Solving the Puzzle of Motherhood and Writing
If you let motherhood keep you from writing, you might resent your kids; if you let writing keep you from motherhood, you might resent writing—we need both
By Heather Lanier
My husband and I called it “buying a vowel.” That was the term we used when, as a nursing mom, I needed space from the tiny, beautiful, tyrannical, tongue-tied new human who lived on my body. The reference should be self-evident: It’s from “Wheel of Fortune,” when the contestants are so baffled by a puzzle that they hand over hundreds in the hopes that Vanna will flip over a few E’s. Only I wasn’t paying in dollars. I was paying in breast milk. And the puzzle I was trying to solve wasn’t a pithy phrase, but one countless women have tried to crack: How to be both a mother and a writer.
The vowels were expensive, paid for by hard-earned ounces. These ounces took thirty minutes to coax from my body via a motorized milker, the syncopated suctioning so mechanical that my body was in no way fooled. Just a few ounces dripped into plastic bags. Even the plastic bags were expensive.
But a few ounces were all I needed to buy myself two hours. Two fat, impossible hours into which I could stuff some semblance of my life before motherhood.
“I’d like to buy a vowel, Pat,” I’d declare to my husband (whose name is not Pat) and he would make his way to the kitchen, baby in hand. I’d head for my scrappy office, where drapes bunched at the floor like unbrushed postpartum hair. When I closed the door behind me, I spun to my desk. Then to the bookshelves. Then to the window, glimpsing the dead-end street. Where to go first? What to do? I felt dizzy with indecision. Sometimes I pulled books off the shelf, searching for mentors: Hello, Virginia Woolf (zero kids). Hello, Lucille Clifton (six).
Weeks before the baby arrived, I’d written a mentor who’d raised two kids: “Will I still be a writer once I’m a mom?” Her response: “Of course! How else will you know what you think?”
When I paced the office, I was trying to find the part of myself that did the thinking. I was sparring not only with sleep-deprivation and brain-fog, but with a hurricane-sized new opponent in my psyche: Mother Guilt. How could I have my own needs when my baby needed so much?
A few ounces were all I needed to buy myself two hours. Two fat, impossible hours into which I could stuff some semblance of my life before motherhood.
At some point, I stumbled across an interview with the writer, Julianna Baggott. In her first year of motherhood, she didn’t write. Eventually, she realized that if she let being a mother keep her from writing, she’d resent her kids. But if she let her writing keep her from having the kids she wanted, she’d resent her writing. She needed both.
Baggott planned fictional plots as she cut bits of apple into toddler-sized bites. She scribbled on the sidelines of her life. She had four kids and to date has written over twenty books.
This interview was a revelation to me. I bought more vowels. I opened messy word documents. I took notes in a journal while the baby slept on my chest. I once wrote a lyric essay about the twelve reasons babies cry while my baby was soothed from crying via my boobs.
That moment—a baby attached to my chest while my arms reached over her to type—became my icon of Mother-Writer. With the minor casualty of an aching back, I could meet both our needs.
Scheduling got easier. And harder. After ten weeks of unpaid maternity leave, I returned to work part-time, adjuncting at a university. I squeezed my teaching obligations into two days; I needed thirty minutes of those days to pump. One afternoon, office blinds closed, my body stripped naked from the waist up, I laughed at the absurdity. I flipped over my lesson plan and scrawled half a poem on the back: “Topless at the office / like a scandal, I stand / otherwise constructed….” I kept writing. I shoved the half-poem into a notebook.
Over a decade later, that poem, “Pumping Milk,” begins my debut full-length poetry collection, Psalms of Unknowing, out on September 12th. Written over the course of over ten years, the poems explore the intersections of feminism, motherhood, and spirituality.
I wrote other things in those ten years: essays, a blog, a TED talk, and eventually a memoir. I had another child. I kept on teaching. If you had asked me if I was also writing a poetry collection, I would have said no. I was just writing in tiny increments each day.
But those increments add up: those vowels bought, those scraps saved. I’ve learned: it is possible to keep both a writing life and small humans alive.
If you also find yourself pacing with indecision about how to solve a similar puzzle, here are my suggestions:
Enlist support. Here’s where my privilege comes in: I had a spouse—a willing co-parent. We didn’t live much in those early years, but his job came with health insurance, and he never once questioned my writing. Regardless of your family structure, find people who will help you buy, and use, those vowels.
Don’t be precious about conditions. Scribble where and when you can. I love a solid two hours, but who always has that? I probably spent ten minutes on the first lines of “Pumping Milk.” Jotting down your ideas when they come keeps the door to your creativity cracked open, which is often enough to eventually get the whole heavy door ajar.
Be imperfect. When I wrote that little half-poem, I had no idea where it would go. It was far from complete. But it captured something—the weird task of getting half-primal in a work setting. As I revised, this led to deeper revelations about the many selves a mother contains. A smarter, less sleep-deprived writer would have typed up those lines and saved them on a fancy device. Whatever your method, keep your scraps, your drafts, your partially formed ideas.
Write more days than not. This is a hard one, and not for everyone. But write even if “writing” is rereading a paragraph and tweaking a sentence. Or journaling a half-page of rage. This practice doesn’t just add increments; it keeps your ideas active in your subconscious—which makes tomorrow’s writing easier.
Have patience. Writing takes time. So much time. I didn’t officially finish “Pumping Milk” until I was preparing my manuscript for publication. Technically, that poem took ten years! The collection itself came line by line, across a decade of writing. Progress might be imperceptible, but it’s happening.
Creativity and motherhood are not incompatible. In fact, they can be mutually enriching! No doubt, it’s hard. Our country’s reliance on the nuclear family puts tremendous pressure on mothers. But I can say this for certain: Once I became responsible for small, wiggly humans, a part of me broke open, and I was raw and tender and alive in a new way. And I had so much, suddenly, to write about—even as I had far less time.
Heather Lanier is a poet, essayist, teacher, speaker, and thrift-store shopper. An assistant professor of creative writing at Rowan University, she is the author of the memoir, Raising a Rare Girl, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, along with two award-winning poetry chapbooks, The Story You Tell Yourself, and Heart-Shaped Bed in Hiroshima. She is the recipient of a Vermont Creation Grant and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her full-length poetry collection, Psalms of Unknowing, is forthcoming from Monkfish Publishing.