Sometimes, in the early months of parenthood, I would gaze at the bonny baby and feel betrayed. Somehow my body had produced something more perfect and more beautiful than my artistic, conscious self could ever achieve. All the years of nurture I had put into thinking, learning, studying and creating, all utterly outperformed by this biological process. No sewing, sentence, song or sketch could begin to compare.
When my kids were younger, writing felt urgent. I felt compelled to put everything down into words. Partly I think it was the difficulty of finding a suitable time to do it, so it felt like it was always an unreachable indulgence. Also there was fear, because for a while I had a keen sense that my mind didn’t feel the same as before I had a baby to look after. It felt less able, less sharp, always grindingly tired and lumpen.
I wanted to write to understand and to record. New parenthood engulfed me, overwhelming my senses like an immersion in the cold sea might. My body wasn’t my own, my mind was strange, the days and nights worked differently and even familiar places, places I’d commuted through daily for fifteen years, were distant. I tried to navigate London Bridge station with a buggy and it felt like I’d arrived at a brand new location. I experienced new parenthood as a total upheaval.
As a doctoral student I’d studied to write and record, but before that I had always turned to words. Both by impulse and by training I sought out writing. While my world was upside down then the compulsion to write and record was one foothold of familiarity amongst it all. And so, of course, was that feeling of wanting to write, and the driving dissatisfaction of not churning out the words.
I wrote short poems, partial notes on my phone, lists of feeds, innumerable WhatsApp messages, social media, a blog post or two, occasional long emails. At one point, nearly a year in, I got the day to myself and I went to the Tate Archive and studied and in the evening I wrote about that. At one point I started writing a novel, a book proposal or two. This substack.
Words were one of the things I wanted to get back to. Before I had kids I felt an internal, intrinsic desire to have kids, after they arrived I wanted to write about it all. Partly to make sense, partly to preserve the experience, and partly I think to share. I hadn’t listened before having kids, I hadn’t really believed or understood what people shared about caring for babies. Maybe no-one can really get it, but I feel like I could’ve tried harder.
By now I’ve read so much about other motherhoods and I wonder if that yearning to write is what drove them. Whether it’s the same mix of recording, understanding and reaching for others. I read these things and wonder at how beautifully expressed they are. How they’ve wrought something fine from the blood, shit, milk and stitches. They’ve made these books that look perfect and I wonder if they are trying to outrun their bodies, too.
As my kids grow this feeling changes. The fluke and fortune of their safe-enough arrivals is no longer so present to me. They are full of ideas and they have grown so much. My unconscious conjurer’s trick of having incubated them isn’t as baffling - they are so much themselves now. As I see them grow, I grow too. I’m learning to understand my mind and body as one thing. I think I will always love to write. Now I find myself with a handful of daytime hours to myself each week. And as this has happened the restlessness to write has faded.
