How did motherhood change your creative practice? Motherhood radicalized me politically. It encouraged me to ask more questions about how society works. I remember sitting at home with my first baby and thinking, why the hell do we live in these single-family homes? Where are the secular communal spaces? The postpartum period lifted a veil from my eyes, and I saw into systems I had previously ignored as irrelevant to my young womanhood. I see now that this was a privileged ignorance. The issues that affect caregivers’ ability to raise their children--food insecurity, housing instability, patchwork childcare, divestment from public schools, lack of access to healthcare--affect all of society, of course, and profoundly. One cannot claim a social morality without some understanding paid to the foundational importance of the wellbeing of children. I became interested in change and creativity at the child’s level. I started taking childhood development courses at Merritt College, and I became a preschool teacher. So I guess motherhood took me away from my creative practice, in that my daily word count plummeted, but now I see it was only a temporary dormancy, a time for observation and experiential learning, and that I was strengthening my practice with literature and new relationships the entire time. I was growing as a feminist and as a storyteller.
Loved this!! I also experienced intense postpartum anxiety after my second and found myself nodding along to so much of your insight.
I experienced postpartum anxiety after my first. This was wonderfully stated.
It can be so overwhelming.
She articulated so many fuzzy concepts so clearly!