Recently, someone asked me how to fit together writing and motherhood. Can one complement the other? How do you prevent writing from crowding out the necessary demands of motherhood? How do you continue to write with the physical strain of childbearing and caring for children? The short answer is: sometimes you don’t.
In conversation, someone wondered aloud why so many of the famous female writers were perpetually single. She had a point; Barbara Pym, Flannery O’Connor, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and Sarah Orne Jewett might come to mind; just to name a few. It seems a big reason for that might be that they have the time to write!
Of course, there are mothers who wrote, drew, sculpted, wrote plays, and remained engaged in the world of creativity and ideas beyond the creativity that comes with living life with young children and making a home.
It’s helpful to note that many women who were prolific authors and artists were under the strain of dire financial circumstances. If their husbands had alternative employment (such as modern farmer, minister, or eccentric) or was chronically ill, absent, or deceased, the needs of a growing family required them to bring in an income. Author/artist is one of those demanding and yet flexible careers that can be done at odd hours in a corner of the house or—how romantic—in a converted barn studio or the like.
Some women of this bent would include Elsa Beskow (with her quip: “Every year another book, every other year a son.”), Tasha Tudor, Shirley Jackson, Sigrid Undset, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Of course, bare financial necessity was not the only reason for the work they accomplished; they were each quite talented. In the sometimes crushing tide of children and their ever-evolving needs, external incentive—like needing to pay the bills—can inspire action where it might not otherwise. That’s a broad statement, certainly, and we can only speculate if these women and others like them would not have written and painted if they didn’t have a financial need to. Given what is publicly known about their private lives, it seems like it’s not too much of a stretch to speculate that the necessity of their work played a role in motivating it.
Let’s not forget: In yesteryear household help and childcare was very different (read: better, or at least a lot more versatile). Having a young woman live in your home to help with meals, washing, watching children, and whatnot, was not uncommon. It appears the “hired girl” was, in fact, so common that even a struggling professor in the throes of the Great Depression could afford to bring someone in to help his wife after she gave birth to their first child. Granted, the charwoman probably didn’t have the time to nurture her poetry.
Whether of not there is an acute financial need, there are mothers who continue to create. Is it to the detriment of their children?
I once read a description of author Grace Metalious—if it wasn’t her, it certainly could be. If I’m remembering the details correctly, her children used to wake in the morning to find their sleepless mother hunched over the typewriter with overflowing ash trays littering the table after a night of writing. Long before I had children, I vowed never to let it come to that. Such a dedication to writing with neglect of her own bodily needs would necessarily be a drain for her family. (Also, was writing some smut about small-town New England really worth the sacrifice in the end?)
And other accounts suggest that was, in fact, hard to be her family. Take this gem from a publication through the University of New Hampshire: “She [Metalious] was often accused of being a bad housewife and mother, and certainly by the standards of the day, she was. Perhaps even by today’s standards. It has been reported that the only clean spot in her Gilmanton home, which itself was a rundown old house that didn’t always have running water, was where she kept her typewriter.”
Well, really, is that any worse than Elizabeth Anscombe’s “academic squalor” and reported incident of forgetting a sleeping child on the train platform? There are any number of eccentric mothers out there who may neglect home and children. Not all of it is bad, as “benign neglect” can itself be a very good thing. However, what is missed by such mothers obsessed and driven by their craft?
I, perhaps a bit like Charity Lang of Wallace Stegner’s “Crossing to Safety,” was tempted to think of children as my work of art. Our culture speaks often of women “making” their children. And yet, that’s not correct. A mother does not craft, shape, and mold her child into being and create the life he or she will lead.
Reading Catherine Pakaluk’s “Hannah’s Children” gets closer to the truth: Children are, simply, a gift to be received. There is not our writing and art that we create in one corner, and in another the children we are crafting as a legacy to our excellence in creativity. No, they are fundamentally different pursuits. Having children is not even, in a certain sense, a pursuit.
How do we receive a gift well? A gift requires that we set aside time and energy to enjoy the gift. So many parents view children as an endless list of tasks added to their lives. Most parents enjoy their children at least some of the time, but how much more could we enjoy our children if we disciplined ourselves to be adequately rested, not perpetually agitated, at peace with the world and ourselves such that we can sit and watch and listen. Children who have someone to listen to them are noticeably different from those who don’t. Enjoying our children is not an added bonus that crops up every once in a while. Enjoying them is a necessary piece of helping them develop their potential.
If we are to have time set aside, a life that is not full-to-bursting with activity and manic creativity, we will not be productive in the way that we otherwise could. That does not mean that the years of little children and the stretched thin years of growing children with more complex needs must be times of lack. Quiet is also good for our thoughts. Space is good for our reading habits. These stages that may require a pause in the writing life can be the years that the fields lie fallow in anticipation of harvest yet to come.
And then, of course, there is also our honing our discernment to know when it is good and just to say, “Grab a slice of bread and a hunk of salami for dinner; mom’s got a deadline to meet!”
In the end: How do you fit motherhood with writing? Receive gifts well and make decisions you can live with.
