Your Creative Intentions: The Monday Post ~ March 18, 2013

Thank you for this blog. I’ve been reading it regularly for the last month or two. I came across it after searching for something like “motherhood + artist”.

have 3 children, ages 2.5, 5, and 7. When I gave birth to my oldest child I had graduated from university and was working at a dead-end job for a year with the intention of going to graduate school to pursue an MFA in writing the following September. I put together my portfolio and summoned the courage to send in the applications. Surprise! I found out that I was pregnant the day before I got the acceptance letter. The world turned upside-down. I wanted to be a mother even though I hadn’t planned to become one quite so soon; I’d wanted to write (ideally for a living) since I was a little girl. Because going to grad school would have necessitated moving across the country and away from my partner, it seemed that the MFA and motherhood were mutually exclusive. I turned down the offer.

I had found the idea of spending a couple years of my life doing nothing but writing and reading while in the company of a group of like-minded people incredibly appealing. When else would I ever have the opportunity to focus on writing like that, I’d asked myself. To me, it seemed almost self-indulgent, a way to put off adult life and its responsibilities a while longer. Instead, I plunged headlong into motherhood and marriage. I kept a journal, but stopped writing fiction. Since early childhood I’d been writing stories in my head, sometimes narrating what I was actually doing, sometimes making up characters and sticking them into imagined scenarios to see what would happen. That narrative voice in my head was my companion for years and years until it was crowded out by the business of an adult life.

I missed writing, but the few times I tried to get into an old project I found it impossible to work without having a stretch of uninterrupted time. While my son nursed and napped on my lap I could read, I could scribble in a journal, but I couldn’t get into the right headspace to write fiction. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to snap back into mommy mode when my son needed me, and I knew that trying to transition back and forth between writer and mother would leave me perpetually divided, never able to devote myself to either.

I had a second child in short order. When she was a baby, our oldest was diagnosed with autism. I was busy; I was angry. I loved my children like nothing else in the world, but I was also unhappy with the day-to-day life of a stay-at-home mother. I was lucky, I reminded myself often — other women desperately wanted to be home with their children but couldn’t. I started publishing and editing book reviews because I could fit in the work around my children’s activities, their naps and meals, my son’s therapy, the household work, the errands. There is a certain creativity inherent in child rearing and in homemaking which I appreciated, but I always thought that it simply wasn’t possible to do it all. All those meals prepared and consumed. All those clean and mended clothes dirty and torn again. The dust swept away accumulates again. All those hours subsumed in the maintenance of life. Everyone must perform these tasks themselves though, unless they have a wife, a nanny, a house cleaner. And then they outsource this work because they can pay to have it done; they can pay to have it done because they spend the time working instead.

How did other women writers manage (because of them certainly did manage)? I read two anthologies about mothering and art. The first was Double Lives, edited by Cowan, Lam, and Stonehouse. The second was Between Interruptions, edited by Cori Howard. I read The Divided Heart by Rachel Power. I read Lives of Mothers and Daughters by Alice Munro’s daughter, Sheila Munro. I read Tillie Olson’s Silences. I read Marni Jackson’s The Mother Zone. I read Carolyn Heilbrun’s Reinventing Womanhood where she writes that “Art cannot be achieved by those for whom anything else matters more. Art, like passion, is not a part-time occupation.” Did I agree? No, not exactly. It’s an awfully romantic notion, but it’s certainly not a universal truth.

I had a third child, then I got sick. I spent the first two years of her life in doctors’ offices trying to get a proper diagnosis and treatment (for what turned out to be an autoimmune disease similar to lupus). My health is now stable and my youngest is in nursery school part-time. I rush home after dropping them at school so I can make the best possible use of that hour and a half all to myself. I wanted to commit to some sort of regular writing practice and I wanted to set some goals. I turned to the internet and searched for “motherhood + artist” and I found this blog. I read through the archives. I wrote some intentions.

Over the last few months I’ve been writing every day, reading voraciously, and feeling more and more alive and awake. And what’s funny, of course, is that this makes me a better mother. I’m happier and more present when I’m with them (which is the vast majority of my time and theirs). Even more importantly, I want to show my kids a model of adult life that is appealing, that incorporates the creative into the practical and necessary. I want to show them that work can be interesting and engaging. I’m getting there.

This is long! I intended to write a couple sentences on what I was working on this week… it turned into this! Anyway, thank you for your blog and the inspiration and encouragement it provides to parents who are trying to make room for creative practice of all sorts in their lives.