I feel like I’m in a constant fight for my writing time. I fight against my workload as a teacher and freelancer. I fight the overflowing laundry hamper and the correspondingly low stock of clean underwear. And a lot of the time, I fight the general urge to just go do something fun and easy, like spending a beautiful Saturday morning buying very Instagrammable eggs at the farmer’s market instead of nudging myself toward my desk and laptop, closing the blinds against the sunshine in order to reduce the glare on my screen.
But moms? Moms have all of that going on in addition to those little people who require so much of them. But they get their work done. They write books. They win awards. And they’re so much cooler than I’ll ever be.
Some writer moms work the way Toni Morrison worked, with teenage sons practicing their flutes beside them.
Some work the way Ursula Le Guin worked, going over the alphabet with their toddlers on their laps.
They do both—writing and mothering. But how? I wonder as I take in my calendar and hamper.
“Writers and mothers are so culturally undervalued,” says Sarah McColl, author of the memoir Joy Enough. “We do so much work that’s invisible, unpaid, misunderstood, derided as menial, boring, drudgery.”
McColl dives into the creative work of (mostly) dead women for her newsletter Lost Art. Among the subset of women she’s studied who are also mothers, she pays close attention to the way these artists have reacted to the numerous pauses punctuating their lives. “Pauses seem to cause mothers a particularly destructive kind of pain,” she says, “often because they are experiencing two powerful desires in direct conflict.” Motherhood and art-making require opposites: children thrive on intimacy and responsiveness, while creative work requires solitude and concentration.
McColl cites the balance that Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Carol Shields somehow managed as she raised five children. “People would ask her all the time, how have you written so many books with all those children? And she said, well, I never wrote before they went to school. When all of her children were finally in school, she wrote a couple pages a day. And at the end of nine months, she had her first novel, which was published when she was forty. At that time in her life, for that first book, she didn’t have more than an hour a day. She couldn’t have been a novelist if she hadn’t had children, she said, and her children kept her from writing for a good chunk of time.”
When author Celeste Mohammed started working on her first book, her daughter was a baby. She recalls forgoing many opportunities during that time. “Friends kept sending me applications to this writing residency, or that writers retreat,” Mohammed says, all of which would have provided her time and space to work on her book. “But I could not even consider applying for those things. I had a baby, I was recovering from a difficult delivery, and all my support systems were here at home.”
In order to continue working on her book, Mohammed structured her writing time around her newborn daughter’s sleep schedule. “I learned to edit on my iPad using a notation app and an Apple pencil so I could work at night while still in bed next to her crib.” The pockets of quiet time were unpredictable, and like Carol Shields, it wasn’t until Mohammad’s daughter started preschool that she was able to find time to work in longer stretches.
New York Times bestselling children’s book author Tracey Baptiste is no stranger to writing amid the chaos of parenthood. “My work day can easily be upended,” she says, “and the pandemic, with both of them going to school from home, really had a toll on my ability to be creative. Kids in the house are kids in the house, and it's energy-sapping even when they're old enough to make their own dinner.”
When Mohammed’s debut short story collection, Pleasantview, was released in May, she says felt more capable of setting boundaries between her life as a writer and a parent. Still, her daughter’s schedule comes first. “During the half day when she has online school and needs me to be available to help, I am there for her. However, I set aside at least two hours each school day to do something relevant to the writing process. On weekends, I can write longer because my husband is at home to care for and/or distract her. I have tried to explain things to my daughter as well. I've explained that Daddy goes out to work, Mummy goes into the study to work, so we need to respect Mummy's work time. I talk to her openly about my schedule of writerly commitments, and we plan ahead how she's going to spend that alone time (including what snacks I'm going to leave out for her).”
Tracey Baptiste has taken a similar approach to setting boundaries with her children through communication. “If I really need to focus and not be distracted, I let them know,” she says. “They’ve been pretty good about this since they were really little because I've been writing from home since they were babies. But there are times I just need to leave the house for a couple of days to get things done. Of course that takes some coordination so mostly I have to rely on their ability to be respectful of my time.” To do this, Baptiste relies on managing her kids’ expectations. “I usually let them know that I need x amount of time so they know how long until they can come get me for something. If they’re unavailable for me to tell them when I need to concentrate, I put a sticky note on my office door. I pretty much never close my office door, so they know not to come in if it's closed and there’s a note.”
But even when boundaries are clearly set, writing is too often considered a selfish act compared to mothering. The guilt a mother can experience when she spends time in her notebook or Word .doc can be an enormous emotional barrier. Celeste Mohammed was no stranger to this feeling as she finished her book, and before that, her MFA. “I was constantly stealing time in my study,” she says, “and wrestling with the guilt of not being with my daughter.”
The guilt factor is something Tracey Baptiste has noticed among her students at Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing program, many of whom are parents of young children. She advises that they remain gentle on themselves as they juggle writing alongside parenthood. “Doing both at the same time can be really rough,” she says. “But it’s also great when you’re making up stories and telling them to the kids and they’re eating it up. My kids don’t read my stories, but they do listen to me weaving random tales while I stare at the last dregs of juice in the fridge and wonder who’s to blame. Mostly I tell people that the writing stuff can wait. Kids forever need a signed trip form or a lucky sock or 1,500 perfectly-cut 3x2” pieces of orange stock paper at the last minute, so you do that stuff first. You can always write later.”
Sarah McColl embraces the challenge of writing while mothering. “I prefer to see my life not as in conflict to my work,” she says, “but as an animator of it.” In order to build community among fellow writers who are also mothers, she founded And/And/And, a creative writing group designed with moms in mind. “I wanted to create a group where people felt their identities as writers and mothers were really fucking valuable and important and interesting, because they are.”
The name And/And/And stems from an interview between Olivia Laing and Ali Smith in Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, in which Smith said of art-making, “It isn’t either/or. It’s and/and/and.” The line resonated strongly with McColl on the subject of creativity and parenthood, and it clearly resonates with other mothers as well—the inaugural session of And/And/And has sold out! She plans to open registration for a future session of the group very soon. Sign up for the free version of her newsletter for announcements.
Are you a writer who’s also a mom or caretaker?
I’d love to hear from you about the challenges you face in your work. Please consider leaving a comment sharing your experience!
(Also, you are all badasses. I bow down to you.)
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I am a mom of two young girls and definitely flat out stopped writing when the pandemic hit. Being at home with them 24/7 and balancing work and sanity has been challenging. I am just starting to feel creatively inspired again so this was perfectly timed with some expert advice!