On mother-writing, mothering and/while writing, and writing as a mother.

If the woman artist has been trained to believe that the activities of motherhood are trivial, tangential to main issues of life, irrelevant to the great themes of literature, she should untrain herself.  Alice Ostriker

This is the epigraph to the introduction to The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood, by Rachel Power. I blogged about this book before when I heard Power interviewed on the radio, and now I own it, thanks to my lovely husband who bought it for me for Christmas.

Of course, being a mother of children on school holidays, I've barely read any of it yet. But so far I think my favourite two quotes from the introduction (yes, I haven't even made it past the seven page introduction) are:

"Beyond giving birth, however, the stuff of mother's lives becomes worse than taboo - it becomes merely mundane. Mothering is such a prosaic term in our culture that it functions as a disguise for the true intensity of the experience, blocking any insight into the way this singular knowledge could be translated into good art."

You'd think we'd be over this by now, but we so are not! Just this morning I was discussing with one of my mother friends the sense one gets when talking to one's still single (or at least childless) friends - of being old and married with children and living in the suburbs (oh the horror!)*. I think being a mother is a bit like living in the suburbs. Actually, it can be very rewarding and intensely stimulating, but it still has such a dud reputation.  (Okay, I'm going a bit far as far as the suburbs go, but you get my point.)

"Every woman featured in this book defies the myth of the artist as tortured, self-obsessed genius with no option but to damage those who love them. Each is at a different stage along the path of reconciling the demands of domesticity with her desires as an artist...
"All the myths about art, as well as motherhood, are dismantled and reinvented by the voices collected here."

Soon, soon I will get to read more and I will enjoy those dismantlings and reinventions, I'm sure of it.

_____

*I hasten to add this is not a sense necessarily projected by the childless friends, just a message we have internalised from the broader culture.