deadlines

on mothering while writing

Earlier this week I took a Zoom call that had taken some arranging, and held some significance. It was a Monday, one of the two weekdays I have my son, and I had failed to convince him to sleep. I had told him to choose some books or a puzzle, shut his bedroom door and hoped for the best. We had barely got into the niceties when I saw him walk down the stairs, where the roofer was sitting, waiting for a phone call himself. I explained this to the agent I was speaking with without apology - when we set up the call, I had said I’d no childcare that day - and the roofer shouted back to say it was alright, he would watch him. And so the call, this significant call that I had been anticipating for some time, took place in my kitchen to the background strains of my bathroom being tiled and my child presenting his farmyard animals gleefully to this kind and patient man.

A few days earlier, the man driving me to the station after an event a rural literary festival asked me how I managed it; how I did “all this” with a child. I told him I had a supportive, co-parenting husband and childcare three days a week. But the unspoken thing was that sometimes everything is done at once, without planning, while putting my brain in two or three or six places simultaneously, because that is the way it has to be done.

I was speaking in Manchester last night when someone asked me how my matrescence had been. I replied that recently I had felt like I was finally emerging from it mere weeks away from knowing I will undergo it again with the birth of my second child. I loved my matrescence and I was fascinated by it and it stole things from me. Sometimes the timing feels cruel.

This year I wrote a novel during my second trimester because I feared that if I didn’t I never would.

I thought this would be an essay. I thought I would pitch it at a magazine, something pointed and declarative, sparked by the headline on Sarah Perry’s nuanced, honest and moving piece about choosing a child-less (her preferred term) literary life over one that had a child - and, it should be mentioned, fertility treatment - in it at the expense of a writing career. The headline (‘I wanted to write more than I wanted to have children’: author Sarah Perry on rejecting motherhood) is both true and inflammatory at the same time. Perry did want to write more than she wanted to have children, and explains her understandable desires at length. But it rankled me because it falls into the same old category that refuses to wear thin: that women have to choose. Creative life or motherhood. Writing or mothering. Never both.

Right now I am writing this in a hotel bed several hundred miles away from my child, eyes on my phone after a missed call, wondering if he is tantruming.

There’s a lot I relate to in Perry’s essay. Being surrounded by anecdotal portrayals of “unhappy mothers” (I’ve written about this before); feeling your anticipated child-free future transform into one of imagined children, quite outside of your control.

Around this stage in my last pregnancy, I received a flurry of long and loving voicenotes from a fellow writer, one whom I admired but didn’t know well, explaining how possible it was to have both - to write and mother, that the latter fundamentally changed the former but often for the better. That it was all a kind of creation. I thought of these lifelines when Perry writes of the “clever and vital woman” who loved both her work and her children, who caused her to cry. How many other women have shut the door on one ambition because they have been told it did not fit with another? Who is making these doors, who is closing them?

In Why Women Grow I wrote about how I fear a baby will steal me from my words. In Hark I wrote about how uneasy I am writing about motherhood, how deeply my self-misogyny, my dismissal of motherhood is ingrained. It is still there, I confessed to it last night on stage, during a talk about it all. I am lucky enough to be told that these things are important, frequently and by strangers, and yet I still question it. There is always an inner voice asking me who actually cares.

Before I had my son I was convinced I would take him on tour with me. I did, a bit, but he was compliant and then active and I realised that it was easier - more freeing, really - to leave him with another person who loved him. I am days away from stopping work. My body is no longer comfortable in most chairs. As I write this I can feel small hands and elbows and ankles pushing against my organs like a breaching whale. I tell myself I will rework the novel while they are small and in a basket by my feet. Like their brother, they will spend their first few weeks becoming familiar with the sound of a keyboard tapping. It feels both naive and hopeful to write this.

There is privilege in all of this. Fertility privilege - masses of it, of which I am increasingly aware each day - but also the privileges of space and money and health. I have straightforward pregnancies. My son was a straightforward newborn. My co-parent is the only person I trust to read my work when it is nascent. I am wildly fortunate to live in a house where there is room for me to have a desk and for my children to sleep in separate rooms. This has not always been the case, but I have never, as a dear writer friend recently explained, had to turn the surface in which I write into one in which I change nappies. These things are important, they make having both far easier.

But writing and mothering has also broken me. When my son was very young a photographer came and took photographs of the pair of us together in the shed I’d installed in the back garden to write in. The board I plot my books out on sits behind us, bear. I nuzzle his neck, my mouth a knowing, closed-lipped smile. He’s barely out of his newborn stage; his limbs are stiff with ignorance. I’m wearing the vintage Wrangler cords I bought days before I fell pregnant in a heatwave and barely wore again. Days after those photographs were taken he would develop an infection that nearly killed him.

I look back at those photographs and I see a different kind of woman. I wonder who she would have become had my son not fallen ill. Had I not left the hospital with a recovering child, my brain a looping, fragmented mass of adrenaline and trauma that would fundamentally change my personality. Would I have written as good a book in the aftermath? Would I have broken at another point? Would I have continued to offer only the glossiest portraits of it all, never the mania or the defeat, the silent tears beneath the kitchen table as I picked up the food I had cooked that never went in his stubborn mouth?

We’ll not know. I still feel as naive as I did before I gave birth the first time. I still feel like a rookie.

Maybe we feel we have to choose because so many of the things we want are dismissed. One of the nicest parts about being pregnant after having a living child is that people, even those who love you the most, even yourself, tend not to fuss about it. I have not been subject to the tidal wave of uninvited warning disguised as advice.

People have started to wish me luck, rather than congratulations. It is kind, but I find it peculiar; it makes me think of labour wards and bleeping machines and colic. I am so lucky already.

What if we wished one another courage instead. These are bold and brave acts, perhaps that’s why we make women pick between them. It is bold to unfurl a day having not slept in the night. It is brave to state that we want both. But some of us do, both and more besides. I do. I have. I will.

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