Women writing (with children)

Well, I’ve been conferencing with my first-year composition students all week, which leaves very little time for food, much less blogs, so I’ve been pretty behind lately. I have lots to catch up on, but I thought I’d just drop this in. My students in my women’s literature course have been thinking about how having children/not having children affects women’s writing. I posted this to our discussion this week.

I’m interested what V. says here about the possibility that children might encourage creativity. I write a bit myself, some poetry (I’ve published a handful of poems) and also some creative non-fiction type memoir type stuff that’s currently just for myself, although I’m thinking of branching out. I find that having children increases my writing productivity, but I am also constantly frustrated by trying to write while having kids.

My daughter was born when I was in grad school, and all I’d been writing for several years at that point was my academic papers, although I’d written poetry all my life until grad school. I just couldn’t concentrate on creative writing when I was trying to write my dissertation. But when my daughter was born, I wanted to write about how differently I began to see the world. And I didn’t have a lot of time, so poetry seemed to work well for me again—it can be such a tight and compressed genre. During her naps, I could draft a poem and revise it and have something to finished in a week or so, even if it wasn’t perfect. So I wrote a lot of short poems, none of which were very good.

When my son was born years later, I also began writing again in response to that. It’s not that a lot of my work is about birth or even my children, although a good deal of it is. But my perspective was changed by having kids. I saw different things—smaller things. Small things became more important to me. It’s what Emerson wrote in “Nature”

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.

While obviously he’s very vested in that whole wacky idea that Mankind includes woman too, his sentiment here is one that holds—that children see differently, so when I had my children, I started to see differently as well.

The problem, of course, now that I have all this poetic inspiration, is that I regularly have to get up at 5:00 a.m. if I’m going to write anything—I can’t do it during the day at work, I can’t do it after work because we’re all dealing with homework and dinner, and I’m too tired to write after everybody’s FINALLY asleep. I have had to retrain myself in terms of my writing and thinking abilities completely—I used to start writing at something like 10:00 at night and I wouldn’t really get going until 12 or so—I’d work til 2 a.m. and get up around 9:00 for classes the next day. Now by the time my husband and I get everybody off packed to school and daycare, I’m still at work by something like 8:00. I almost literally pass out between 9:00 and 10:00 at night. I’ll sit down to read a bedtime story and wake up the next day, you know?

I can’t tell you what a significant disruption to my work life this schedule change represented. It took years before I adjusted enough to do real writing at that early hour—I could prep for class or something like that, but I couldn’t write. Now I’m more accustomed, but I feel as if I have to steal time from my work and my home to write at all.

I have some other good quotes on this by actual women writing about their own creativity, but they’re all at home! I’ll try to post one or two of those early next week.