Creating Life

“Mommy, when you’re a mommy and an artist, does being a mommy have to come first?”

My daughter was six years old. We were lying on the living room floor late one afternoon in front of the fire. I remember being tired.

At the time, my daughter’s greatest ambition was to be an artist. She had several schemes for how this might work in her life. She thought she might be a kindergarten teacher, so that half of her days would be free to make art. She thought she might have an art gallery, staffed entirely by members of our family (I was to be in charge of a daycare center), so that she could be free to make art to put in the gallery.

I remember being tired. I remember her small body next to my larger one, both of us looking up at the ceiling. I remember being very aware that it was important for me to answer the question thoughtfully. Carefully. Correctly.

“Well,” I said, “I think when you are a mommy, for most of us that’s what we want to come first.”

“But does it have to?”

Careful, careful…

“I don’t know if that’s the right way to think about it,” I finally said.

“I’m not going to be a mommy,” she stated matter-of-factly. “I always want my art to come first.”

Ohshitohshitohshit, I remember thinking.

How to respond in such a way that I might serve both the girl in front of me and the woman she will become? How to be honest (because she has a sense for dissembling sharper than any I’ve known)? How to answer this question that so many women have struggled to answer? That I have struggled to answer?

Let’s re-frame the premise, I remember thinking.

“You know,” I said, “you don’t have to choose. You can be a mommy and still be an artist.”

Not entirely true, but not entirely false. Good enough?

“But I want my art to come first. And if you’re a mommy, that should come first.”

“Lots of women do both. You can, too.”

I remember her looking directly at me. “But you don’t,” she said.

BAM.

Oh, I thought, as her words walloped me. Why is this so hard? “This” being all of it–parenting, art-making, making a living. Being so goddamned tired all the time.

It was not the first time, and most certainly not the last, that I knew with swift, sharp clarity that every single choice I made was teaching my children something about how to live, and that my actions carried more weight than my words ever would or could.

What was I teaching her about how to be a woman? How to make a meaningful life? About serving others and serving ourselves?

She knew that I had a published book. She and her twin brother and father had traveled with me for poetry readings, where she’d seen me on stage, reading my work. I had thought I was a pretty bang-up role model, being a fully-present mom, a published writer, and, through my work as a teacher, a financially independent wife. Apparently, however, she knew that I wasn’t doing much writing. And, clearly, she was attributing that to my being a mother. Her mother.

Shit.

“No,” I said, knowing I had to tell the truth. “I don’t very much.”

In Daily Rituals: Women at Work, Mason Currey profiles 143 artists on “how they paint, write, perform, direct, choreograph, design, sculpt, compose, dance, etc.” In it, he shares that Alice Walker moved three times across the country in search of the right place to write what would become The Color Purple, and that during the extended period of those moves her daughter stayed with her father, Walker’s ex-husband.

Reading that, my first thought was, How could she do that? I could never have done that. It was not a thought of judgement, but one of genuine wondering. When my children were young, I hated to miss even one bedtime. I rarely did. Nothing I said to my daughter about mothering in that long-ago fireside chat was untrue. I wanted my children to come first. When they were born, I thought: No poem I could ever write will mean as much to me as this. And that was–is–true, too. Raising my children was often absorbing creative and intellectual work, and writing was third (or fifth or tenth) because it was never as compelling as mothering or as necessary as the income needed to support the mothering. I was not a martyr. I was doing what I wanted to do. (Just not everything I wanted to do.)

Once Walker settled in what became the right place–meaning, the one in which her characters “started talking to her”–her daughter joined her. In Currey’s account, Walker felt she found a way to productively write and care for her child, but her daughter Rebecca’s experience was quite different: “…in her telling, being the child of an author who was so deeply absorbed in her characters’ lives was profoundly destabilizing.” So much so, it is implied, that the adult Rebecca became estranged from her mother.

As I dip in and out of Currey’s book, I’m drawn to the stories of women who both created art and raised children, particularly the writers. Again and again, reading his accounts of their daily ways of working, I have thought: I could never have made that choice.

I suppose I picked up the Currey book because I find myself again in a place with choices to make, and I’m looking for models of how I might work and live. I suppose I have been remembering that long-ago afternoon with my daughter because she and her twin brother have just celebrated another birthday, an annual time of reckoning for me. They are no longer, in any way, children. They are young adults. With every birthday their lives have become more and more their own creation, not mine. In that shifting, that turning over, a space has been opening for me that now yawns wide.

In a recent conversation with my mother about life choices ahead of us both, I mentioned that I am open to “radical lifestyle changes.”

“Maybe you can finally write that trashy best-seller,” she said, laughing a bit.

The trashy best-seller I might write has been a long-running joke/fantasy, shorthand for her wish that I might find a way to both make the money I need and to write things that matter to me.

I laughed, too, though to see that she still sees me as a writer, still sees that as a possibility, after all this time of mostly not-writing, took me close to tears.

“No,” I said, “you know I’ve never really been interested in that.”

I paused. “But maybe I can finally write.”

It felt risky to say that out loud. Like, singing in public or taking off my clothes risky. (It feels that way to write the words here, too.)

To be honest, I don’t know if I want to write anything more than I do here. To be honest, I feel so worn down I don’t know if I’m capable of knowing (right now) what I want to do in the space that’s opened, or the one I might blow open through radical change. Since learning of the passing of my friend and mentor, Robert, I have been keeping an intention to write here at least once a week. It is partly my way of honoring what he gave me, and partly my way of trying to take care of myself by prioritizing creative work. The more I do this, though, the more that tensions long buried have risen to the surface.

In Currey’s book of over 400 women, most profiles seem to fall into one of two categories: women who immersed themselves in their art and didn’t raise families, or those who did both and endured significant challenges in one realm or the other. And that’s the women who weren’t also doing some kind of other work to pay the bills.

What painful relief it was to read about a different Walker: Margaret, the author of Jubilee, a novel she began at 19 but didn’t finish until she was in her early 50s, after teaching for 30 years and raising 4 children. Currey quotes Walker’s response to a question about about how she finds time to write with a family and teaching job: “‘I don’t,'” she said. “‘…It is humanly impossible for a woman who is a wife and mother to work on a regular teaching job and write.'”

Certainly, there are women who do teach and write and mother, and my intention is not to disparage mothers who create or imply that they are lesser mothers or artists. I just appreciate the acknowledgement that, for at least some of us, it is not possible–and, more importantly, to see that it is possible to do significant creative work later in life. Walker said that her inability to work on her novel was “agonizing,” and she feared that she’d never be able to finish it, but also that, in the end, time served the work: “‘Despite all of that, Jubilee is the product of a mature person. When I started out with the book, I didn’t know half of what I now know about life. That I learned during those thirty years…'”

Unlike Walker, I have no Jubilee that’s been percolating in my mind over the past three decades. I have no Yale Younger Poets Award or a prestigious academic career or anything to my writerly name other than one slim volume of poetry and a blog whose daily page views rarely top 100. What I’m saying is, there’s nothing I’m burning to write, and my prospects for accessing outside resources to support writing are as slim as my chances of writing something as important as the novels of either Walker.

But that’s OK. That’s not what this post is really about. It’s about the question my daughter asked me when she was 6, and all the other questions embedded within it: How important is creative work? How do we incorporate it into the whole of our lives? How do we make choices about what to prioritize? What matters most, and when? It’s not about the business of writing or standard measures of success, but simply about the need many of us have to create in whatever ways compel us–and what happens to us if we don’t meet it. For years I poured my creativity into mothering and teaching, which largely satisfied that need for me, but neither of those is an outlet for it now, and there isn’t much, or enough, or the right kind, available in the work that’s replaced those vocations.

As I did that afternoon on the rug in front of the fireplace, I feel the importance of the questions in front of me. In preparing to answer them again, I again feel the need to be thoughtful. Careful. Correct. Not so much for my child this time (though she’s still watching, I know), but for me.

Extra Credit:

Rebecca Walker Explains Rift with Mother, Alice” from NPR

Taking Care of the Truth–Embedded Slander: A Meditation on the Complicity of Wikipedia,” by Alice Walker

“‘Sponsored’ by My Husband: Why It’s a Problem that Writers Never Talk About Where Their Money Comes From” by Ann Bauer

Feminism and Tillie Olson’s Silences by Bianca Lech (or better yet, read Silences, a work that shook me way back in the day)

12 thoughts on “Creating Life

  1. Lucretia says:

    I don’t know how I found your blog but you write so well (so rare in blogs) and I always enjoy reading. Your need to create is compelling. I hope you keep writing and creating and storytelling and remembering.

  2. Marian says:

    Oh Rita. You probably don’t want a novella in your comment section, so I’ll just say this whole question of combining motherhood with other things—whether those things are working at a job or working at creative endeavours—is something I think about on a daily basis. (Yup. Daily. Ever since becoming a mother.) It has actually been a huge source of angst for me, because I was, once upon a time, a really smart girl who was supposed to be successful. (And yes, I know we aren’t “supposed” to care what other people think, and we shouldn’t use others to measure our success, but it really does drive me up a creek that there isn’t a better understanding of what it actually takes to be able to pull off success (whatever that is) in more than one or two areas of life. And also, that the value—and work—of motherhood is only given lip service.)

    I’m going to have to come back to do the extra credit in a couple of weeks, because I’ve got a huge assignment due soon. (Speaking of being in one’s early 50s and finally trying to be a writer, or an editor, or anything, really, that will allow me to work with words in some capacity.)

    • Rita says:

      I hope your huge assignment is going along swimmingly. I love that you are pursuing your desire to work with words in some capacity. They are clearly the medium you’re meant for. I was a smart girl who was supposed to be successful, too. I wish I’d spent more time a long time ago really thinking about what success means to me, rather than simply accepting what I thought were the standard measures of it. I don’t know that my life would look all that different, but I might have felt differently about it. I’m glad there’s still time to do that thinking and some ability to act upon it (like you are).

  3. TD says:

    Rita, your Sunday weekly post is lovely today. I especially enjoy reading your thoughts reflecting upon how you remember your children and your reflections of your intentions; how that is part of where you are now on your journey of life.
    Always moved by your writing!

    I wondered if your daughter is pursuing the creative arts field as a livilyhood?

    • Rita says:

      Thank you, TD. My daughter is still figuring out questions about her livelihood, but she remains a highly creative person. (Which makes me glad)

  4. Kari Wagner Hoban says:

    “I was not a martyr. I was doing what I wanted to do. (Just not everything I wanted to do.)”

    You just described my life in one sentence.

    I love this piece so much but I love every single thing you write. I think so many moms (me included) struggle with the tug-o-war of motherhood. Wanting to do something that makes your soul soar and feeling bad that motherhood doesn’t always fill that gap.

    The question your daughter asked at age 6 is pretty astounding in many ways and also makes me sad. Did she ask her dad the same question? Probably not. 🙁
    Kari Wagner Hoban recently posted…Making John Hughes Proud at the Skydeck Chicago Sears TowerMy Profile

    • Rita says:

      No, she wouldn’t have asked her dad that question. He didn’t have any side gigs like me, but now that your question is prompting me to look back, I can see that our lives absolutely made room for his passions. I never really saw that at the time. I was absolutely gob-smacked by her question, though. To see how much she was thinking about questions I didn’t even consider until I was much older. This generation is so different from ours (and I think that’s a great thing!)

  5. Kate says:

    I’ve come back to this post a few different times. I loved this line in particular: I was not a martyr. I was doing what I wanted to do. (Just not everything I wanted to do.). Discussing the balance of motherhood, ambition, careers has been big in our house off and on the last few years. I wasn’t a very good juggler and having the option to give up a career to do the work I saw need doing, I took it. Now, I wonder if my choices to give up my own ambitions haven’t accidentally taught my children that it’s best to be either/or. I’m frustrated that women fight these battles while men seemingly don’t. (Not to get all macro.)

    Anyway, I hope as you think about the time you do have opening up to you, that you find something that brings you a great deal of joy and satisfaction. And I’m grateful for your writing here. You really have a gift and you’ve honed it.

    • Rita says:

      Macro is one of my favorite things to get. I think no matter what we do, our children are going to draw their own conclusions, and there’s no one right way answer these questions. I’m guessing most of us do what we have to do. I think I probably thought I had more influence or control over their thinking than I actually did. What I most wanted them to know was that I loved them and that they were more important to me than anything (because they were). I think they did. Do. That men, in general, don’t have this struggle can make me angry (and sometimes does) and can make me feel a bit sorry for them. The struggle comes from a place of passionate caring (or it did for me, anyway). I’m glad I got to feel that. I’m glad I got to create a childhood for them.

      I’m not a great juggler, either. I’m glad you were able to make the choice that feels best for you and your family. I often wished I could have made a choice more like yours–but I know that there are always trade-offs. Thanks for the words of encouragement.

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