Warning: motherhood may alter how you use one of these. via {amy} @ flickr
It’s kind of a no-brainer to say that things change when you become a parent. Sometimes the changes are the ones you expect; sometimes not. The thing is that it seems like the only time people talk about this phenomenon is when it applies to mothers. Case in point: an article originally published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that popped up in my Google alert last night when it was reprinted in another paper. The article was originally written the day before Mother’s Day, which I suppose explains why it focuses solely on mothers who are writers and not parents of both genders. Still, it rankled to read sentences like this:
But motherhood does things to writers – from stealing their time to swelling their emotions to making them silly and dizzy with this strange, overwhelming protective love for another human. They’d often rather be with this human who’s taken over their life, their thoughts, their fears. And yet, there is their artistic impulse, a call so strong they cannot go long without yielding to its siren song.
Wait, huh? “Swelling their emotions” and “making them silly and dizzy”? That’s either a colossally bad choice of words, or writer Geeta Sharma-Jensen truly believes that women are carried away by fluctuating emotions the moment they become mothers. It also implies that every single writer who happens to be a mother is inevitably going to have their writing style overtly influenced by parenthood. And what’s with calling a child someone who has “taken over their life”? This piece is basically saying that women who write after succumbing to maternal instinct are performing the literary equivalent of drunk driving. It could just be called Writing Under the Influence.
Look, motherhood can be a key component in women’s lives. God knows that it was foremost in my thoughts when I was prepping to have my own wee bairn. But I don’t think it had any demonstrable effect on my writing. In fact, I think my fellow Harpies would wonder what the fuck was happening if I suddenly started writing nonstop about how “silly and dizzy” I felt whenever I touched my stomach, or if I only wrote about things related to motherhood, or if I became a totally different person under the influence of motherhood. Maybe instead of sarah.of.a.lesser.god, I would be expected to become sarah.of.a.greater.hormonal.imbalance. Doesn’t sound very catchy, does it?
Some of the writers quoted in the piece sound far more reasonable than Sharma-Jensen would make them out to be:
“Before, I understood the mother-child relationship from the children’s point of view,” says novelist and children’s author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, the mother of two sons. “(But) as soon as they were born, I had firsthand experience of how a mother feels. And so, more children began to appear in my poems and stories.”
Okay, that makes sense. A lot of people write what they know, so Divakaruni’s progression towards including more children in her work is understandable. But Sharma-Jensen also wonders if novels such as A Map of the World and The Deep End of the Ocean were motivated by the authors’ status as mothers: “Were those novels prompted by a subconscious fear of losing a child?” Well, maybe. Then again, maybe Lord of the Rings was prompted by J.R.R. Tolkien’s subconscious fear of a giant flaming eyeball and long-buried desire for tiny people with hairy feet. In other words, women can write about motherhood without it being an explicit representation of their own personal experiences. Motherhood is not a monolithic entity that every woman handles the same way, and not every writer who is a mother channels their energies in the way that Sharma-Jensen purports they do. Mothers, like all women, are individuals. What a concept.
(Side note: Has anyone ever seen an article talking about this concept within the structure of fatherhood? I honestly have never seen it. But I’ve also never seen men described as being “silly and dizzy” over paternity. Yeah, I can’t help but come back to that phrase; it really pisses me off.)
“This piece is basically saying that women who write after succumbing to maternal instinct are performing the literary equivalent of drunk driving.”
lol. and we all know a father wouldn’t be described as silly and dizzy.
hell, for the father to be mentioned at all would be great.
As someone who writes for a living, has a child and is pregnant with another I think this article is a load of old bollocks. The only thing i experienced while pregnant and later once my daughter was born was an overwhelming desire to write – where before i’d been prone to procrastinating, reading books, going out, i found myself far more focussed on my work because I had to fit it in around said child as i couldn’t initially afford childcare. Also writing was such a release for me. I wrote pieces for UK papers within 24 hours of being released from the hospital after giving birth (not pieces about childbirth or motherhood though, one was about horse racing and the other about The Wire)
That said I do find it interesting that when men are writers it’s a job and they go and work in their studies or wherever and its like any other job but when women are writers it’s often seen as ‘oh well you can raised the children as well can’t you, it’s not like it’s a real career’. There was a really good piece about this in one of the UK papers about three years ago.
To your point about whether this theory is supposed to apply to male writers: NO. Wimminz and their hormones! They make female writers all silly and dizzy and hysterical and overly obsessed with nursing metaphors and whatever.
It’s interesting that you bring up J.R.R Tolkien, because some scholars believe Lord of the Rings was influenced by his sons serving in WWII, although he denies this. Can you imagine if Tolkien was called “silly and dizzy” though? No, hobbits and Gollum are serious business!
As a non-parent, I feel kind of like I’m… not allowed to have an opinion about this kind of thing? So I hope I don’t say anything that gives offence; I’m here to learn!
It seems like this article is the product of the idea that motherhood is/should be the sole focus of a woman’s existence. This kind of reductivist thinking can go in any direction. It can lead to the argument that motherhood turns writers into giddy goofballs whose writing skills suffer; it might also lead to the argument that no one really understands love/life/what-have-you until they become mothers, therefore motherhood is almost necessary to be a good writer. Anything along these lines reduces women to their reproductive status, and it’s aggravating in the extreme.
@Kari: Oh, you are totally allowed to have an opinion about it. My stance on this kind of article didn’t change when I got pregnant, because I always thought this stuff reeked of idiocy. A woman is more than the sum of her reproductive parts, whether she’s a writer or a lawyer or even a stay-at-home mom. And to assume every mother who’s a writer deals with it the same way is blatantly offensive.
@emilyanne: I was hoping you’d weigh in on this! Like you, I didn’t start writing books of lullabies once I learned I was pregnant. You can write what you know, but that doesn’t have to be all you write about. Oy.
This particular debate is raging on Susan Orlean’s Twitter at the moment.
http://twitter.com/susanorlean
yeah, i hate this kind of thinking, whether it comes from men or from women who spout the “you’re not a real woman/you can’t understand the meaning of life until you have kids” line.
FWIW, this Salon piece from yesterday does in fact address a “dude’s” perspective on how parenting changed him. Still processing what I think about it – horrid title aside, there are some interesting points. And other points that make me gnash my teeth.
There’s an absolutely beautiful book on this subject called “The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood” by an Australian author Rachel Power. She interviews artists who are mothers and talks about the way these women are redefining what it is to be an artist.
The traditional view of an artist is that of the solitary man locked away in his room for hours on end. Of course, this is ignoring the fact that for this man to live there is usually a wife, or a sister, or a maid who has dedicated her life to supporting him.
The women she interviews are forging new ground. Some might argue too that growing a baby inside you is one of nature’s ultimate ‘artistic’ acts!
s.o.a.l.g, are you saying that you weren’t going to change your screen name to babymama.of.a.lesser.god?
@blue_streak: Tolkien was famously adamant about how Rings was not any kind of allegory, once saying, “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.” He made a point about the divergence between allegory and applicability, and I think Geeta Sharma-Jensen could stand to learn that lesson.
@PhDork: Maybe sum.of.the.spare.parts.of.a.uterus.of.a.lesser.god?
@Jemima4 @Magda @ShinyObjects: Thank y’all for the reading suggestions! The Mommy (and Daddy) Wars continue.
I’m not a writer, but I am a mother. Words can’t describe the rage! Perhaps I speak only for myself (but I think not) when I say that after having a kid, I became more successful in my professional life. I attribute this solely to the point I was at in my career. Nothing to do with motherhood except, possibly, I have to be more on my toes because parenting is a major scheduling nightmare.
There are women who, on having a patriarchy-prescribed experience, immediately describe it as universal. Geeta Sharma-Jensen is welcome to explore and enjoy her maternal dizziness. Please leave the rest of us out of it.
I work with writers–mostly males. Whenever one of them becomes a parent, they fall off the map for a little while and are hard to pin down for information, email responses, edits, etc.
This has nothing to do with being male/female and everything to do with a big, fucking event happening in their personal lives that temporarily puts them out of sorts. I treat them the same way I do when a traumatic event happens: they get time and space to come to terms with their new arrangement.