(I wrote this offline, earlier in the week)
Reading Rachel Power's book, The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood, I am overwhelmed by the resonances it continually strikes. It's not surprising, perhaps, that such a book should resonate for me. This blog, largely, is about art – writing – and motherhood (or at least it's about the children). But it seems that each page I read there is another quote I want to record, and share, and comment on. I have half written a dozen essays in my head in the past half hour. So many things I've been thinking, or not quite thinking but feeling, are being articulated in this book.
I often feel incredibly lucky: as a writer-mother I have it easy compared to many, if not most. I have a supportive partner who actively encouraged me to start the masters in writing, knowing that writing was really what I wanted more than anything else to be concentrating my energies on. My professional energies that is, because of course parenting requires and equal – if not greater – toll.
Right now I am sitting in a cafe, writing, on a Monday night. My children think I'm at pilates, which is where I usually go on Monday nights as soon as Chris arrives home. But my pilates instructor is away this month, so I am going to this cafe instead, to carve a little time to write, or read, or plot, or research markets. Yesterday morning I spent time writing while Chris took the children swimming, which is a recently resumed habit, since the pool they go to finally reopened just before Christmas, after six months of renovations.
Nonetheless, I struggle with the same guilt that seems common to so many writer-mothers. Somewhere recently I read a comment from a writer-mother about the problem of treating art as a privilege, not an obligation*. I know there are those who feel torn between their salaried jobs and their children. I honestly don't have that issue, perhaps because I know my kids are with their father when I'm at work, or because I only work 20 hours a week, or because I think the benefits to all of us of Chris and I sharing the domestic role as well as the paid-worker role far out way any disadvantages.**
But I do find it hard to treat my writing as an obligation, and I find it hard to expect my partner to do so also. It doesn't pay (usually) and while I hope that it will, it's never likely to replace my public service salary. And now that I am actually enjoying my paid work so much it makes writing seem even more like a luxury that I indulge in at the expense of my family. I long to have my Sundays back – Sundays in my study, that is, like I had before I went back to work, while I was working on my Masters Project. Time to write and think and read as I felt I needed to.
Power writes of "the burden of the artistic imperative, of that constant desire to record everything almost before it's happened" (p . 16).*** Oh yes, I thought. She also writes about sometimes longing to be free of it. "For the first time in my life, I envied the women without strong ambitions outside of the home. Art was like a monkey on my back and I resented it's skittish hold on me, the way it caused me to strain away from my babies, to live a split life. I was burdened by the knowledge of what it would cost my family (financially, but more so emotionally) for me to keep writing – just as I became aware of how much it was cost me not to." (p. 17) Yes yes yes!
I think I've written here before about the sense I have sometimes of how much easier life could be if I could just give up writing. The time I – we, as a family – would suddenly have. The freedom I would have from this constant desire to record, to interpret, to imagine. But I don't know how to be free of that desire. I've had it as long as I can remember, or at least ever since I read Our snowman has olive eyes when I was about eight, which ends with the protagonist deciding to write about her grandmother – sort of an eight-year-old's memoir (from memory, which could be wrong). And although I often think it would make life easier, I don't really want to be rid of the monkey either. I don't know who I would be without it.
This past six months, since I finished my master's project and started back at work, I have written little. I have spent weekends with my family, planted and expanded our vegie garden, planned fruit trees, half covered our pergola (our house faces west, so this is not before time), and of course gotten back into the swing of paid work, complete with occasional overtime. But I have been hankering after my writing time, trying to figure out how to fit it in.
The truth is that I am lazy by nature. I like to sit and read and chat with my husband, and yes sometimes watch television (I gave Chris the last season of Alias for Christmas and we've already watched 5 episodes). Also, since I had children I always seem to be tired. I don't like to do housework – and unfortunately neither does he, so our house is a constant mess, I don't like to get up early, I don't like to stay up late.
Also I do like to spend that precious hour or two after the kids are in bed with my husband. Usually a good bit of that is still spent in domestic labour, be it cleaning the kitchen (Chris usually does that), hanging out washing, watering the vegies or walking the dog. Then, if we're lucky, there's enough time left to watch an episode of Alias (or West Wing – we're on the second season) before I need to collapse into bed. Otherwise we usually retire to the living room for a cuppa and a chat. Sometimes I retire instead to the study to write a blog post or read my email or google something or other, but mostly I reserve that little bit of time to be alone with my partner. And I do that both because I want to and because I feel I should; that it's important for both of us separately and more to the point for both of us together.
Part of our commitment when we married was to nurture our relationship – to recognise that it would not always thrive without some effort on our part, and to put that effort in. Having brought children into the mix that becomes even more important, while ironically also becoming harder to manage. I am lucky to be able to say that our relationship is – I think – as solid today as it ever was. Nonetheless I feel to neglect it is both foolish and unfair.
Or is this simply all justification for my inability to prioritise writing?
I do feel incredibly lucky, as I began by saying, in my choice of life partner, in my well paid part-time work, in my wonderful children. But I still feel guilt when I take 'time out' to write. Especially when I use the time to write something like this, or to read, or to – well, do anything that is not either required for my masters (and I do have one subject to go, which will begin in March), or specifically aimed at getting published. If I'm writing an article or preparing a story for submission, that's not too bad. But if I use the time for writing like this, or what I think of as feeding my writing-self, by reading something like Power's book, I feel like I am somehow being deceitful, like my partner has given me this time (as Power says, time alone is never free, once you have children – it has to be "bought, borrowed or stolen" (p. 14)) and I am wasting it.
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*Maybe at Literary Mama, maybe one of the revolving writer-quotes on Dawn's blog, maybe somewhere else (somewhere offline even!).
** That's not to say I don't feel frustrated by never having enough time either at work or home - I just don't feel guilty about it.
***page numbers refer to the paperback edition (amazon refers to a hardback?), published by Red Dog, Fitzroy, 2008. Rachel Power is an Australian, by the way, who also just happens to be a good friend of a good friend of mine, and who also had her first child within a week (or was it a day?) of mine, but who I've never met.
