Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh and an aviator in her own right, thought she should have written more. In addition to her early career in the air, she was a wife, mother, and writer. Throughout her adult life, she castigated herself for “not writing enough.”
Her daughter, writer Reeve Lindbergh, recalls in the introduction to the final volume of her mother’s letters and diary entries the meticulous record-keeping and carbon copies of letters sent to the archive at Yale. Her mother, in the midst of raising five children and continually moving between the Lindberghs’ three houses, would write prolifically, often three to four long letters and diary entries each day. Reeve notes the strangeness of this copious written material so often containing apologies and accusations of not writing enough or fast enough or often enough.
Throughout her fascinating life and career, Anne Morrow Lindbergh seems to have reflected often on the conflict between her obligations as a wife and mother and her creative pursuits as a writer. Apparently taking literally Virginia Woolf’s exhortation to have a “room of one’s own,” Lindbergh kept a small, converted shed or outbuilding on the outskirts of each family property to use as a writer’s retreat.
As is so often the case when people see themselves as deficient, other people zero in on the vulnerability and exploit it. In 1970, the reviewer John Barkham asked, “Why, as an eager and talented writer, has Anne Morrow Lindbergh published so relatively little in forty years of marriage?” He continued, “After a promising start with those first books on flying, she tapered off into long silences broken by an infrequent volume of verse or prose.”
Years later, Lindbergh responded to the critique, telling her daughter, “A woman writer is ‘rowing against wind and tide.’” She elaborated, “We cannot — or only with the greatest difficulty — produce a great ‘body of work.’… And it isn’t just being a woman. It is some other deeper conflict between art and life.” Her observation about a “great body of work” for the woman artist is accurate. And there is struggle there, as there is for anyone, though there are undeniably certain struggles particular to mothers.
The expression “rowing against wind and tide” comes from a letter of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Remarking on the interruptions to writing inherent in motherhood and the running of a household, Beecher Stowe wrote to her sister-in-law, “Since I began this note I have been called off at least a dozen times – once for the fish-man, to buy a codfish – once to see a man who had brought me some baskets of apples – once to see a book man…then to nurse the baby – then into the kitchen to make chowder for dinner and now I am at it again for nothing but deadly determination enables me to ever write – it is rowing against wind and tide.”
These talented and prolific women felt deeply divided between the demands of their husbands and children and the inspiration they felt to write, or, at the very least in the case of one the financial necessity to write. Indeed, it’s a subject over which endless ink has been spilled. Is it really worth the hullabaloo? Is there a way of seeing the physical and emotional demands of childbearing as a living embodiment of creative pursuits? Perhaps, as a wellspring of inspiration for creativity rather than a distraction from the high considerations of Great Art?
Lindbergh herself recognized that the greatest part of her experience and introspection came precisely from her experience of motherhood. In an entry of great emotional distress recorded in her diary in 1947, Lindbergh recounts how she contemplating abortion when she was pregnant with her seventh child. Her anguish is worth quoting at length:
“Could I take what seemed to me the destructive, noncreative, negative way out? And if I did, would I bear incurable guilt over it—and what would that do to my life, my writing, my marriage? Could I say no to a child, to that act of God which had been the greatest experience in my life, from which I had learned the most? That experience—almost the only one—which I felt in other terms and had to put into writing the lesson life had taught me. ‘The word made flesh.’”
To kill the child, the“parasite,” as the child is sometimes called, invading the creative host, is, itself contrary to a life of creativity. Rather than collaborating with “that act of God,” the creation of a new human soul which, however much we may succeed in manipulating, we cannot control, abortion is to crush and destroy, the “noncreative, negative way out.”
Lindbergh, pas the age of 40 and afflicted with a gallbladder condition, was anguished for naught. The pregnancy ended in miscarriage, an event Lindbergh felt was a great mercy. Certainly, any woman has her limits, but is not the life an artist one of expanding beyond the demands of the mere material order? If the pregnancy had not ended in miscarriage, would it necessarily entail a devastating loss of creative time, a regression in personal development and creative output?
There are undeniably acute and unavoidable physical setbacks in pregnancy and infancy. The risk are sometimes fatal and the distress can seem overwhelming. And yet, in the forced quiet and convalescence do we not meditate and learn more deeply the meaning of our humanity? Do we not journey through the liminal spaces when life and death are so close at hand?
While some mothers spend the best years of their lives anguished and rueful, torn between the obligations to their children and the creative outlets they crave, some mothers display a deceptively simple, integrated whole. There are mothers who blossom with the challenges of pregnancy and family life. Never without severe struggle, but sometimes, in those rare and admirable instances, without appearing to struggle. This is not at all to say that mothers should pretend not to struggle and should not confide wholeheartedly in friends and trusted advisors. Rather, there is something truly inspiring in a mother who is not encumbered by her children, her greatest creative pursuit of all.
Motherhood is difficult, which is to say not that we should sit around and complain about it (as in the insufferable mode of such recent publications as “Screaming on the Inside”). Because motherhood is difficult, we should set aside time for it, recognizing that inevitably much will be demanded of our time and energy in nurturing souls and nourishing bodies.
Creating anything in motherhood will be “rowing against wind and tide,” not because motherhood is in conflict with creative pursuits but because to create anything, to live creatively, is arduous and difficult. The laws of entropy push all of us toward chaos and destruction. To act, with the divine life within us, to build up and mirror the splendor of creation, is difficult.
A good starting place for mothers is to consider—really consider—the possibility that the demands of motherhood are not in conflict with creativity but a life-encompassing expression of it. Sometimes, the greatest impediment to putting thoughts into being is our own conviction that it is too difficult and the cards are stacked against us. If all that time of emotional turmoil and self-pity were spent noticing the beauty around us and expressing some facet of it in art, that “great body of work” begins to accumulate, however modestly. It is not despite the obstacles to writing, drawing, painting, singing, but sometimes because of the obstacles that we find the reason to create at all.
What is more, our children learn much from an integrated life lived in us. We would be remiss not to mention the observations of Brenda Ueland in her essay, “Why women who do too much housework should neglect it for their writing.” She offers the sound observation:
For to teach, encourage, cheer up, console, amuse, stimulate or advise a husband or children or friends, you must be something yourself. And how to be something yourself? Only by working hard and with gumption at something you love and care for and think is important.
So if you want your children to be musicians, then work at music yourself, seriously and with all your intelligence. If you want them to be scholars, study hard yourself. And so it goes.
And that is why I would say to the worn and hectored mother who longed to write and could find not a minute for it: If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say: “Mother is working on her fiv-act tragedy in blank verse!” you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.
Motherhood need not be the end of all creative pursuits. Viewed rightly, it can be the fertile ground from which they begin.
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