Some thoughts about monsters

This much-tweeted article by Rufi Thorpe, and all the others on what it means to be a mother and a writer, tend to rub me the wrong way. I thirst for them; I hate them. Because — as much as I crave conversation about this stuff, the basic torture of life with small kids — either they’re telling me that the important thing is to put my art first, or they’re saying that making art under these circumstances is impossibly hard and frustrating and the worst (I tend to agree with this), but it’s always about being a mother vs being an art monster. My problem is more just motherhood vs personhood, and the only monsters in my life are the ones a good foot or two below eye level.

A lot of this piece (which is very excellent in many ways, and you should definitely read it) draws on (and critiques) the Tortured Artist paradigm. So many of those male geniuses in the canon got away with being monsters because (a) they assumed they could and (b) it fit right in with the idea that art comes from anguish. Your own, someone else’s, does it really matter? The point is you have to be a Great Tortured Romantic Soul, which basically means an asshole, and if you play it right, being an asshole can actually count as evidence of your artistry.

So that’s obviously crap, and it’s great to have someone rip that apart. Death to the Tortured Artist! But see, artists are not the only people who are selfish. See, for instance, me.

Obviously, I’m not an artist. It’s possible to imagine a life in which I were. For years everyone basically assumed that at some point I’d “be a writer”; and I do dabble in writing knitting patterns. But I’m really not an artist. So reading articles about how hard it is to be an artist and a mother just adds to my burden of guilt, because honestly I’m as selfish as any of those writers, but without their excuse. These “art monster” complaints therefore manage to add to my guilt and frustration. To read them, one would think it’s okay to be selfish, but only if you need to be selfish to make art. What about the mothers who need to get away from their kids just to, well, get away from their kids?

As Thorpe writes:

The problem is not in what I am doing. The problem is in what I am not doing, which is writing every day, but which is also leading a life of the mind.

My loving, supportive, understanding husband asked me recently what it is that I want to do, what I would be doing if I only had the time. Not what career I’d be pursuing — what I’d do. I struggled to answer. I could only mumble a list of things that I’d like to do or try, that I have tried but can’t do justice to in the time available: improving my German (which has the potential to improve my life measurably) and learning the other Swiss languages, learning to sew, knitting and designing even more, writing. It was feeble. Quite obviously, everyone, whatever their circumstances, has a similar list. (Husband certainly does.) I’m not complaining that I don’t have the luxury of time for personal growth, time to explore every passing fancy. It’s not that I desperately want to be doing something in particular. I just desperately want to be doing anything that I can actually put myself into. I want a life of the mind. I love spending time in my head, and that’s just not part of my reality these days.

In one of these many essays on mother-writers — please don’t ask me to track down which one, just blurting out these words is taking so much more time than I have — I read the needle-sharp words: “Mothers do not get to have flow.” People who are not full-time carers of small children can maybe not comprehend just what that means. Whatever your job, however boring or hard or trivial it is, you will at times experience flow. You will find yourself sunk into the task at hand, doing it, fully engaged, proceeding steadily towards satisfaction. (This applies even to those whose job is childcare, and I’ve actually done that job. It’s not remotely the same as full-time responsibility for your own children, without time off.) When your childfree time is limited to, at most, two-hour stretches, when your concentration is wrecked by sleep deprivation and simple lack of use (being urgently interrupted in whatever you’re doing every minute or so throughout the day takes its toll on the attention span), flow is quite astonishingly hard to achieve.

So let me just put this here. Basically, goes this piece, Aristotle says happiness = doing stuff. Being engaged in the process. Flow! And science says YES. And science also says that stress and unhappiness literally kills you. That feeling described by so many other mothers that the little monsters are eating us alive? Not just a feeling. (Literally having a monster pulling on my arm as I type this, btw. “Mommy please come.” He doesn’t need me for anything, he just needs me.)

Also: that vital, health-giving, eudaemonic happiness is about the big picture, not fun in the moment. So Husband misses the point when he suggests I should quit writing knitting patterns because all he sees is the frustration when I’m having a hard time with a spreadsheet. (Which, by the way, is usually because my spreadsheet work is being constantly interrupted. It’s almost as if it’s not the work that’s making me miserable, but not being able to do the work.) Giving up the thing I want to do because I’m unhappy that I don’t have more time to do it… doesn’t seem like the sensible solution. But it’s still not about doing that thing. It’s about doing anything that lets me actually think for more than two minutes together.

Seen from outside, this all calls for a major attitude adjustment. If happiness = a project with meaning and connection, that I can immerse myself in, then clearly I should make monster-wrangling my project. It ticks all the boxes and as a bonus, it would make me a Good Mother. At a stroke, I’d rid myself of frustration, provide a better experience for my children and boost my own happiness levels. Haven’t quite figured out how to do this. Maybe if I weren’t naturally built to need so much alone time, or if my monsters weren’t such very needy monsters.

This whole problem, and the discourse around it, goes together with the myth of the ultimate fulfilment of motherhood, torture though it be, and how non-parents are fundamentally sleepwalking through life. I hate every fucking thing about this. Quoth Thorpe:

My life before children was selfish and bland, all feelings and no grit, just a drifting miasma of mood. To go back to living like that seems like hell.

No really life without kids was pretty great. I do love my kids! I’m so glad I had them — I’m not sure I would make the same choice again, if I knew then etc, but I really am glad I did — but shit. I really miss being free. Being a person, instead of being just a collection of child-serving functions. I’ve been told “nobody’s free, it’s an illusion, nobody gets to do just what they want to do”, and this is of course true, but people without small children do get to do some of what they want to do, some of the time. Honestly they do. I remember it well. So I resent these articles that say “it’s okay, despite all the sacrifices, this life is obviously better,” because it’s not. Really, it’s not. Quite possibly it will be, but not for a good few years to come. Nor do I find it remotely awful to imagine a nanny doing the childcare for me. Maybe my mom switch is broken.

It took me days just to read the article that triggered this. Days more to write even this unedited, overwrought brain dump. (I’m sorry for the long letter; I hadn’t time to write a short one.) I’m painfully aware of all the very excellent, considered, polished pieces that have already been written on this subject from women in circumstances just as difficult as mine. But every single thing I do other than tending to the monsters’ immediate needs, from going to gym to going to sleep and certainly every attempt at carving brain time in between, is a difficult choice, time that has to be stolen from one urgent need to meet another. I choose to prioritise knitting, these days. I’ve also tried writing. Every now and then I have a desperate, urgent need to express whatever feelings are bubbling over and I try to Write Something. So far it hasn’t gone well. But wotthehell, archy, wotthehell. Here we are.