young daughter needs me to herself. I am a place, her own North Star, at least for now. And so the walking and the sleeping and the writing happen in pockets — a grabbed half hour while she naps, some time while my husband has her before his work, at 3am when my mind fizzes after sitting with her while she doesn’t sleep.
There is a growing awareness about motherhood, about caregiving. We know about the huge biological, psychological, social and other changes that happen when a person becomes a mother (detailed recently in books like Matrescence by Lucy Jones and Milk by Joanna Wolfarth). But I find myself wondering, what is it translating to? When will maternal care, any care, be the cornerstone of policy, of funding — of how we build and rebuild our world? Until then, how I use my time feels like a choice between leaving my baby with someone else, or writing and working around the edges of caregiving. Each comes with a cost. For now, I forgo other ingredients essential to good writing — wide reading and sleep — in order to snatch at those edges and throw some kind of word clay onto the wheel. Shaping it into something beautiful and useful will, I desperately hope, come in time.
Of course, I am not alone in my frustration/guilt/desperation/juggling. The challenge of being a mother who writes is increasingly well documented, and in looking for guidance, I keep a growing collection of links, books, quotes and advice from a range of mother-writers. I’ve shared a smattering of these below, along with some fragments of personal reflection, in case they speak to you or someone you know. (The challenge of course goes beyond motherhood to any caregiver who also creates or works, but I am speaking here of motherhood and writing, because I am a mother who is trying to write).
In an essay for The Cut called A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mom, author Kim Brook’s friend tells her the real reason for the mother-creativity conflict is “because the point of art is to unsettle, to question, to disturb what is comfortable and safe. And that shouldn’t be anyone’s goal as a parent.” The overlap between these ways of being — comforting, questioning — also comes into play collectively and politically. Being a mother has shone a light on the priorities that we are handed but do not choose. It is a lens on what we value in society, who benefits and who suffers. Two days before Iris was born, I ended my four-year term as a District Councillor. The structures and processes of local government can be hard to access at the best of times, and I worked to make changes to those processes while I was there, but I didn’t stand again because I couldn’t imagine making early motherhood and local representation work alongside each other whilst also leaving room for other things that are important to me. People do make it work, but those who can’t fit into the schedules, processes and formats of local decision-making are closed out of discussions that impact all our lives, meaning our ‘representatives’ rarely represent the diversity of our communities.
I am currently (slowly) reading Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, by anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. She digs into wide ranging research to explain the evolution of emotion and caregiving, and how our ancestors of the taxonomic subfamily Homininae developed an ability and need to care and cooperate in a way that other bipedal subfamilies didn’t to the same degree. Her work shows the communal nature of child-rearing in our early ancestors. We are not meant to do it all alone. I have been thinking and writing in snatches about this; how modern life carves up community into individuals and distinct spaces, wrenching us from how we used to live. It can feel hard to find it, but we need the village it takes to raise our children (and ourselves). More on that topic in future issues of this newsletter.
In The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem, Julie Phillips looks at six writers “young enough to have experienced the changes that came with feminism, old enough to have mothered for a lifetime” — Ursula Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Alice Neel, Doris Lessing and Angela Carter. Rather than argue a case, she explores the shifting landscape of creativity and motherhood. There is lots here, and I dip in and out of its mentorship. For some, mothering can feel repetitive and intellectually draining, but for Ursula Le Guin, having children was “terrifying, empowering and fiercely demanding” on her intelligence. Phillips says, “the experience of motherhood loses nearly everything in its translation to the outside world. In motherhood a woman exchanges her public significance for a range of private meanings, and like sounds outside a certain range they can be very difficult for other people to identify.” I’m often without the language to translate those meanings to the outside world. Perhaps I don’t need to — much of the experience is universal, and uneventful, and of no interest to most people. But I think motherhood is a creative force — socially, politically, ecologically, artistically — and it feels important to articulate it so that it does not stay hidden away.
LitHub wonderfully and regularly turns to the mother-writer conundrum. The determination that many mothers muster, despite the lack of sleep, is remarkable. But it might not be so necessary if care was prioritised and valued in our society. I am self-employed, my state-supported maternity leave is coming to an end, and the pressure to use any pockets of time — nap times, night time, windows where my husband has Iris — for productivity, for income-generation of some kind can feel overwhelming. I think up pitches while she eats, play with ideas while I get her to sleep, because I have to. My husband is supportive, and works while I take care of Iris, and I do not take this for granted. But I imagine a future where care is given value and space and support, free from the pressure and cost of keeping financially afloat; where carers and families and communities get the same kind of backing that banks do. Some countries, like Sweden, already do far more than most on this.
In this piece called ‘Mastering the Book-Baby Balance’ novelist Maggie O’Farrell says that because they leave you with such little headspace, “children are brilliant editors, not in that they will go through your manuscript with a red pen, but in that they occupy so much space in your mind that the bad and weak ideas will be cut off at the pass.” This has been true for me so far — and Iris edits not just my writing but my life too. O’Farrell also says that writing doesn’t just get done at the desk: “…it may look as though you are washing up, folding laundry, slicing the crusts off toast, but you are, deep inside your head, actually working. I’m a great believer that, no matter what you are doing, an engine is running somewhere inside your head, generating ideas, solutions, questions, metaphors, even though you may not be aware of it.” I find reassurance here. Writing is more than the act of writing.
Time and headspace have been compressed since my daughter arrived, but she has expanded the world too and she’s helping me see and translate it. Her milky breath puffs into my ear while she sleeps, transforming into words. Author Margaret Drabble speaks of the advantage that motherhood is to her own writing in this Unherd essay: “…pregnancy and childbirth seemed so intimately connected with my career and writing life.” She also says this: “Le Guin, quoting Alice Ostriker…“we can imagine what it would signify to all women, and men, to live in a culture where childbirth and mothering occupied the kind of position that sex and romantic love have occupied in literature and art for the last five hundred years…” I feel that this culture is almost with us. Almost, but not quite … I continue to be surprised by the fact that “the Nursing Madonna” was considered a wholly suitable subject for art, while breastfeeding is still hardly ever mentioned in literature. We continue to inhabit a world of paradoxical values, one in which books and babies are not yet entirely compatible.”
Do the challenges of being a mother-writer in part come down to time? — the fact there’s not enough of it? Maybe. But I am touching something else too, something existential and terrifying and bright and alive. I am so grateful I get to be a mother, and it links me to all the caregivers that our shared world has ever known. That all these things co-exist — despair and beauty, boredom and aliveness, constriction and expansion — seems to be how life is. This braided life is the one I live, and I will keep braiding until I see the tapestry that is being woven. It will be confronting, it will be beautiful, it will be my own small stitch offered to this vast and intimate world.
Are you a mother? A caregiver? A writer or creator? — I’d love to hear your thoughts, advice, recommended reading. How do you balance the strands of your life?
Some other mother-writer reading:
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, by Adrienne Rich — an exploration of the pull between love, art, and the expectations of society and culture
Also by Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations, by Adrienne Rich — this collection covers a range of things from writing to capitalism, art to power
Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer — a beautiful intertwining of mothering, nature, place, creativity, heritage
Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year — an account of the trials that Anne Lamott (beloved author of Bird-by-Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life) faced having a baby as a single mother at age 35
Soundings, by Doreen Cunningham — a memoir of a mother and her young son as they follow grey whales from Mexico to Alaska
My Wild and Sleepless Nights, by Clover Stroud — an honest and deeply felt dissection of motherhood
The Farmer's Wife: My Life in Days, by Helen Rebanks — an honest account of domestic life and care for family and place
A Life’s Work, by Rachel Cusk — a moving, honest account of the early years of motherhood. I have been thinking about what Cusk says here: “Mothers are the countries we come from: sometimes when I hold my daughter I try to apprehend this belonging for her, to feel myself as solid and fixed, to capture my smell and shape and atmosphere. I try to flesh out her native landscape. I try to imagine what it would be like to have me as a mother.”
And here’s a recent article that looks at novels about motherhood.
Thank you for being here. I’d love to hear your own thoughts or experiences — you can leave a comment below or send me an email.
With love, and appreciation for caregiving in all its forms,
Elizabeth
Each phase of childhood/mothering has brought unique challenges to my writing and creative life. Each phase has also brought enormous gifts. When I was working on my book, my daughter was so young. I enlisted her as a co-traveler on research trips. She joined me on less exciting trips to the university library, standing on a chair to copy pages from books and journals. (Oh, I treasure those crooked copies!). I tried to breathe deeply and remind myself that it's all so fleeting. And time did pass quickly: it was my dear, precious Natalie (the best enterprise in my life) that typed the final footnotes for my book. It's all longing, I've found. xoxoxox to you and Iris!