Image: Jenna Norman, Canva.
Muffled crying through the bedroom wall. As soon as I pick up his small hot body he lays his head on my chest, ear to my heartbeat, and slips easily back into sleep. The weight of his head tamps the anxiety that always accompanies starting a new piece of writing so that as I begin to pace the five steps from one end of his room to the other, I can confront the question of what exactly this essay is about.
I want to write about writing and mothering, writing as a mother, writing while and around mothering—but what of it? In Mothertongues, Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell’s own account of ‘making art and mothering’, they note that the twin drives of creating and procreating are often figured in an ‘antagonistic battle, pulling the woman in two different directions so that she ends up having to choose a side (or risk being cleaved in two)’. And yet, though I have wanted to write since childhood, it was only after the birth of my first child that I began to write and relish in the writing. This essay is not a response to the well-worn question of motherhood or writing—what Julie Phillips refers to as the ‘founding lie of artistic exclusion’ in The Baby on the Fire Escape—but a consideration of motherhood and writing. It is about the ways in which becoming a mother also allowed me to become a writer.
It was only after the birth of my first child that I began to write and relish in the writing.
*
Muffled crying through the bedroom wall. This is the third (or is it the fourth?) time he has woken tonight. Rachel Cusk transcribes the essence of maternal time: ‘The mother’s days and nights represent an accumulation that is barely perceptibly an advance: it is as though she is living the same moment over and over again.’ My watch logs my steps as I pace from one end of his room to the other, creating the illusion of advancement, or in the least, accumulation, but ultimately all this walking is getting me nowhere.
I eventually cede my body to his wakefulness and offer him my breast. As I feed, I catch up on group chat messages and marvel at the working conditions detailed therein—absurd workloads and hours of overtime all endured in the hope of advancing careers and/or accepted as the price of doing what you love. In one sense, motherhood has released me from my capitalist preoccupation with advancement. I care more about my children than any of the paid work I have ever done, and the richness of this care—a recompense in and of itself—means I am (sometimes) at peace with the monotonous nature of my work as a mother and primary carer. In another sense, society’s determination to devalue this work—for work it is—renders my life less a portrait of ideological freedom and more a shitty video of being unceremoniously evicted from the comforts of visibility and financial independence afforded by a salary.
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In The Most Important Job in the World, Gina Rushton pointedly sums up the apparent either/or of motherhood and doing what you love as the only means to a meaningful existence: newly liberated from the home, many millennial women now find themselves immured in the workplace. Six months into my first round of family leave, I was depleted yet unsatisfied by the work of mothering, but also unwilling to resume overcommitting to a job that seemed far less worthy of my love than my child. Like Rushton, I found myself fantasising about ‘the space between the myths of woman as womb and woman as worker. I too longed for a life in which my purpose [was] tied to neither…a life in which my identity [was] not contingent on the labour my body produces in reproduction or production’.
Writing was and is a critical bid for agency.
In my matrescence—the maternal equivalent of adolescence—I experienced once more the desire to forge a stable self from the disparate actions and reactions through which I cycled each day, an identity that would ballast and centre me within the oblivion of care work. Writing was and is a critical bid for agency: a focusing of what little energies remain to me at the end of each day towards the space between the roles made available to me as a woman; a labour of love that keeps me close to my first love of words; essential work that allows me to make a narrative of the endless repeat of my days. Among the euphoria and tedium of mothering, writing no longer feels, as it once did, like a self-indulgent distraction from my real work, but a necessary means of self-fashioning.
*
Muffled crying through the bedroom wall. I linger over my laptop wanting to think one more thought through to completion. As if he hears my reluctance, his cries build in volume and pitch until I slam my laptop shut and go to him.
Other times I am grateful for the opportunity to unscrunch myself and while settling him back to sleep, to luxuriate in some alone time (more or less) with a sentence, to polish it until it is radiant with meaning. Better still are the whole days of playdough, parks and toast that go by without my thinking about the work at all—less standing back from the canvas and more fleeing the gallery altogether to romp in the open air. Like Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, ‘This is a female text, composed while folding someone else’s clothes. My mind holds it close, and it grows, tender and slow, while my hands perform innumerable chores’. In the fertile ground of my inattention, my notions take root and extend pale tendrils towards the light.
*
Muffled crying through the bedroom wall. My touch releases some spring mechanism, causing him to fling his short limbs outwards and I know I’m fucked. He sobs inconsolably in my arms, on my breast, in his dad’s arms, in the cot, in the pram. His sobs reverberate through the whole fragile ecosystem of sleep, milk and words over which I have so little control, yet which I nonetheless work so hard to maintain. If he slept a little less than he does / if I had to go to work tomorrow / if I had to return to work next week / if our financial situation were more precarious / if I didn’t have the support of my partner, parents and friends / if I were a single mother / if I were any less privileged than I am, would I be able to write?
I have never had so little time to write and so much to write about.
*
Muffled crying through the bedroom wall. The swell of headlights floods his room, briefly revealing his large brown eyes, so like my own, and I am gripped once more by the feeling of looking both down and up at myself. Each sleepless night wears me down and leaves me raw and newly sensate. As Audre Lorde writes in A Burst of Light of the rage she experienced as a Black lesbian mother—rage that infiltrated her home—each day is ‘a long and arduous journey towards self-possession’. Rage is as heritable as eye colour, and raising children necessitates an interrogation of the rage I feel as a mother of colour—rage too often misdirected at my children. But the discomfort of self-interrogation is followed often enough by the release of personal growth that the work of parenting is, as Lorde observes, ‘sweetened by an increasing ability to stretch far beyond what I had previously thought possible—in understanding, in seeing common events in a new perspective, in trusting my own perceptions’. I have never had so little time to write and so much to write about.
*
Muffled crying through the bedroom wall. I remain at my desk and listen hungrily to the scrape of a chair, footsteps down the hall, the bubble of voices as my eldest welcomes the baby back to the waking world. I rein in my attention, make myself read over these words, add a little more. My family is the harbour from which I venture each time I put words on a page. I write my way towards some idea of myself as remote from my work as a mother, as if I were still whole and alone and not divided in three, cradled by the storm of my children’s needs and demands, then I write my way home.
