Storying The Self As A Writer-Mother
Mel Parks, freelance writer and editor of Children’s Centre Leader, offers a glimpse into her doctorate research proposal which challenges personal, cultural and archetypal narratives of what being a creative mother is all about. It includes a series of creative writing workshops for mothers in children’s centres.
I spent the summer delving into the stories that have shaped my relationship with creativity as a mother for my MA in Creative Writing dissertation. The research took me back to Wales, where I grew up. I walked with my mother to a site of mythological significance; Llyn Y Fan Fach and we talked about my ‘motherline’ (Lowinsky, 1992) of hardworking, resourceful, resilient, creative women. I rewrote the story of the Lady of Llyn Y Fan Fach (Breverton, 2012) to explore patriarchal societal constructs of where the expectations of motherhood came from. And I explored the idea of a matricentric feminism, where mothering is work that is important and valuable but does not have to be the sole responsibility and duty of mothers.
Matricentric feminism ‘contests, challenges, and counters the patriarchal oppressive institution of motherhood and seeks to imagine and implement a maternal identity and practice that is empowering to mothers’ (O’Reilly, 2016). It also ‘commits to social change and social justice, and regards mothering as a socially engaged enterprise and a site of power, wherein mothers can and do create social change through childrearing and activism’ (O’Reilly, 2016). Seizing creativity and sharing stories of our experiences in a personal, particular way is part of this activism.
Although I have been a professional writer for 20 years and writing creatively alongside being a mother for most of those years, I felt as if I had not achieved enough. My anxiety was caused by my inner critic who was strong and shouty, silencing into submission my attempts at finishing creative work, at sending it out into the world. I realised that the guilt I was feeling about stealing time away from my children was buying into the idea of being a ‘good mother’; one that did not spend time writing for her own enjoyment or self-expression. Andrea O’Reilly, in her book, Mother Outlaws, outlines societal rules of being a good mother:
Rule 3 — ‘the mother must always put children’s needs before their own’
Rule 5 — ‘the mother must be fully satisfied, fulfilled, completed and composed in motherhood’
Rule 6 — ‘mothers must lavish excessive amounts of time, energy and money in the rearing of their children’ (O’Reilly, 2004).
There are other rules, but I have chosen to highlight these as rules which creative mothers or writer-mother will most often break if they follow their creative urges or a creative pathway. In the anthology, Fruits of Labour, a book of essays on mothering and creative pursuits, Mary Lowe says, ‘To be creative or artistic requires a certain freedom of thought, an ability to notice, to listen, to play’ (Sumner, 2001) which is tough when you have a child tugging at your apron strings. In 1936, Cyril Connolly famously said ‘there is no more sombre enemy of great art than the pram in the hall’ (Connolly, 1961). Ironically, he was referring to male writers as he did not acknowledge that women could be writers. But the sentiment rings true. Artist, Barbara Hepworth was determined to do some art every day when she became a mother of four children, an older son and triplet babies, but she ended up putting her triplets into a residential nursery for three years as the only way she could continue to work (Artsnight, 2015). More recently, Brigid Schulte, in a Guardian article about the lack of time a woman has to create, discussed female artists whose creative lives were limited by ‘the expectations and duties of home and care’ while male artists could move ‘through life as if unfettered time to themselves were a birthright’ (Schulte, 2019). For writer/artist-mothers, there is a constant pull between societal and personal expectations of child and home care, the need to earn money as well as the demands of creativity.
I am purposely using the word ‘mother’ rather than ‘parent’ to acknowledge the important job that they do but I also acknowledge that mothering takes many forms and mothers don’t necessarily need to be biological. A mother is anyone who identifies as such and makes mothering practice a focal point of their life. Motherhood matters and so does creativity and every mother has the right to claim creativity and there is a need for it too. Reclaiming our mother stories and our creative lives is a way of positioning ourselves in motherhood; it’s a way of affirming and not denying that part of ourselves. A feminist theory for mothers needs to include creativity so that it is not reducing a woman’s self to motherhood, which is what women were breaking away from in the 70s, but more that motherhood ‘is central and integral to understanding mother women’s oppression in patriarchy and their resistance to it’ (Schulte, 2019). One way to understand our role as mothers is to write about it.
I met a mother recently who told me she had started attending creative writing workshops at a children’s centre when her children (now 7 and 9) were little. She has just finished a part-time MA in Creative Writing and has published a series of self-help books for children. The children’s centre stopped running workshops when their funding was cut. When I heard this, I felt a new surge of determination to apply for research council PhD funding for my proposed project which includes running a series of writing workshops in children’s centres as a creative methods lab.
My PhD research will continue to interweave personal and mythological mothering stories with, as Marilyn Metta says, ‘the cultural, the historical, the political, the embodied, and the imaginary’ (Metta, 2013). It will have a wellbeing focus as I will also align my research with Metta’s declaration that ‘the meanings we create out of stories are contested, re-invented, revised and continually re-written to align and re-align with emerging life scripts of our selves and our place in the world’ (Metta, 2013). I am excited to involve other mothers in children’s centres in my process and to find out how they are able to (re)story themselves post-maternity with my creative writing workshop techniques.
Since one in five mothers experience anxiety and/or depression during pregnancy or in the first year after childbirth (APPG, 2017) and creative activities, including writing are shown to be therapeutic (Hunt, 2000; Pennebaker, 2014), creativity should be an essential, rather than an add-on, first-to-be-cut service in children’s centres.
If you are interested in setting up a writing group in your children’s centre, Maternal Journal has some excellent resources to help you get started.
References
All Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing, Inquiry Report, Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing, July 2017, Second Edition
Artsnight, Lily Cole, 23:00 03/07/2015, BBC2 England, 30 mins. https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/0A4D8E56?bcast=115959328 (Accessed 06 Dec 2019)
Breverton, Terry, The Physicians of Myddfai: Cures and Remedies of the Mediaeval World (Carmarthenshire: Cambria Books, 2012)
Connolly, Cyril, Enemies of Promise (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961)
Hunt, Celia, Therapeutic Dimensions of Autobiography in Creative Writing (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2000)
Lowinsky, Naomi Ruth, The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to Find Her Female Roots (1992: Fisher King Press, 2009)
Metta, Marilyn, ‘Putting the Body on the Line: Embodied Writing and Recovery through Domestic Violence’, Holman Jones, S.; Adams, T; Ellis, C., Eds., Handbook of Autoethnography (USA: Left Coast Press, 2013)
O’Reilly, Andrea, Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice, (Canada: Demeter Press, 2016)
O’Reilly, Andrea, Mother Outlaws: Theories and Practices of Empowered Mothering (Women’s Press of Canada, 2004)
Pennebaker, James W; Evans, John F, Expressive Writing: Words That Heal, (Enumclaw, Idyll Harbour, 2014) Amazon Kindle ebook
Schulte, Brigid, ‘A Woman’s Greatest Enemy? A Lack Of Time To Herself’, The Guardian Online, Sunday 21 July 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/21/woman-greatest-enemy-lack-of-time-themselves> (accessed 27 August 2019)
Sumner, Penny, Ed., Fruits of Labour: Creativity, Self-Expression and Motherhood, (London: The Women’s Press Ltd, 2001)
Mel Parks, editor of Children’s Centre Leader, has been writing about childcare and early years for 20 years, both in a freelance capacity and employed by national organisations. She recently completed an MA in Creative Writing (with distinction) at the University of Brighton and she develops and delivers creative writing workshops for children and adults in Sussex: www.honeyleafwriting.com. Thank you to Children’s Centre Leader and Tunbridge Wells group of children’s centres for agreeing to be partners on my proposed PhD journey.
