Jan 05 2009
Creating in All the Moments
I regularly read an online magazine for mothers called ‘Mamazine ‘ which is full of thoughtful, moving poems and columns featuring a variety of different mothers’ ‘voices’. What they all have in common is a desire to carve out some space for the recognition of their own experience, a large part of that being who they are beyond motherhood.
Today I read a Mamazine column called ‘Mothers of Invention’, about trying to live the creative life as a mother. It raised some important issues for me, such as how mothers make choices when faced with creative opportunities versus their duties as mothers. The author of the column, Jennifer New, who is also a yogi as well as writer and mother, mentions an actress who took an opportunity to act in a film in South Africa, even though it meant leaving her baby with her parents.
The reason she was able to feel good about this decision, reads the column, is that she realised that this opportunity would never come again, but her child would ‘not remember’ being separated from her. I found this quite difficult: I often come across this idea, that it doesn’t matter if you do something (short of outright abuse and neglect, of course, but even this is a relative concept) to a baby (such as leaving it to ‘cry it out’, or putting it in daycare very young, or in general ignoring its distress), since they don’t remember and they ‘grow up fine’. It’s lazy thinking and lacking in empathy for babies as human beings. It’s unfortunate that mothers have to come up with justifications like these, for making choices, because inevitably they do face the ‘you’re a bad mother’ lobby for almost everything they do. I agree that it’s unfair that fathers do not have to face the same potential judgements and heartrending choices, but fathers are notbiologically mothers and do not have the same role. No matter how ‘new man’ the father, all common sense and psychological and anthropological research, would indicate that babies are hard-wired to be breastfed and held close to their mothers for the large majority of their early time outside of the womb.
But, back to the creative life and how it can be stunted: Jennifer New quotes Tillie Olsen’s Silences, a book I am curious to read, which apparently is ‘angry’ about all the deferred, interrupted and silenced voices of women who had to juggle art with motherhood. While that is certainly a lamentable case of affairs, I found myself asking the question: why is is that art is valued in our society more than producing and rearing children? Why is a woman’s life ‘wasted’ if she has poured her creative energy into her children?
Of course, I know I would be frustrated creatively if I never put time into my writing, and I can only put it aside for short periods before I return to it. But I also know that this is only one cycle of my life, and that it won’t be long before the Pibler is in a different cycle too, and won’t need me as much as he does now. I feel sad that in the rush to take advantage of creative ‘opportunities’, and more importantly, a fear of never having those chances again, of losing one’s creative identity, the once in a lifetime opportunity to ‘be here now’ as Buddhists would say, with your child in his or her formative years, is lost. And no, I don’t think that by saying that, I am glorifying motherhood as the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life. In fact one of the most uneasy contradictions of my life is between my feminism and my passionate attachment-parenting approach. A good friend of mine, who struggles with the same dilemma, puts it well: she said that she is a feminist, but also first and foremost, a humanist, and the needs of babies as human beings in a dependent and fragile state, must be honoured. This contrasts to Jennifer New’s statement that: “A mother’s needs, even creative ones, can and should sometimes come first.” Hhhmm.
On a lighter note, however, I was struck by the depiction of the artist character Clara, mother of three children, in Lavinia Greenlaw’s An Irresponsible Age which I blogged about recently. Clara’ s husband takes the children out for the day so that she can finally get on with some work. Clara, of course, finds herself unable to work, and seizes on the smallest chance to get away from the empty canvas by turning her sister’s phone call into a crisis that she simply has to drop everything to go and respond to. The author describes her driving off ‘joyfully’. I laughed at this scene, because I have experienced something like it often enough. Clara is described as being unable to create in large swathes of time, only small snatched moments, as she is now used to that, and finds too much time quite intimidating. It’s as if she’s afraid that, once she started going, she wouldn’t want to stop, and it would be even more challenging to take up the mantle of motherhood again when her children return. I think you can create as a mother, just in a different way, and the whole journey of motherhood is so much about opening up to new ways of being anyway. Everything doesn’t have to be about a straightforward linear path of progression through hard focussed work - that’s such a masculine-centred idea! Let’s be open to creating in all the moments of our lives, whether it be creating a beautiful relationship with one’s children or creating a piece of art.
