On Mothering and Work
I'm writing this the day after my first Mother's Day as a mother, in the hour and a half or so I have each night after the baby has gone to bed and before I go to bed if I plan to get any sleep at all. It's still strange six surreal, beautiful and extraordinarily difficult months in to claim that title after spending well over a decade of adulthood not giving much thought to parenting at all. There's little to say about the meat of it that hasn't already been said better; a wonderful gift and an immense challenge at once that, to paraphrase a Redditor (look, it's my main source of information sadly), has already broken my old self and begun to rebuild it.
I haven't had time to do much work, and am lucky to be in a situation where our family's survival doesn't require me to; that said, I'm doing the specifically American calculus of not paying for childcare because my earnings wouldn't be enough to justify that massive expense. So instead I'm doing full-time parenting and part-time work, a job-and-a-half like so many others. There's no question the whole thing is harder than I thought it would be (shock of the century), and I have longed for all the time I wasted not luxuriating in the possibilities of my work; right now, thinking and imagining don't really fit in the schedule.
I've barely tasted this push and pull that so many women before me have struggled with; Marissa's written about it, and of course been a mother for much longer. I think there is a particular struggle with maintaining a creative profession as a mother; the looseness that kind of looks like flexibility on the outside is often just a different, less predictable set of obligations. I was asked to do an on-site interview last week, and decided to give it a go, coordinating an hour-long drive with the baby who would then be watched by my in-laws — only to show up and learn that the artist had pushed the conversation an hour and a half. "But you can hang, right?", they asked. For the first time, I really, truly could not; after still more juggling and no small amount of screaming (apologies to my in-laws), I did the interview and it was invigorating — a reminder of something I'm actually good at, unlike keeping my baby on a schedule and getting him to sleep and all the other things.
When we discussed Alice Gerrard's memoir for the Don't Rock The Inbox Book Club, the thing that jumped out wasn't really her folk bona fides or even all her lovely photographs. It was the way she talked about motherhood, the ambivalence and regret she articulated about the way she'd raised her four children while cultivating a music career that ultimately made her a folk icon. "As I look back, I think I was way more conflicted about becoming a parent than I ever admitted at the time," she wrote. "As time passed, doing what I wanted, when I wanted, playing music, living music, was hard for me to reconcile with the care of four small children."
Most of her regret is reserved for not being the parent she believes her children deserved, a theme that she comes back to over and over — in her life, making music was fundamentally incompatible with raising children, especially in a time when rigid gender roles more explicitly obliged women to do the lion's share of child-rearing and homekeeping (even if they had other successful careers like Gerrard). It's jarring but also refreshing how often her feelings about parenting and her love for her children come up throughout the book; she talks repeatedly about how messy her house was with plenty of humor but also, again, clearly no small amount of guilt. I don't know that I've ever read a music book that laid it all out so plainly, and to me that makes it brave.
She chronicled some of those feelings in the song "Mama's Gonna Stay"; the only song I've ever heard about standing in the hallway trying to not make the floors creak so you don't wake the kids (about as real as it gets!!). I'm inspired by her journey and grateful for her candor as I embark on my own, pushing at the limits of what I thought I was capable of.
