Did I Choose Motherhood Over a Creative Life?

Sometimes I feel like I chose motherhood over a creative life. I chose it of course without knowing that was the choice I was making. When having a child was always a part of your life plan, it isn’t something you question doing when the opportunity finally permits.

Being a parent is diving into the unknown and that, in itself, holds a certain kind of thrill. Who will this little person be, how will it feel, how will it change me? And then the child arrives and you realize you underestimated all of it.

You could not even begin to fathom all that you had just given up but it comes into immediate focus the first week home with your child. The love is intense and leaves you awe-struck but so does the reality of what you just signed up for.

Gone immediately was space inside of yourself. The breathing room. The thinking room. The room to do anything at all was suddenly sucked out of every aspect of your life. Your child becomes everything. Your child needs everything.

How could you know beforehand the devotion that was necessary to raise a child?

You can imagine it, sure, but how could you really know without first experiencing the constant, second-by-second, ever-present demand of their needs and feelings and wants and frustrations.

The fact that it doesn’t stop.

They need you for everything.

All the time.

How could you fully grasp the effort and change that would be necessary in yourself in order to be the mother you imagined you would be?

How could you know without first hitting up against the limits of your capacity, the limits of your kindness, the limits of your patience?

How could you know it until you see that alongside the nurture side of you there is also the worst side of you that can flair up under great stress, lack of sleep, and not enough space for your soul?

You could never have known what it would feel like to have your own life’s creative drive — all that energy inside you — completely interrupted, redirected, and dare I say, snuffed out. Gone. There’s no room for that now.

For the first few years, any small windows of time you have go to an unlikely new longing to clean the house because the only order you can keep and sanity you can maintain is in the environment of your current surroundings.

Never before have you longed so much to fold towels, put clothes away, keep a clean kitchen, and put away belongings in an orderly way. This is the transformation that comes from being in absolute survival mode.

Forget your creative aspirations. We have to be grounded in the practical-now of doctor’s appointments and preschool registrations.

It’s not who I was — but it was who I had to become — and I’m not sorry for it.

Sometimes if you’re lucky, within small slivers of time, you will experience bursts of creative moments.

This is one of those moments.

As I write this, I have been interrupted 5 times.

There was screaming about the discovery of a small spider, screaming because they are afraid of the cat (understandably), and then, of course, screaming between siblings. All of this interspersed with the pressured whines of bored, hungry bellies.

It is true that my spirit is depressed as I write this. A small cry will lift it and I will have one soon on the couch with my husband once the kids go to bed. He will put a supportive, firm hand on my shoulder. He won’t know what to say but I know I have his support.

Or perhaps it will just take a moment of cuteness to lift the veil. My six-year-old fiercely advocating for herself always brings me a sense of joy and awe. I have to try not to smile in those moments because I think she is amazing.

It is often my devotion to them that cuts through my own longing, bringing me back to the present moment.

For although I long to write, this was something I also longed for: to be in total communion with another human being.

To feel such sweet tenderness between me and another person.

To provide for them.

To love them the way I wish I had been loved — more affectionately and more consistently.

I can forget sometimes that I longed to be a provider and to give my whole heart over to another little person.

To witness them blossom into being and to experience my own self blossom into mother.

And here I am, with that which I longed for.

If I desired to be an emotional provider, my cup now runneth over.

I know how lucky I am to have this chance. Gratitude, without a doubt, is a feeling that wraps itself around the whole of my life. But it is also okay to talk about the grief — for being a mother is not without loss.

The ideas, the thoughts, the words, and the creative impulses that pass through a woman’s mind — while she sits there saddled with a baby on her breast and a toddler climbing her back, unable to act on ANY of them — are worth grieving.

It is important for us to realize that mothers everywhere are not just holding their babies.

They are holding their own life’s potential and the intense longing to achieve it.

After all, the energy that gets poured into a child is the energy that no longer goes into a woman’s own life. There is a sacrifice in that.

And I suppose that is what I am making room for in writing this. To put words to that feeling and to that pain.

The gift of parenting, of course, is that my children demand that I surrender all of it. Surrender to the moment, again and again and again.

Despite my hurried need to be somewhere else on time, can I take in the lady bug on the leaf that their little eyes have discovered? Can I meet them in their need to climb around the car for a moment, satisfying their hungry curiosity for what buttons do, before being held back by carseats and straps?

Yes, to be the parent I wish to be, I must surrender my preoccupation with being anywhere than right here. At all times. As much as I can be. To put aside the things I would sometimes rather be doing, need to be doing, want to be doing, and instead come right into relationship with the present moment, with the present gift of their aliveness bubbling over.

How could this surrender NOT influence my writing and my creative being?

How could this tension within not become its own alchemy of clarity?

Years spent not able to do what we want to do means we become even more clear about what it is we WANT to do.

As the high-demand years pass, those slivers of time become less about folding towels and more about tending to a deeper, creative self.

I ask parents of older children if it gets easier and when they say “no,” I silently resent them for withholding hope and what I suspect is also the truth: which is that, of course, it gets fucking easier! I realize parenting will always have different challenges, but if it means I can have longer stretches of uninterrupted time, lord, that is easier.

I know — trust me — I know the space I ache for now will one day be the space that exists between me and my children.

Space that will bring up a different kind of ache than the one I am feeling, highlighting the reality that grief lives on both sides of motherhood and even the spaces in between.

And so I try to sink deeply into the moment, receiving it, relishing it, because I know it will pass.

I bear the longing and delight in the having,

But I track closely when I begin to feel mangled and desperate and suffocated inside because that is how I know I need to write. Writing is how I stay fed so that I can keep feeding my children. Writing is how I stay connected to my soul.

For now another interruption.

Another scream for me from the bedroom. And so with the capacity hard-earned over the last six years, I put myself aside and stand up to meet the need.