Hello friends, 

It has been a while since I have been in touch. Since then, I have had another baby (these two things are not unrelated). 

What has been on my mind as I navigate first bites, first steps and muscle memory mothering, is exploring where we go when we have a baby – and do we ever come back?

Are we not fundamentally changed by this experience, shedding the skin of who we were, to find something similar, but distinctly differently? Or, do we find ourselves again at the other end of these liminal, sleep-deprived baby days? Do we ever feel like “ourselves”?

Let’s get stuck in.

A meeting point of comfort and terror

Something that has consistently sat uneasily with me since having children is the narrative that pulls us to what was – life before kids – and the tug of what will be – life when they are older/when childcare is sorted/when things are not so chaotic.

To say that the focus, right now, is simply on being a parent felt somehow both predictable and radical, and, for me at least, brought some serious reckoning with my achievement-focused ego. 

I love how artist Gabby Laurent explores how yes, it can be both:

“Domesticity is a place I want to be, and it annoys me that I even have to say that as a caveat, but it’s also a place of confinement – a meeting point of comfort and terror.”

Similarly, in her essay How millennials learned to dread motherhood, Rachel M. Cohen explores how, in in our efforts to reject unrealistic expectations around motherhood, we risk dismissing the vital work of parenting altogether. She writes:

“We can recognize that for millions of women, raising children has been a central source of identity and meaning, and we can name this without fear that it will somehow unravel decades of feminist progress, or that we’ll risk empowering “tradwives” for saying what countless people experience as wonderful and true.”

She also highlights just how dramatically the cultural messaging about parenting has changed, something I hadn’t really realised but recognised as true as I read her words:

“For at least the last decade, women my age have absorbed cultural messaging that motherhood is thankless and depleting, straining careers, health, and friendships, and destroying sex lives. Today, it’s genuinely difficult to find mainstream portrayals of moms who are not stressed to the brink, depressed, isolated, or increasingly resentful.”

I’m relieved that the unrealistic and outdated vaseline-on-the-lens image of motherhood has been replaced with something closer to reality, but gosh, is it a grim reality. To me at least, this is partly down to a shocking lack of care and support for mothers (early motherhood for first-time parents in particular can be a brutal, lonely place these days, with no “village”in sight) but also partly down to just how hard it is to articulate the more beautiful, meaningful, rich and joy-giving aspects of the experience without giving way to something that feels mawkish or twee.

Juxtaposing the mundane and the momentous

Diving into the experience is Hungarian photographer Andi Galdi Vinkos, whose book, Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I'm Back, explores what it is like to be a “mother of two working on borrowed time”. Her work proves that there can be creativity and meaning during those messy early days, even as you are, as she says, in “constant negotiation between their needs and yours, between what you want to do and what you actually feel capable of.”

She tells The Guardian:

“I had no idea what awaited me. How messy and how raw, how unpredictable and how out of control motherhood really was compared to the images I had in my mind from films, photos, paintings done by men.”

That last line floored me – how much of the imagery and narrative around motherhood that we ingested, especially as children, was created by men?

Learning the difference between grief and regret

Continuing on my journey to try and see things as they are, this brilliant piece by Ann Friedman resonated with me, reminding me of how obsessed I was with questions of parenthood in my 20s and early 30s, how fluid my identify felt, how momentous every choice seemed – every road a huge fork with clear, black and white, right/wrong repercussions.

Friedmand riffs on trying to get comfortable in the nuance:

Now, I wonder why my lens on the parenting question was always regret, why I never thought to frame the much-feared feeling as grief. As a sadness that is not about wanting a different outcome, but about letting go of a few tantalizing hypotheticals in order to live one flawed reality.

Grief feels like a heavy word, but more apt I think – it gives us permission to grieve what was and give over to the metamorphosis, accept this matrescence – a term that is slowly starting to gain a bit more traction (and that this newsletter has touched on before).

Writing for The Cut, Miranda Rake, co-host of the podcast The Mother of It All, discusses Lucy Jones’s book Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood :

This book says out loud, in as many ways as it can be said, that the long-accepted notion that we can “go back” — back to normal, bounce back, get our body back, even our brain back — is a fallacy that can cause real harm.

And again, that word – grief:

Maybe a postpartum experience that is as full of grief as it is love isn’t something that requires a diagnosis. Maybe what we “have” is simply a time of losing both the rhythms that made up our lives and certain synapses and gray matter in our brains.

A key part of dismantling the “bounce-back fantasy” that persists is being aware of just how momentous the change is. She finishes:

After I gave birth, I simply did not know that my identity was in a natural process of becoming forever altered. What would it have been like had I experienced those months with clear eyes? I think I would have been slower to pathologize. And maybe awe could have flooded in.

I’ll leave you with a few other web bits that caught my eye:

• Mothering Alongside a World in Conflict is beautiful piece by Amy O’Brien that sums up I think what so many of us have been feeling this past heart-breaking year.

• This Irish Times piece on why friendship is your 40s is hard really resonated, and did the rounds on several WhatsApp groups.

• The new Martha Stewart documentary looks fascinating.

• “Most mothers secretly worry that the unlikely fears that hum at the edge of our consciousness could tip over into reality.” - great piece on “Mom Nor” and how feminist crime writers are exploring the darker realities of motherhood

• “I want proof that I’m chafing against motherhood not because I’m innately selfish, impatient, and bad, but because motherhood makes me this way. Makes us all this way.” – so much to love and digest in this piece by Sara Petersen about how so many of us either “perform” motherhood online or why we follow (and wonder about) those that do.

That’s it for this edition, which is, as always, so much longer than I think it will be! I’m working on possibly trying to do shorter, more regular dispatches. If you have any feedback, article recommendations or just want to say hi, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading, and see you soon,

Nathalie

Hello friends,

Nothing like revisiting a childhood classic to make you re-examine things. This edition’s subject line is taken from Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree series. My kiddo has gotten very into it recently, both as an audiobook and in the more traditional us-reading-it-to-him-over-and-over-again format.

In between tales of pop cakes, google buns and moon-faced men, I was intrigued by the glimpses we see of the kids’ parents, and it got me thinking about how mothers are depicted in fiction and what is subtly and not-so-subtly woven into these stories.

It probably comes as no surprise that, even in contemporary children’s books, mothers are more likely than fathers to perform almost every nurturing behaviour, but what else could be peeking out from under the (red riding) hood?

Let's get stuck in.

A walk in the woods

In Mother and the Wolf: Maternal Power in Fairy Tales Julie Phillips writes not just about how motherhood is depicted in fairy tales (and has me looking at the Rumpelstiltskin story with fresh eyes), but also how mothers navigate combining motherhood and creative work, creating a hero’s tale of their own.

Some choice cuts:

On the initial step into the woods of motherhood:

“Motherhood challenged me and revealed me to myself. Yet I lost myself, too. My creative work wasn’t getting done. I was overwhelmed and thrown off balance by my needs and desires.”

On how other artists did it:

“I saw my impatience and joy reflected by Audre Lorde, too, who wrote poems on scraps of paper that she kept in her diaper bag and in both her art and her mothering found healing for her own childhood hurts.”

On what really makes motherhood and creating difficult:

“Because I suffered less stress and time poverty than my American friends, I could see what Doris Lessing saw: that it’s not mothering but the conditions under which it’s done that lead mothers to lose themselves.”

And, finally, on combining motherhood and creative work:

“I believe that there is more than one matrix into which mothers must descend. One is for the artist, who follows her muse into the core, where the language is hot and the images smolder. Another is for the mother who must reckon with her volcanic emotions: anger, resentment, despair, too much love. Entwined, they become a hero’s tale about the most basic work of being human, nurturing one’s soul.”

Love of this voltage

I recently started reading Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor and it had me both laughing out loud and welling up within the first 10 pages.

This quote in particular stood out:

“I swear every woman in my position feels the same. We all go bustling about, pushing shopping trolleys or whatever, acting like love of this voltage is normal; domestic, even. That we know how to handle it. But I don’t.”

For me, it seems to sum up so much of my own struggle with depicting motherhood in my creative work: *how* is something this epic this mundane? Is everybody else experiencing motherhood as viscerally, dramatically, cell-shakingly as I am? And how do I explore that in a way that doesn’t feel overly-sentimental and twee? (And why is that something I am so afraid of, most of all when it comes to creating work about being a parent?)

“I’m angry nearly every day of my life”

And sometimes something old just needs to be looked at with fresh eyes. Greta Gerwig is on the brain, and has me returning to her adaptation of Little Women, which included the above line from Marmee. It’s only the second time that line that has made it into any of the film adaptions, and was praised for so aptly capturing women’s rage. In an interview with The New York Times, Laura Dern, who plays Marmee, explains why she felt it was essential to include it:

“I was really grateful for that scene, because I think the availability of Marmee as a mother is about something raw and about expressing what isn’t working with how women are treated or measured.”

Writing for the New Yorker, Sarah Blackwood discusses how so many adaptions – including Gerwig’s – have missed this take on Marmee:

What’s missing is what the novel takes pains to reveal: a subtle account of the damages that Marmee has accrued across a lifetime of becoming and being a Marmee.

Rewilding the fairy tale

No where is more ripe for some much-needed reading between the lines than your run-of-the-mill fairytale. Might the subversive origins of fairy tales, and the women’s wisdom that once circulated within these narratives, teach us how to live again with ghosts and monsters? This is the central question in Kaitlyn Teer’s beautiful, evocative essay. Love her take:

Soon I would be lost in the woods, realizing I couldn’t find myself in these stories. I tried to remember: were fairy tales regressive or subversive? I read once that telling fairy tales was a domestic art—stories that women told to children or to each other while they worked—that men who aspired to make literature of folklore had tamed the tales they took from the mouths of women. Since then, the cultural status of fairy tales has been debated, simultaneously undervalued and overvalued, marginalized and mythologized, like motherhood

I’ll leave you with a few other internet nuggets:

• Staying on theme, I am still getting a chuckle out of the Hot Dads of Picture Books Instagram account.

• “When I practice this routine, I feel a meaningful psychological shift: I can seize back a piece of power I yielded to motherhood.” Why the ‘three-or-four-hour rule’ for creative work feels tailor-made for the full days of motherhood.

• Vogue has a handy listicle on 10 of the most compelling mothers in fiction.

• Some new-to-me books currently on my wishlist:

  • Matrescence by science writer Lucy Jones explores the “spectrum of emotional and existential ruptures” that happen during the transition into motherhood

  • In Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood Allison Yarrow dives into the “trauma and tragedy” of the American childbirth experience (you can read an extract on her experience breastfeeding her three-year-old son here)

  • Closer to home, Alice Kinsella’s Milk: On Motherhood and Madness is getting rave reviews and is one I’m really looking forward to picking up

That’s it for this edition. If you have any feedback, article recommendations or just want to say hi, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading, and see you soon,

Nathalie

Hello friends,

I have written in a previous edition about motherhood as a catalyst for creativity but this issue I'm exploring the push and pull; the sacrifice, the fear of the sacrifice, the realities of it and the ambivalence that can surround deciding to become a parent and do creative work.

Let's get stuck in.

I never knew my killer would be coming from within

This edition's subject line is taken from Florence + The Machine's new track, King. In it, Florence Welch explores the price of making art as a woman, writing in the opening lines:

We argue in the kitchen about whether to have children / About the world ending and the scale of my ambition / And how much is art really worth

In a statement that accompanied the release, Welch has spoken about grappling with the realisation that she is going to have to make decisions that many of her "male idols" did not:

“As an artist, I never actually thought about my gender that much, I just got on with it. I was as good as the men and I just went out there and matched them every time. But now, thinking about being a woman in my 30s and the future, I suddenly feel this tearing of my identity and my desires. That to be a performer, but also to want a family might not be as simple for me as it is for my male counterparts"

The song continues:

But a woman is a changeling/ Always shifting shape/ Just when you think you have it figured out/ Something new begins to take

Writing for Nylon, Steffanee Wang interprets the line "strange claws… scratching at my skin" as representing Welch's foreign desire of suddenly wanting a family:

“I never knew my killer would be coming from within,” she sings, characterizing her own bubbling desires as a force that could potentially kill her career.

In an interview with NPR, Welch describes her feelings:

For me, it definitely felt like I would have to choose, depending on how I wanted to use my body for the next couple of years. And the rage was so acute. It was frustration as well. Just the frustration, which I think is the scream at the end of it. I think a reading of this song would be to oversimplify it, to be like she's against these things. I am not a mother, I'm not a bride. And the rage is not that I'm against them, it's the rage that actually, I feel completely split. I feel like I'm being torn in two.

You can watch the video for the track here and read the whole interview here.

How to do both

For a glimpse of the realities of being a rockstar and a mum, I turned to Pink: All I Know So Far, a fly-on-the-wall documentary which explores Pink's 2018-2019 Beautiful Trauma world tour.

With over 156 shows performed across 18 countries, it was the second highest-grossing tour of all time by a female solo artist after Madonna’s 2008-2009 Sweet & Sticky tour (2008-2009).

Directed by The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey, the doc received some criticism for not being as raw or confessional as perhaps was promised ("The film spends far more of its time telling than showing," wrote one reviewer ). However, I was still riveted by watching Pink navigate both worlds – the magic and the mundane of both touring and parenting.

Some choice cuts:

There are many reasons why moms don’t do this. I know that it’s a lot easier for men, just primally, to just walk out the door and not look back.

On why we see so few female rock and pop stars touring as they become parents:

For a lot of moms, when they become moms they stop touring - because you can’t imagine being able to do both. 

On deciding to bring the family on tour, and the pressures of doing both well

The only way I can justify dragging my family all over the world is that we’re making memories together. I want it to be worth it. I want the tour to be perfect for every single person that walks through those doors with a ticket in their hand. But I also want to to be perfect in my kids’ minds. And I’ll kill myself to do both. 

On the challenges of being always on, in both worlds:

Some people walk out the door and they go to work and they leave what’s at home, at home and they go and do their job. I don’t walk out of a door, ever. Everything is melded into to one. That is both beautiful and incredibly overwhelming. 

Stream the doc here (Prime Video).

A few more musical reads

Gemma Hayes, a long time musical love of mine, on how she needs to "step out of being a mother" in order to create.

"At a time when the joy of bringing a child into the world has too often been overshadowed by one geopolitical crisis after another, her unbridled feminine power was nothing short of life-affirming."

This Spotify series profiles musicians sharing their hard-won insights on navigating their careers while raising children.

An olide but a goodie – 18 musical moms talk motherhood to Paste.

That’s it for this edition. If you have any feedback, article recommendations or just want to say hi, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading, and see you soon*,

Nathalie

(*How 'soon' exactly? The honest answer is I'm not sure. On the one hand, my inner Seth Godin-inspired voice tells reminds me of the importance of consistently shipping creative work, but my inner perfectionists hates the thought of hitting 'send' just to stay on track while my outer mother/freelance struggles to make the time I need to create. I adore the rabbit holes I run down while creating this newsletter, and hope that you enjoy them too, even if they don't come quite as frequently as I either of us might like them to.)

Hello friends,

This issue, we're exploring motherhood as a muse – how it can be a potential boomtime for creativity, a way to see the world in a fresh way, rewire our thinking, and not just be the creative desert we're often led to believe it is.

I share these stories not because I personally have found motherhood to be doorway to a creative awakening (I haven't), but because I want to believe that it can be. I love reading about projects inspired by motherhood because they serve as a reminder to not to write off this period in my life, to try and find pockets of time to do something – anything – just for its own sake, to see what happens.

Because motherhood is a big shift, and as with all change, it brings with it the opportunity to learn, grow and create in a new way.

Let's get stuck in.

The postpartum creative rollercoaster

As Anna Harrison points out in this great piece for Russh, motherhood and creativity can "connect, collude and draw from one another", but so often that's not what we see:

"For an enterprise that builds more resilience, demands more multi-tasking, calls on more inner resources and requires break-speed acquisition of new life skills, motherhood is generally treated by modern society as a kind of handicap, an obstacle to bridge in resuming a full and multifaceted life.

We see a mother’s laboured stride as she pushes a pram up a hill to the grocery store wearing a milk-stained T-shirt and a glazed, sleepless stare and what we see isn’t the force of a hurricane or the grace of a rainbow; in the most unjust of terms, what we see is mediocrity. Life at its most mundane, its most creatively and intellectually impoverished."

And yet for some, motherhood enabled them to dig into the depths and find something creative; take artist Ying Ang. Her beautiful Riso and offset printed handmade book, The Quickening, garnered rave reviews for its honest, yet still evocative and dreamy depictions of early motherhood. 

Here's a review by IzabelaRadwanska Zhang for the British Journal of Photography:

“Ang’s depiction of matrescence is layered and complex. Her images blend the gentle and soft, with a strain and rawness that becomes all-consuming. Velvety skin is enveloped in warm, delicate light. But, motifs of that tenderness behind misted glass at once suggest fullness and a claustrophobic repetition. The narrative is textured and sensual; it mirrors the intensity of Ang’s lived experience."

In her essay, writer Emma Pattee doubles down on the idea that "the fog of new motherhood" can be a good time for creativity, asking "what if postpartum is one of the most magical, expansive, creative times of our life?"

She writes:

"First off, creativity requires novelty, and new motherhood is the definition of a novel experience. Solitude and daydreaming are both key factors in creativity – and regular occurrences in postpartum.

It seems that trauma and creativity might have a relationship because trauma forces our perspectives to shift and our brains to rebuild, and therefore explore new avenues (and no matter how closely your birth matches your birth plan, I would say that birth itself and the identity shock of becoming a mother is the very definition of trauma)."

I love how she flips the traditional expectation – the infamous pram in the hall that scuppers all chance of creativity – and asks that we instead explore the potential of this period in our lives:

"(...) what if postpartum is one of the most magical, expansive, creative times of our life? A time when those of us who have birthing bodies have the ability to touch the birth-death continuum, to take the hormonal rollercoaster and turn it into a piece of art, to create meaning as a way of making sense of what we’ve just experienced. What if that was true? And if it was true, then how might that shift the narrative around mothers who are artists and writers? Instead of ‘Prepare to miss a year of writing,’ how about ‘Prepare to have some of the wildest ideas of your life.’ Instead of ‘For every baby you have, that’s a book you won’t write,’ how about ‘For every baby you have, that’s a new Pulitzer-prize-winning-neural-pathway that might get uncovered.’

Mama as maker

Ang talked about being “confused at the lack of meaningful exploration in literature, art and cinema” that motherhood receives, which is something echoed in this essay by Stephanie Hayes on harnessing the hero narrative of creative motherhood:

“My first thought after giving birth was, “Why aren’t history books filled with birth stories? Where are the epic poems and novels about bringing forth and raising a full human being?” The work is so intense, you cannot flee from it.”

Hayes started a collective with other mother artists, where they challenged each other to make, make, make. Not in spite of motherhood, but because of motherhood. 

Every week the project participants submitted a video, photo, or piece of writing on Instagram, inspired by a collective prompt. This was a few years ago, but you can view some of them here (this one made me laugh out loud).

Similarly, artist Lenka Clayton created an artist-in-resident-in-motherhood in response to how closed the professional art world felt to her as a new mother:

"I aim to embrace the fragmented mental focus, exhaustion, nap-length studio time and countless distractions of parenthood as well as the absurd poetry of time spent with young children as my working materials and situation, rather than obstacles to be overcome."

The fruits of her labour include the wryly titled The Distance I Can Be From My Son video series and 63 Objects Taken from my Son's Mouth (above). 

Something worth writing about

“The first things that she took from me were selfishness and sleep / She broke a thousand heirlooms I was never meant to keep / She filled my life with color, cancelled plans and trashed my car / But none of that is ever who we are”

Like Alanis in a previous edition of this newsletter, file The Mother by Brandi Carlile under songs about motherhood that hit the bone. The heartwarming slice-of-life video, above, is a beauty too.

Again, Carlile's experiences – as a gay mom who wasn’t the one to carry – are what help create what she describes as a “complicated thing, and a beautiful thing, and something worth writing about and something worth listening to."

Things I read and loved this month

• "When I think of the women in 20th-century Ireland who spent their fertile years perpetually pregnant or nursing, I don’t feel inspired; I feel terrified." This 2018 Sally Rooney review of Sheila Heti's Motherhood (which is currently in my reading pile) struck a lot of chords.

• Yep, this pretty much sums it up (the post went viral, so Annie turned it into a print)

• “There is a whole world of objects pertaining to women, mothers and pregnant people that have been overlooked from the perspective of form and function, and unstudied in terms of how their designs came to be." I love the sound of Designing Motherhood, a new new book and exhibition series (lots of good stuff on their Insta acc too)

• Stumbled across this post on the importance of a margin – in cupboards, in computers and life - and just love how simple and powerful it is.

• "The truth is: I don’t want this for my kids. The deeper truth is: I don’t want this for myself, either." Design for Mankind's Erin Loechner putting beautiful, eloquent words to something I've been feeling more and more.

That’s it for this month. If you have any feedback, article recommendations or just want to say hi, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading, and see you next month,

Nathalie

Hi friends, 

Motherhood 'takes' a lot things – time, energy, the ability to pee alone. But often when we discuss what it 'gives', we rarely do it in the context of what we gain as creative individuals.

We're constantly fed the idea that motherhood and creative work are incompatible. But what if science is saying the opposite?

We are only just starting to get a glimpse at the monumental changes mothers' brains go through during pregnancy and following childbirth (thanks, patriarchy), and while lots of these present all sorts of challenges, it's also fascinating to see what changes for the better.

As writer Leslie Jamison says in this lovely interview: “...I feel really nourished by stories of how they can feed each other rather than being these warring gods, motherhood and art.”

So that’s what we’ll explore in this edition. Let’s get stuck in. 

How motherhood changes the brain

You lose your mind when you have a child. Quite literally. Studies show that there are ‘significant grey matter changes’ happening for at least two years after birth.

It's been an area ignored for centuries, but more and more studies are finally looking into the astonishing changes women go through when they become parents.

In this eye-opening Refinery 29 piece, novelist Emma Jane Unsworth explores not just the huge changes occurring within women’s brains during pregnancy and early motherhood, but how little we know about them, and how they can affect so much of our early experiences as mothers:

Could this help to explain the heightened anxiety many new mothers feel? The forgetfulness of some things and the hypervigilance when it comes to others? The unmooring from our sense of identity?

Most research so far has focused on how these brain changes affect a mother and infant’s attachment, but I was blown away by this piece looking at the neurological link between motherhood and creativity in The Atlantic.

The piece interviews Kelly G. Lambert, a professor of behavioural neuroscience, and cities studies suggesting that women may indeed become more creative after having kids. Some choice cuts:

On brain changes:

“…a mother’s brain requires cognitive, emotional, and behavioural flexibility. This helps us adapt to new environments […] flexibility and thinking outside of the box—isn’t that what creativity is?”

On the urge to create:

“Diaper changes might cut into the time spent on creative work, but they don’t cut out the drive to do it”

“My own creativity these days may come out in a thought tapped and auto corrected on my phone at 2 a.m., or it could come out in a method of bathing three small kids without anyone drowning.”

In the same piece, artist Hein Koh (the person behind that viral breastfeeding Instagram post) weighs in on that all-too-familiar work/life balancing act:

 “I feel like I can’t get my ideas out fast enough. Sometimes it causes me pain to leave. At the same time, I love going home to my family, switching gears and going into mom mode – it helps normalize me.”

Seeing the world in a new way

I loved this interview with writer Leslie Jamison and artist Mika Rottenberg, particularly when Leslie spoke about taking her daughter to Mika’s exhibition:

“…I was learning how to see the world, including galleries, in a new way because I was experiencing it with my daughter and I felt like I was re-training my attention in all of these different ways.”

On how motherhood can deepen understanding:

“On a creative level, I feel like becoming a mother has totally deepened and expanded my writing practice. It’s opened me up to thinking about caregiving as a subject with a new kind of focus, and not just caregiving within the boundaries of a parent/child relationship.”

On the parallels between the grind of motherhood and creative work:

"Making art is also just doing the work, so that’s also boring sometimes. It’s more mentally exciting maybe than changing diapers or something like that, but I see the similarities in that sense." 

Creativity with a big C

I’m also still learning that a big part of the problem lies in how we view creativity itself, and the assumptions and stereotypes that surround it (see issue two for more on this).

Anyone who parents knows what intensely creative work it is; but when we talk about motherhood and creativity, we are talking about what Psychology Today calls “Big C” creativity – that is, substantial, ‘important’ or publicly acknowledged or celebrated contributions to a creative field. But that doesn’t mean mothers are being any less creative:

“Much of the creative work that mothers complete may be called acts of everyday creativity, or “little c” creativity. These acts may not be recognized with a Pulitzer, Oscar, or Fields Medal, but as developmental psychologist David Feldman says, these “little c” creative acts are equally as important as “Big C” creativity for the “preservation, enrichment, and continuity of culture.”

I always felt injecting creativity into day-to-day things like snack-making and toy-tidying were ways of keeping myself sane – it's comforting to know there's also something bigger at play.

Things I read and loved this month

• “The key as a parent is just making sure your creative pilot light never goes out” – Jessica Hische hits the nail on the head with this Twitter thread (and creates a Discord server for parents to boot).

• "I thought I was going to have to pass on the assignment all together, which felt particularly ironic": Beautiful, intimate portraits of mothers who lost their jobs during the pandemic, all shot remotely thanks to the creative thinking of a breastfeeding photographer.

• Such a cool idea: OwnTrail, a platform that lets you visualise different women’s work and life paths (and create your own), with the goal of advancing women "through the scalable owning and sharing of the trails we blaze through life”.

• A new book features the work 227 authors who became mothers during the pandemic. 

• Love this: you won’t be for everyone, but you are for someone.

• This looks like a great new newsletter series aimed at dads. 

I'll leave you with...

How did I miss this before? As a lifelong Alanis Morisette fan, this video from last summer of her performing a beautiful new track about being a parent (with her kid in tow) brought lots of feels. 

Like so many, I’ve often connected with the parts of Alanis Morisette lyrics that help me process and understand difficult and painful experiences: breakups, estranged parents, bad relationships. 

So there was something so powerful and moving about the unbridled hope and positivity in Ablaze. Seeing her beautiful lyricism applied to parenting is such a gift. The official video is a tonic too.

--

So: can motherhood make you more creative? For me, the answer is undoubtedly yes. After all, this newsletter – and the incredible connections, conversations and ideas it has sparked – wouldn’t exist without it (even if it does mean I wrote most of it to the white noise soundtrack coming from the baby monitor).

That’s it for this month. As always, if you have any feedback, article recommendations or just want to say hi, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading, and see you next month,

Nathalie

Hello friends,

In this edition, we delve into how creative women have explored the darker aspects of motherhood. Because isn’t it at times a raw, frightening place? 

In many ways, we are lucky to live in a time where a lot of taboos around motherhood are being dismantled, and we are becoming more and more open about different facets of the experience. 

But I still wasn’t prepared for the dark, invasive thoughts that shook my soul after my son was born. For how I would regularly find myself compulsively imagining worst-case scenarios in even the most mundane of moments.

I've been grateful to find that I'm not alone. Let's get stuck in.

The 'treacherous emotional terrain' of motherhood

Modern literary fiction is starting to borrow from the thriller, horror and even sci-fi genres to explore the darker, more vulnerable and unsettling aspects of becoming a mother.

A great example of this is the critically-acclaimed The Need by Helen Phillips. Here's how the New York Times described it, and this budding new canon:

“The Need belongs to a growing body of surreal speculative fiction that uses horror tropes to capture the panic, self-doubt and pressures that new mothers face. The exhaustion that verges on hallucination. The feeling that your body has become a food source and no longer belongs to you. The endless chores and monotony of caring for small children, punctuated by adrenaline spikes that emanate from a constant, creeping dread. What if the fever in the middle of the night is a sign of a life-threatening illness? What if the boiling pasta water falls on the child who’s clinging to your knees while you frantically cook? What if you can’t keep them safe?”

Early parenthood, in particular, can be such a deeply unnerving, visceral time – as you awkwardly clamber up steep learning curves, every day doing something you've never done before, acting on animal instinct at times and grappling with the responsibility of keeping this new tiny vulnerable being alive. Here's Phillips on why chose to explore that though sci-fi:

“...writing about a supernatural threat felt like the most accurate way to explore the treacherous emotional terrain of motherhood and the lurking feeling that even the most mundane situations are freighted with peril.”

I also love how – and why – she works breast pumps into the novel, as she explains in this excellent Nylon interview:

“I was hungry for fictional representations of a woman using a breast pump [....] I mean a breast pump is from like science fiction, and it's also this symbolic thing, bridging the gap between a working identity and a mothering identity via a machine, so it feels like this metaphor for what motherhood is like right now.”

The book is well worth a read.

Mothers as makers of death

As novelist Samantha Hunt points out, when you become a parent, no one ever says, “Hey, you made a death. You made your children’s deaths.”

"Meanwhile, I could think of little else," she continues. "It’s scary to think of mothers as makers of death, but it sure gives them more power and complexity than one usually finds."

These lines inspired the title of both this newsletter and Claudia Dey’s incredible 2018 essay for The Paris Review. Mothers as Makers of Death went viral, and it’s easy to see why. In it, Dey explores motherhood, death and other taboo topics in ways that deeply resonate. Some choice cuts:

On small talk instead of real talk:

 “Every conversation I had was the wrong conversation. No other mother congratulated me and then said: I’m overcome by the blackest of thoughts. You?” 

On the ever-pervasive fear :

“No one had warned me that with a child comes death. Death slinks into your mind. It circles your growing body, and once your child has left it, death circles him too. It would be dangerous to turn your attentions away from your child—this is how the death presence makes you feel. ”

On (non-existent) alone time:

 “I had not been alone because I am a mother, and a mother is never alone. When she is washing, sleeping, raging, she is not alone. For a mother, this is the state of things. Children hang from your clothing. They pummel you with questions. Like a gunfight, like the most consuming love, like an apocalypse: they take up all of the available space.”

On losing "autonomy of the mind":

“The private actions of the mother’s mind—her scholarship, perversions, miscellany, narcissism—are swamped by the bureaucracy of parenting. A ticker tape hurtles across the mother’s brain listing all of the things she must remember: spoon, bathing suit, milk, booster shot, sign-up, pickup, 3:15. These lists are a form of paying attention, which is a form of love.”

Read it all here. 

I didn't want to be a mum...

Speaking of taboo topics, photographer Sophie Ebrard explored that fuzzy grey area where love, sacrifice and resentment meet in her 2019 exhibition, I didn't want to be a mum.

In an interview with Creative Review, she talks about what inspired it:

“Becoming a mother involves an identity shift, and is one of the most significant physical and psychological changes a woman will ever experience. Yet when a woman gives birth, society puts pressure on new mums telling them it should be one of the most joyful moments of their lives. Of course, it is, but the struggles of parenting are hard and can at times overshadow the joys. These unspoken challenges mean that women often struggle through this in isolation, ashamed to admit how they feel.”

And what she hopes to see more of:

“Saying you don’t like or don’t want to be a mum is still a taboo. It has nothing to do with the love for our kids, but most women will never admit it, fearing that their kids will be taken away from them. In my wildest dreams I’m hoping to start a movement where women from all over the world complete the sentence ‘I didn’t want to be a mum….’”

Eat the mouth that feeds you

Looking at motherhood and domestic life through a surrealist, at times macabre lense and still being able to touch on universal truths is the magic in Eat the Mouth That Feeds You.

The debut collection of short stories from the artist, journalist and author Carribean Fragoza explores lots of aspects of family life – and particularly Latinx and Chicanx family life, from both sides of the US/Mexico border – in ways that are sometimes beautifully intimate and poignant, sometimes weird and gothic, and yet still manage to somehow feel oddly familiar.

Take the eponymous story, which sees a mother reflecting on the pain and pleasures of having her flesh literally consumed by her small daughter, which features lines like:

“Sometimes I start to pull away, sometimes I cry out and my eyes fill with tears. Sometimes without thinking I will say, “Why do you hurt me? You are so cruel.” But it's not fair for me to say those things. It is her right. She must take those things. She must take from me what she needs.”

It reminds me of this beautiful post-partum poem (and the line “but my flesh was still your home”) and is another excellent tome for the book pile.

Things I read and loved this month

• Why women do the household worrying (and how to get men to do more of it): A fascinating look at the mental load, through the eyes of a sociologist.

• Why Victorian era-inspired momfluencers are taking over Instagram

• I recently started following Karen McMillan, aka @mother_truths on Instagram, and this post on justifying productivity resonated.

• Cute toddler toothbrushing tip.

• Beautiful Vogue essay asking what makes a family, really?

• Photographer Sophie Harris-Taylor's new series photographing new fathers explores "the absence of support or discussion" of fatherhood.

I'll leave you with...

How do you explore the darkness, the taboo? As Samantha Hunt said, there can be power and complexity in those moments, and sometimes liberation, freedom, and a sense of being understood. A lightness, if you will.

My hope is that you have someone – or can find someone – to have 'the dark chats' with this month, someone who gets it, should that be something you'd like to explore.

That’s it for this month. If you have any feedback, article recommendations or just want to say hi, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading, and see you next month, 

Nathalie

Hi friends,

Is motherhood the enemy of creative work? That certainly seems to be the question that hangs in the air all too often whenever mothers who work in creative fields are interviewed.

I feel conflicted when I see those 'how do you do it all' questions asked. On the one hand, I'm angry, because so rarely do we even know that men in creative fields are fathers, let alone ask about how they work and parent (did you know that Tolstoy had 13 kids?). But on the other hand, as someone for whom being my best creative self and my best parenting self is a daily struggle (and juggle) – I really do want to know how they do it.

When she wrote about needing "a room of one's own", Virginia Woolf was outlining how women need money and space in order to create (and, I assume, if you're a parent that room better have a door that shuts firmly).

Studies have shown that during the pandemic, mothers were more likely to work in common areas instead of dedicated home office spaces (though that's not something new) and more likely to carry out more domestic responsibilities while working flexibly, so in some ways it's not surprising that these questions get asked.

So – how do they do it? And why do we care? Let's get stuck in.

How we do both: the dangerous myths surrounding motherhood and creativity

As anyone with kids knows, carving out the time to be curious and create something is hard.

Toni Morrison wrote around the distraction. Jodi Picoult sacrificed sleep. Julia Cameron said "Mommy's working" and modelled autonomy.

Part of the difficulty can be attributed to the snack demands of the tiny people we share our homes with, but part of it is also down to the idea that in order to be creative you need to be selfish, free.

Joan Didion's late daughter Quintana once nailed a list of "Mom's sayings" to the garage door that included "Brush your teeth" "Brush your hair" and "Shush I'm working."

Although Didion's quips sound like something so many of my mum friends could've said at any point over the last few months, as this (controversial) Atlantic piece points out, it became "a symbol of Didion's maternal negligence".

In her essay On Women’s Work and the Myth of the Art Monster, Rebecca Solnit explores the toxic myths that exist around creativity, and how crippling outdated concepts about what you have to give up in order to create can be:

“The idea that you “abandon some nurturing part of yourself” suggests that you can’t be kind and supportive and write, and that the kindness part of women’s lives is inevitably onerous.”

Similarly, author Zoe Brigley Thompson talks about how for so long, the image of someone being creative entailed "an individualism that cannot be maintained well in the life of domesticity and being a good parent”. She writes:

“... we have to defy stereotypical imaginings of what creativity looks like. The tortured male genius with the sensational life is a dead end as a productive route to creative success.”

When it comes to what mothers really need in order to create, Zadie Smith wrote this eight years ago – and this year has shown how true it all still is:

"The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd. What IS a threat to all women’s freedoms is the issue of time, which is the same problem whether you are a writer, factory worker or nurse. We need decent public daycare services, partners who do their share, affordable childcare and/or a supportive community of friends and family". 

Shaking off "the stank of uncool motherhood"

As much as we need to give mothers the time and space to create, parenting itself needs to be seen as a valuable part of the creative process, and not always an enemy of it.

When talking about her book exploring art and motherhood, co-author Qiana Mestrich explains how biased the art world at large was against the idea that women could be artists and mothers:

 "I’ve heard stories of artist moms having to deny or avoid the subject of having kids and even going as far as working under a male pseudonym in order to avoid being marginalised and having their work devalued."

In Mother, Monster, Writer, Maid, a brilliant piece I've read and re-read, Rufi Thorpe writes:

 "I get annoyed when women’s magazines try to edit my motherhood out of my work. I get depressed when they won’t run a piece unless I take out any mention of my having children. I firmly believe that having children has made me smarter and better and more interesting, and fuck you to any women’s mag that doesn’t think so too."

Her essay explores how damaging and devaluing it can be to not see being a mother as a rich and meaningful source of creativity:

“It is easy to dismiss the inherent interest of raising children because such a profoundly meaningful period in life comes to us cloaked in so many boring and pedestrian details: breast pumps and counting wet diapers, homework and vaccination schedules. But any soldier will tell you that much of the Army is similarly boring and routine. Yet we do not ask a war poet, Do you ever worry your work will become clouded with bureaucratic detail? We assume that he can reach past the quotidian to the elemental, and we should demand the same of mothers.

There's no easy answer, but it's becoming clear that there is a lot more to the question.

Our mothers before

What can we learn from images of the women we never met? That was the question best-selling author Edan Lepuckiis set out to explore in this brilliant Instagram series. She shares pictures of people's mothers before they were parents, and it's also now a gorgeous book. The captions are so beautiful and poignant. I love this, from the introduction:

It takes respect and compassion to consider the woman we will never get to know and to try and square her with the woman we do know, and to accept that not all the discrepancies will be resolved. For some of the contributors, their experience of reading their mothers is a celebration. For others, it’s a reckoning. Either way, it’s work. It’s an effort of love.”

(I adored poring over my mum's photo albums as a kid – it's one of the reasons I was so drawn to photography. A child actor on an Irish travelling roadshow, she became a circus performer, and then a trapeze artist and tiger tamer in Mexico, all before she was 35!)

Bringing up bebe

Jamie Beck, a huge photographer crush of mine, has launched a newsletter and in a recent edition she talked about finding her way back to creativity after her daughter Eloise was born:

"Everything stopped. My energy, my ideas, my time. It was scary, really, for me to wonder if I’d ever feel like a photographer again. Feel worthy of creating. Now I can laugh at that as I’ve since had time to sleep, reclaimed my body, and eased back into work and discovered I not only have more to say but I am enjoying and appreciating it all in such a deeper way."

You can read more here.

Things I read and loved this month

• Why no one is too old for picture books.

• Made me laugh: The UX on this small child is terrible.

• A very sweet, funny and sincere stop-motion short exploring 'the motherhood penalty' in the workplace

• "When I hear “I don’t know how you do it,” my answer is “I don’t!" A pragmatic and refreshing read on pareting during the pandemic.

• Here are 10 reasons to write a book.

I'll leave you with...

Tackling tricky transitions

Toddler transition times get a lot of coverage, but how about for us grown-ups? When work-home-parenting-life is all happening under one roof it can take a while to get in the zone, and similarly tough to be able to engage and be present once you’re done working, and not let whatever you’ve been immersed in consume the rest of the day.

I'm finding short, sharp habits are helping a lot: A quick morning 'commute' around the estate before heading upstairs to work, and this lovely, grounding 5-minute meditation by the wonderful Jodie before I head back down to Ari.

That’s it for this month. If you have any feedback, article recommendations or just want to say hi, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading, and see you next month,

Nathalie

Hi friends,

Welcome to the first edition of The Motherhood Sessions, a newsletter for mother makers, writers, dreamers and doers.

Thank you again for signing up. There are over 140 of you on here, which shows just how much these conversations are needed, now more than ever.

Every month, I'll send you some links, resources and reads – things I come across exploring motherhood and creative work.

I hope that they might encourage and inspire you, or simply kickstart a conversation (and please feel free to reply, I'd love to hear from you).

Right – let's get stuck in.

Something old: Adrienne Rich and finding "freedom of the mind"

Over the past few months, there has been a lot written about how Covid has plunged many women back into the 50s. 

But what does that mean for our creativity? For that, I turned to the iconic feminist writer Adrienne Rich, who, in the 1950s, married and had three kids before she was 30 and wrote so presciently about the challenges of creative life and motherhood. 

Below we find Rich reflecting on the increasing tensions she experienced as a wife and mother during that time - and honestly, much of it reads like a snapshot from one of the many Instagram DM convos I've had with a fellow creative mother. 

On that very-particular-to-parenthood exhaustion:

“I was writing very little…partly from the discontinuity of female life with its atten­tion to small chores, errands, work that others constantly undo, small children’s constant needs. What I did write was unconvincing to me; my anger and frustration were hard to acknowledge in or out of poems because in fact I cared a great deal about my husband and my children.”

On losing yourself after having kids:

"What frightened me most was the sense of drift, of being pulled along on a current which called itself my destiny, but in which I seemed to be losing touch with whoever I had been, with the girl who had experienced her own will and energy almost ecstatically at times, walking around a city or riding a train at night or typing in a student room."

On ‘having it all’: 

“I had thought I was choosing a full life: the life available to most men, in which sexuality, work, and parenthood could coexist. But I felt...guilt toward the people closest to me, and guilty toward my own being. I wanted, then, more than anything, the one thing of which there was never enough: time to think, time to write.”

On finding the headspace to be creative: 

“For a poem to coalesce…a certain freedom of the mind is needed—free­dom to press on, to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that your motion can be sustained, that the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away. 

That “freedom of the mind” – secure in the knowledge you won't have to drop what you're doing – is what I often feel most robbed of. Even if I have somehow magically been able to create an actual pocket of time, I often find that I can be productive – reply to emails, tick off to-dos, schedule interviews – but being creative is the hard bit, isn’t it?

"The experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me" Rich went on to say, and, as this excellent New Yorker piece explores, her work reclaimed and repurposed images of domestic life "to show how they might be used for—and transcended in—art". 

(All the above from When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision, 1972)

Something new: On The Rocks

There's a lot to like in On The Rocks (Apple TV+). The rich, busy and bustling pre-Covid New York location. The implausible but undeniably gorgeous set design. And how, in many ways, it echoes Rich's experience decades earlier.

Written and directed by Sofia Coppola and starring Rashida Jones, Bill Murray and Marlon Wayans, it tells the story of a successful thirty-something writer Laura (Jones) struggling to feel seen and find her creative groove amidst the madness of life with two young kids and becoming increasingly suspicious that her husband might be having an affair.

Coppola says she started working on the script when her kids were little — "just that moment of trying to find my way as a creative working person ... navigating a new moment in my life."

In an interview with The Independent, Coppola talked about how "vulnerable and insecure" new mothers can feel. In a way, it's those feelings that allow the plot – where Jones and Murray embark on a series of increasingly madcap schemes to try and figure out whether her husband is indeed cheating – to happen:

"I’m just trying to take where I was at that moment in my life where my kids were younger…that adjustment. I think you go through an identity crisis [when you become a parent] and I thought it would make sense that she could be vulnerable and insecure enough to go along with this crazy plan, if she’s in that state.”

It's a quiet, gentle film in a way, but it sticks with you. I particularly loved how everyday scenes of seeming monotony – how we see Laura repeatedly picking up toys from the floor, squishing tiny feet into little shoes, hurrying to the school run, saying a rushed hello to friends, sitting in her office meticulously making labels for notebooks (rather than writing in them) – are so beautifully shot and documented. (Again, domestic life becomes art.)

Things I read and loved this week

• This Vogue piece paying tribute to some of the people we lost in 2020 credits the wonderful Eavan Boland with "putting to rest the tiresome fallacy that motherhood and creativity cannot coexist".

• There is some brilliant advice in this Instagram post from Irish journalist Nikki Walsh on what freelance creatives at home with small children should bear in mind.

• Jen Stevens interviews creative mothers – including fashion stylists, creative directors and broadcaster Síle Seoige – on how the pandemic is causing a big creativity lag for mothers right now [subscription needed].

• This New York times series following "American mothers on the brink" makes for grim, eye-opening and compelling reading.

• In some positive pandemic news, this BBC Worklife piece examing how Coronavirus is going to change the way we work mentions research that says remote work can help mothers better balance their work and family responsibilities, "which makes them less likely to sacrifice one for the other".

"When people ask me “how I do it all” as a working mother, the answer is simple: I spend an extraordinary amount of money on childcare"

Freelance life + spotty childcare often means you feel you can’t afford to do something just to scratch a creative itch. So understanding what you need to bring in and what your time is worth is vital. I loved this pricing guide from my mega woman crush Jessica Hische – it’s aimed at illustrators, but the fundamentals apply to any creative career, and it's full of lots of gems like the one above. 

If you're working for yourself in any creative field and struggling with knowing what to charge, I highly recommend it.

I'll leave you with...

What’s better now than then?

If you’re anything like me, it’s often all too easy to wallow in what has been lost in this new land of parenthood: time, idleness, that sense of open possibility. But I know there are some things that I have gotten better at, and that will ultimately support and protect my creativity in the long run. One of these is saying no. I’ve always been prone to taking too much on, and not being selective enough. But my time isn’t my own any more, and I’m becoming much more disciplined, which in turn has often led to having the space to say a big, enthusiastic yes to truly fun, enriching things. 

How about you? If you are a mother, is there anything in your creative life that has improved, even a tiny bit?

That's it for this month. If you have any feedback, article recommendations or just want to say hi, I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading, and see you next month,

Nathalie