Ten of My Favorite Pieces on Creativity and Motherhood This Year
The connection between creativity and motherhood is just starting to become a part of mainstream conversation, and it still tends to be very white, academic, bourgeoisie, and focused on productivity rather than inspiration and wonder. But slowly the light we are shining on these topics here at Mothers Who Make and beyond is deepening the discussion, showing what’s possible, and celebrating the amazing work that women around the world are doing every day. (They’re talking about it in Vogue for goodness sakes!) These are the pieces that stayed with me this year. Some make me want to weep, wondering “Why is life so hard?” Others make me want to run out into the street, shake people, and shout “Put women in charge! We are ready to make art and lead us to peace!” because we are witnessing, grieving, believing, loving, and not just giving birth, but breathing life into this world, in essential ways.
My Disabled Body Prepared Me For Motherhood Like Nothing Else Could by Rebekah Taussig
Culturally, we’ve inscribed so much meaning into the images of a pregnant belly and a visibly disabled body. The former is shorthand for life in abundance, while the latter is so often reduced to brokenness. And we seem to have very little experience seeing the two entwined. As this baby grew in my paralyzed body, we busted through the tiny boxes allotted to us. It wasn’t that I proved my body wasn’t damaged — it very much is — but the brokenness and abundance folded into one another. As I splayed my fingers across my belly and felt our baby’s lively kicks and rolls the night before he was born, I felt awe at our stubborn, sturdy defiance.
We sit on the floor. We each pick a color. The first piece we make is no rules. Just make a mark and then the next person takes their turn. And something absolutely incredible and magical started to happen and I’ve literally never understood art more in my life.
From the get go, it was almost impossible to just make a “random” mark. Each one was some kind of intuitive strategy, either in response to the turn before, or in response to the negative space still left. I became really sensitive to instinct, but not methodical. And observing his fearless process as he had fun doing this. Secret mysterious game rules and ways to make moves appeared out of thin air. But none of them needed to be explained or second guessed. The kind of creative logic that you don’t invent - because it invents itself.
A Day in the Life of a Children’s Book Author by Katia Wish
It’s Not You, It’s the Emotional Labor by
[H]aving to suppress certain emotions and amplify others taxes our willpower. Which means it makes us less able to spend that willpower on other things that might also matter to us (like getting off Instagram at a reasonable hour.)
So, hooray! It’s not us. We’re not weaklings by the end of the summer. We’re also not lazy or undisciplined. We’re just tired. Tired from the very well-meaning and sometimes necessary emotional labor of parenting.
Maintenance Art Manifesto! by Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1969)
Pretty White Moms in Their Pretty White Houses and in conversation
If you are on social media AT ALL, and find yourself searching whatever platform for any sort of information AT ALL about, say, anti-nausea pregnancy teas or sleep training strategies or stretch mark cream or diaper bags that don’t scream “diaper bag,” you will find momfluencer culture impossible to avoid, and in most cases, you’ll also find it impossible to construct your own maternal identity without reckoning with the noise of that culture.
The Fog of New Motherhood Can Be a Boomtime for Creative Work by Emma Pattee
[B]y the end of my maternity leave, I had a rough draft of a very bizarre apocalyptic novel about a pregnant woman trying to find her way home. Publishable? I had no clue. Creative? Most definitely. In fact, it was weirder and bolder than anything I’d written before.
Happily by Sabrina Orah Mark
I don’t know how to protect my sons. I wear their names around my neck on a thin gold chain. Sometimes I lie to them. Sometimes I say nothing. Sometimes I have to tell them that people do terrible things. Every day I send them out into the world, and they come home wiht rocks and twigs and wood chips and acorns and dead bugs in their pockets. It’s been getting colder and colder here. If I could, would I have a golem sit in the corner of the kitchen, follow my boys to school, accompany us to synagogue, and stand at the door?
I look around my house. Maybe the golem is already here. “Hello, hello?”
More silence .
Maybe my house is the golem. And my neighbor’s house too. And the synagogue is the golem and the school is the golem. t
Tips on Getting Writing Done While Parenting by
I started writing short humor in part because it was something I could do in small chunks of time while sleep-deprived and getting constantly interrupted. It was also a way to channel some of my parenting frustrations.
The Zone of Emerging Curiosity is about sensing something interesting, powerful, unique, that touches on all your own little personal nodes of fascination. You can’t program it out, you can’t be sure it will produce anything the culture anoints with value. You have to take on that risk, trusting that, if you explore with enough dedication and discipline, eventually a project will begin to cohere.
A Note From Heidi
This year I made an effort to talk on podcasts and write more about motherhood, and I’m proud to be adding my voice to this conversation. In case you missed them, here are a few of my favorite appearances…
My son’s love of words stretches the limits of my technical vocabulary and imagination, just as motherhood has stretched my capacity for joy and heartbreak. As mothers, we are constantly translating the world to our kids, trying to explain why this not that, why now not later. And some of us are translating our children to the world, trying to help others understand why they say hello differently or play in their own way. As with all translation, meaning is lost as it moves between languages. But if we listen, we might discover new words and appreciate small details we never thought to notice.
Selkie a poem for MER Literary
Past the wolves, and goblins too, The seals fatten in the sun, Transforming from solid to liquid As they dive through swirls of seaweed. There our selkie swims free. Ebb. Flow. Crash. Want. Need. Love.
The Celebrate Cultivate Interview
