I might be particularly attuned to this stuff, but I feel I’m always reading about women – mothers – I admire powering triumphantly through the very real obstacles of early parenthood, creating and innovating in nap times, evenings and early mornings. “Though time for writing is now more scarce – she mentions the ‘in between’ moments snatched in the car and the office – motherhood has made her a ‘better writer’.” That’s a recent interview with the author Kiley Reid. A Vogue article on motherhood and creativity last year had several examples: “I found motivation and grit I had never felt before,” one interviewee announced; another “wrote her first book between the hours of 4am and 6am during the first two years of her daughter’s life”. Caitlin Moran expands on the idea at length in How to Be a Woman: “In the tiny windows of time that your child is asleep or someone else is looking after her, you find yourself becoming almost superhumanly productive. Give a new mother a sleeping child for an hour, and she can achieve 10 times more than a childless person.”
These women aren’t boasting; they’re exploring some variation on “How do you do it?” or “How has being a parent influenced your work?” (questions almost never asked of fathers). It’s a vital corrective to the long-held assumption that a working mother is less-than, distracted and conflicted; to what Vogue called “the common perception that once a woman has a baby, she will automatically have no time or energy left for writing” (or for whatever her job is).
But I worry about this counter-narrative becoming an alternative default assumption: “All mothers are superwomen!” What if you aren’t transfigured by a fiery new focus? Maybe the support or the internal reserves you need to get up at 5am or condense a day’s work into snatched minutes are lacking? Maybe you just don’t feel any transformative urgency at all; you feel anxious, fuzzy, bone-tired, and you just want a lie down and a sandwich?
I wrote nothing until my sons were four and six and I was hardly killing it at my day job, either. In those six years, I spent 18 months not working, four months working self-destructively hard and the four subsequent months having an inevitable, full-on breakdown. The rest of the time I worked part-time (no one remarked on my efficiency, or organisation). I achieved nothing on non-working days; my only ambition during nap time was to read the whole internet (it was smaller back then).
I felt dismantled on a cellular level, and I mention it because I felt huge relief reading writer and illustrator Sophie Lucido Johnson articulate her similar recent experience. “I feel I have been obliterated,” she wrote, “turned into a mushy goo, the way a caterpillar gets in a cocoon, but instead of coming out as a butterfly, I have come out as a goo-person.”
Even if you still have that hunger, circumstances can conspire against you. Leslie Jamison, writing in the New Yorker this month, articulates beautifully the conflict between wanting to create and needing to parent: “I wanted a life that was 90% thinking about the complexities of consciousness, and just 10% buying pouches of purée. But this was not the life I’d signed up for.” Sometimes you make it work through sheer determination; sometimes you can’t; sometimes the struggle breaks you for a while.
Look at her now, though, writing her heart out. I started writing on the internet as well as staring at it too, though it took 15 stumbling years to make it my job. All of which makes me wish we could keep some space for more nuance, for new and newish parents to be neither write-offs, nor marvels of multi-tasking efficiency. We aren’t set up as a society to give most mothers what they need to achieve great things; it’s not helpful to expect them to squeeze great things out in nap time (though huge admiration and respect to those who do).
And for the goo-people, keep the faith: something will emerge from the cocoon. It may not be what you expect, but it will be worth waiting for.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
