There’s a cultural misperception that spontaneity and impulse are the fertile ground of artistic expression. Undeniably, there is a long and storied history of artists, musicians, and writers resorting to mind-altering substances and dipsomania. It’s often thought that these flights of fancy (and the ensuing depths of despair and human suffering) enhance the creative process, allowing otherworldly vision.
On the other hand, renowned jazz guitarist Joe Pass saw it another way. He said following his rehabilitation from a heroin addiction, “A lot of kids think that in order to be a guitarist, they’ve gotta go out and be a junkie for 10 years, and that’s just not true.” He continued, “I can’t credit any of that time, saying that’s when I really learned. I spent most of those years just being a bum, doing nothing. It was a great waste of time.”
“A great waste of time” is the overwhelming feeling I had reading about many of the lives of female artists and mothers in Julie Phillips’ “The Baby on the Fire Escape.” A study of various female artists and writers who were also mothers, many of the stories were just downright depressing. Phillips never directly asserts that the unconventional lifestyle choices and instability of their personal lives were the necessary preparation for their art, but there seems to be an implication that the suffering was somehow necessary.
Suffering is the school of virtue for many, and from that rich soil of human experience, great art does grow. However, self-inflicted suffering is sometimes simply a source of unnecessary pain and destruction. When a woman has children, her self-inflicted suffering harms her children, too. As is evident in so many of the artists Phillips selected (by which criteria she selected them is not clear), many mothers suffer from the vices of their parents and of their children’s fathers, so this is not to place blame but to note a sad cycle of dysfunction. Reading about so-and-so sticking her head in the oven and what’s-her-name wandering the streets of Japan weeping for some faithless cad who failed to show up—it was just so devastating, most piercingly because it was often unnecessary. Understandable, to some extent, but not necessary and not inevitable.
These accounts stood in sharp contrast to the story of Ursula Le Guinn who had loving parents, a stable childhood, and a long, apparently happy marriage. While stability was a notable exception in Phillips’ book, Valerie Shore’s “The Compleat Woman” had women who seemed almost all to have such health and stability. Most of them were not visual artists in Shore’s collection, and several of them pursued careers that put them at the top of great big bureaucracies. And yet, several were fiction writers, at least one was an illustrator.
This contrast between “The Baby on the Fire Escape” (a name taken from an artist who allegedly neglected to watch her child who toddled into danger) and “The Compleat Woman” raises interesting questions about mothering and career and creativity. Order as the cornerstone of family life ensures that a mother has a stable partner, the father of her children, on whom she can rely. Ill health and catastrophe may thwart these quaint domestic aspirations, but they are surprisingly often attainable. When there is order, the baby is not left to wander
When faced with the reality that a child needs constant supervision at certain stages, one can despair and be continually vexed by the stifling of creative expression. Or one can arrange life so that for defined periods of time, the child is not your sole responsibility (one of the women interviewed by Shore memorably claimed that she and her husband accepted renters in their home with the assumption that minding the baby was part of the deal, a rather cold and impersonal way to arrange childcare). Many of the women Shore interviewed described “flipping a switch” when they went to work. During that time, they did not think about their children, and when they were with their children, they made a deliberate effort not to think about work.
In the words of one of my favorite freaks on the internet, Simone Collins, women may not be able to “have it all” but they can have everything that they care about if they decide what it is they care about and pursue it. If being home with children during daylight hours while also writing professionally is important, it is possible, quite handily, to accomplish. There may be times when a pause is in order and a recalibrating of what matters.
We should not let ourselves believe “the story” that being an artist or a creative requires dysfunction in our domestic domain. Often, it seems such disorder will hamper our opportunities to create or destroy what we have created. Motherhood is a weighty obligation, but when managed with calm and reason, there is every hope for meaning and expression. Our brainstorming may need to happen over a sink full of suds, but it turns out that is a very fruitful place to ponder topics of import.
As Phillips quoted from artist Sarah Ruhl, “There was a time, when I first found out I was pregnant with twins, that I saw only a state of conflict. When I looked at theater and parenthood, I saw only war, competing loyalties, and I thought my writing life was over. There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me…, and finally I came to the thought, All right then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow. And then I could breathe. I could investigate pauses.”
Pursue the creative path, the more difficult path in life that demands further growth. Why settle for clinging to fictions that do not serve us? If clutter piles up while we are bursting with life and creative energy (or taking a much needed nap), we need not catastrophize; an evening of puttering should set the worst of it to rights.
