It’s been quite the season. I spent last week home with my sick ten year old - and this week she’s on vacation (the universe could do a little better at coordinating these things). For the past few months one out of my little ones has either had a tummy bug, strep, flu or just a good old fashioned cold. And that doesn’t account for snow day closures, power outage closures, school breaks and then those days when they’re at school but I’m worrying about them because they’ve got a friendship issue or are are struggling in a way that I can’t fix. Nor does it take into account how I get sick once everyone else is well again because while my little treasures were sick they clung to me like a life-raft with their germ-sticky hands and pressed their snotty little noses against my cheek.
But that’s the deal with parenting, right? That you will never really have a normal day - or week, or month or season or year or decade, or really a life - ever again.
Because if there’s one thing these little creatures bring into our lives, just by dint of being little creatures, is unpredictability and distraction and worry and the impossibility of making any sure fire plans.
I’m not complaining. Not really. I was 32 by the time I had my first child, so I was old enough to know what I’d signed up for. Apart from the fact that, of course, none of us really know what we’ve signed up for. Not until our little creatures arrive and make us realise that though we might have understood (intellectually, at least) how hard parenting is (heck, if you’re me, you probably even wrote a few novels about it!), the real life hard of being a parent is something altogether different.
The thing about being a writer - any kind of artist - is that, contrary to some unhelpful presentations in film and literature, we don’t thrive on chaos and bolts of inspiration, on lurching from one project to another or on writing in messy rooms in the middle of the night, fuelled by caffeine and the mania of sleep deprivation. Maybe some artists find a way of creating and thriving and being brilliant under these conditions, but what most of us writers really, really, really need is a degree of quiet, of routine, of predictability, decent sleep, a modicum of order and, most importantly, a stretch of time to dive deep into our work without interruptions. Which, as you’ve guessed it, is fundamentally incompatible with motherhood.
There’s an aspect to being a writer, a hard wired part of our DNA, which means that we need alone time, time to withdraw from the world, time to be a hermit and a recluse and, frankly, be a bit antisocial. By nature, I’m a sociable type, more sociable than many writers I know, but I also really need times of complete withdrawal. And when you’ve brought another human into the world - other humans - and they’re little, you just can’t do that, not completely, not for the periods of time you feel you need. Or I can’t, anyway. Parents in the 80s seemed much more comfortable with regular child abandonment but I’m an anxious, overly involved Gen Xer.
On a profound level, there’s also a sense that, as an artist, you’re bringing things to life all the time - that the work you put out into the world is a child of a kind, a part of yourself that you breathe life into and nurture and love.
Making art is a kind of mothering.
Which means that you sometimes feel deeply conflicted: like you’re living two parallel lives, like you’ve got two brood of children you’re caring for in two different places and that you can never be in those two places at the same time and that, as a result, you feel like you’re always missing out on or failing the one or the other.
And finally - and rather less attractively - being an artist sometimes means being selfish. Brutally selfish, at times. Putting yourself and your work above anyone and anything else. And you kind of give up your right to that kind of selfishness when you become a parent. Or most of us do.
I remember reading an article in The Atlantic about writing and motherhood entitled: The Secret to Being both a Successful Writer and Mother: Have Just one Kid. It was inspired by a quotation by the novelist, Alice Walker, who when asked if female artists should have children, replied:
"They should have children—assuming this is of interest to them—but only one."
“Why?” The questioner asked.
"Because with one you can move," she said. "With more than one you're a sitting duck."
Alice Walker is in good company. Other ‘successful’ novelists and, it seems, successful mothers, have only had one child: Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Margaret Atwood, Ellen Willis, and more. As the article suggests it’s because, with one kid, you can always park them. Find someone to watch them. Fold them into your marriage in a way that is more symbiotic than when you have more than one kid and there’s suddenly a ‘kids camp’ and a ‘parent camp’ and you have to start juggling and negotiating and fighting for a scrap of peace and quiet.
I’ve also found that there’s an only child vibe that’s very different from the more tribal identity of siblings. And you’re better tolerated in public spaces when you just bring along one kid. People don’t mind so much when you have one child hanging on your coat tails. Sometimes (depending on your child’s behaviour), they’re even nice about it: they engage with your little one and accept them and understand. Bring more than one, however, and their faces drop and you definitely feel like you’ve just caused a major inconvenience.
So maybe, to be a good mother and a good writer - maybe to be a good human - it’s better to jut have one. Or even, according to some voices, none at all.
But well, whoops, I had three. So I guess I’m neither a good mother nor do I have a chance of being a successful writer. Maybe.
Alice Walker did have a point. Having more than one really is hard. I pine for those days when I wrote for seven hours, cloistered away in my study, barely looking up from my computer, with nothing but a cat to distract me. I did get so much more done. I felt I was able to go deeper, quicker. I didn’t feel as frustrated or tired and stressed. I also pine for the days when I could give my first daughter to her godmother for a few hours and sneak off to a coffee shop and write. My husband and I have only ever had one person offer to take all three children and that was for just two hours!
And so, if you ask me today, after months of interruptions and distractions and upended plans, I’d be tempted to do a Norah Wells (the protagonist of my second novel who, inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s Nora in A Doll’s House, packs a suitcase and leaves her husband and young children behind to find herself again).
But of course, there’s another side to the story too. One that Zadie Smith put beautifully when she commented on being ‘a successful writer’ and having two children:
“When I think of writers, I really love someone like Ursula Le Guin, who had three kids and lived an entirely domestic life. I feel her children in those books, I feel that the weight of it, her experience of being a girl, a woman, a mother, an old woman, it's almost overwhelming when you read her.”
She also shared an anecdote of being seven months pregnant at a literary festival when a male author told her that, gosh, wasn’t she worried that stopping to have a baby would lead to her ‘falling behind!’ as an author. She gave the best retort:
“You must be worried about just a complete lack of human experience that you're now going to be 40 and then 50.” His face went so pale. It was a wonderful way to frighten him back.”
Go Zadie Smith. Not that I ascribe to the fact that you have to have children to live fully. I have many, many dear friends who through choice or circumstance don’t have children and live infinitely rich, deep, complex lives - and actually spend a great deal of their time mothering and caring for others. But I don’t think this guy was one of those people. And Smith needed to put him in his place.
The truth is that, as with most complicated and hard and beautiful things in life, it’s both and.
It’s infinitely harder to be a writer and a mom - a mom at all, even of one kid, and especially a mom of more than one kid.
It’s also true that having children has been the most creative, intellectually, emotionally, human-stretching experiences of my life. That it’s helped me understand myself and the world and others better. That it’s given me an education of what it means to come into the world and grow and live and get hurt and disappointed and to flourish. The act of being human is, after all, what we write about, so watching another human grow, a human who is an extension of you, a human you’ve been given the job of nourishing and nurturing and caring for, is a gift. More than this, watching how little ones respond to stories, how they love them, how they learn from them, how they are as essential to their growth and to their way of navigating the world as food and water and shelter, has given me the biggest motivation of all to write. When it comes down to it, I think I write for them, more than for anyone else.
And so, I live in a conundrum and in the exhausting paradox that just as my children feed my heart and soul and imagination they also deplete me so completely, at times, that I’m left unable to write at all. Maybe one of these days I’ll find a balance. Or maybe the imbalance is what brings some magic to my writing, when I’m able to do it. Maybe that’s the deal. That it’s harder to write but that when we are able to write, when we can carve out some time to get it done, a little magic seeps in from having been involved in this impossible act of motherhood.
Virginia Macgregor is the author of five novels for adults and two for young adults. She has an MFA in Creative Writing with a specialisation in the teaching of writing. She lives with her husband, her three children, her four cats and a home full of books and coffee mugs, in New Hampshire.
I absolutely love this, Virginia, and relate so much! Thank you for sharing and discussing this topic.