Is it fair to ask women to describe how they balance work and motherhood? Should men be asked the same thing? As a woman and a mother, I can see and understand both sides. But the reality is, women are the ones giving birth. Women are the ones healing physically from birth. Women are the ones (disproportionately) dealing with PPD. Women are the ones nursing. And for many families, women are the ones doing the day-to-day childcare. These circumstances combine to make it very hard for women to get any work done—and yet they do. Because they have to.
When I was pregnant, I had this fantasy that after I had the baby, my life would be just as it was, only with a tiny human. I’d still be able to work a lot, still be able to write as much. Even writing that sentence made me simultaneously cringe and laugh, because it’s so preposterous that I could think like that. But I was so used to reading interviews and articles about women writers who were able to churn out articles and books while having multiple kids, like they were superwomen who had 48 hours in a day instead of 24. There wasn’t much frank discussion about the difficulties and expenses involved with childcare. I didn’t realize just how time-consuming infants are. I had a sense that residencies wouldn’t be open to writers with infants, but I didn’t fully comprehend that if I chose to do extended breastfeeding, I wouldn’t really be able to apply to these for 2-3 years.
If we don’t talk about these things, parenting and motherhood become invisible, and that just exacerbates our unreasonable expectations and fosters feelings of isolation. It also ensures that things don’t change. If we don’t talk about these things, conferences won’t provide childcare. Residencies won’t be infant-friendly or more accepting of parents. We won’t have spaces to admit that sure, parenting is great, but damn, we miss having long stretches of writing and reading time without paying daycare fees (for those of us lucky enough to afford care).
This is why I came up with the idea for this series.
I talked with Lydia Kiesling over email about her book The Golden State, which examines these issues in its own way. Set over 10 days, this debut novel follows a young mother who drops everything to go to the high desert with her daughter, to the trailer left to her by her grandparents. What follows is not quite what she expected. It would be a mistake to say the book is only about motherhood, though: it captures a society that is steadily breaking apart, the intricacies of relationships (of all kinds), and the inevitable loss that comes with living.
I loved reading this book—by the end, I felt such a kinship with the characters that I couldn’t stop thinking about them and where they’d end up. How did you come up with the premise for The Golden State?
I can’t tell you how nice it is to hear that! I had a few things floating around. My grandparents lived in a town very like the (fictional) Altavista. They died about ten years ago, and my connection to that place has become increasingly tenuous since then. That was on my mind a lot at the same time that I had my eldest daughter in 2014. Then she was on my mind a lot, and work was on my mind a lot. I also had friends of friends who dealt with a horrible immigration situation. I thought about them separately at first, and then realized that a novel was the ideal vehicle for putting all of these concerns together.
As a mother of a 2-year-old, I really identified with Daphne and the rhythms of her day—the tedium of basic mothering, the boredom, the sweet unexpected moments of pure joy in a sea of difficulty. You got it SO RIGHT—even the unbroken prose without commas felt like the way I think. What was your process for that?
The official guiding principle for the book was “Describe what it’s like to be alone with a small child.” You have a lot of new feelings to cope with when you have a child, but the one I found the strangest was this dual sense of wanting to go away with her—that we were a unit and didn’t need anyone else to function—while also suspecting that I would wither into nothingness if I had to spend all day, every day with her and no other stimulus. So part of the writing was living out a fantasy of aloneness and separateness with a baby, in the full knowledge that I actually handle full-time solo parenting really pretty badly. I was really interested in trying to pack all of those feelings into a prose style, and the only one I could come up with was first person and present-tense. I tried past tense, but it just did not carry the momentum, both as a way to make the narrative less excruciating (“and then she picked up the socks… and then she gave her the string cheese”) and because it also let me get really into the headspace of a racing mom-mind, where you are living so fully in one endless mundane moment, and the whole rest of the world and your life is buzzing around in there at the same time.
That makes perfect sense to me. What have you done to maintain a space for yourself and your work (writing and otherwise) within motherhood?
Well, the main way thus far is I… spend money. Ironically this is a book about being full-time with a child, and I would not have been able to write it without full-time childcare. To write the book, I quit my full-time job and was lucky enough to take a very part-time job as editor of The Millions. The stipend from The Millions didn’t cover daycare for my first daughter completely, but it was more than half, and with my husband’s salary and healthcare—a tremendous privilege to have those things in America—we said that we could try this arrangement for a year, at the end of which there needed to be some indication that the book was going to soon be publishable, or I would need to get a full-time job again. I’m sure it is the only time in my life that a deadline like this will work, but it did, and I sold the book before that year was out. But I also got pregnant. Now the older one is in preschool and this one is in daycare, and that’s how I’m making space for my work. But even with this space I haven’t been able to replicate that breakneck pace for the second book I’m theoretically working on, and it’s been only five months of this arrangement and already it’s really clear that we can’t afford it. So I’m going to be rejoining the regular workforce in some capacity pretty soon. And then I’ll have to figure out again how to do the writing. This topic is fraught. On the one hand, I could stay home with the younger child so that our annual childcare cost was not $37k, but I know my work habits and while there are many amazing writers who make it work during naptime, there has been no indication thus far that I am one of them. So something is going to have to change, pretty soon.
How do you think the creative community can support women, and mothers, especially?
One reason this book exists, from an inspiration standpoint, is that when my older daughter was born, I went back to work way earlier than I was prepared to, when she was about ten weeks old. Which, crucially and horribly, is way more time than most working women in American get to spend with their newborn babies.
I had tried to be very stiff-upper-lip about it, but I’m only just realizing… I guess after completely upending my life to writing a novel partially inspired by it… that I was pretty undone by that feeling of loss, and the professional and financial necessity of having to go back when I did. Now as I mentioned above I’m dealing with a new set of professional anxieties. But in both scenarios the anxieties mostly came down to money. In America, childcare means money. So on the most basic and uninspired level, I think the creative community can support parents with residencies and grants that are specifically meant to pay for childcare. It’s amazing how much of a luxury, nice-to-have type of thing that feels like, though, considering that in our current American hellscape many people, artists and otherwise, are having to crowdfund medical care and things that are much more life-or-death than whether or not you’re going to get your three hours of writing in while someone else minds your kid.
On page 138, you write, “Why did I have a child? To have a child is to court loss.” Loss is woven in various ways throughout the book: Daphne and Engin, Daphne and her parents, Ellery Simpson, Alice’s many losses, and even the secessionist movement in the story. Yet it doesn’t feel like a book about loss, per se. Did you consciously write about loss, and how did you do it in such a way that it didn’t overwhelm the reader? (Big question, I know!)
My friend Meaghan O’Connell wrote a lovely book of essays called And Now We Have Everything, and she has a great line about how when you have a baby you “create a death.” It’s sort of an annoying canard about parenting that having kids makes you more empathetic, or better—I don’t think that is true. But I do think it can make you more aware of the loss that people are living with every day, all around you.
I actually suspect that the book is a touch too light for how stuffed it is with bereaved people, but life is also full of people who are walking around with huge loss, and there are still light moments.
What are you struggling with, as a parent and as a writer, right now?
As a parent: Being patient. Keeping it cheerful. Not yelling. Not letting TV be the third parent. I fail at all of these all the time. As a writer: If I’m going to procrastinate on everything (The Millions, emails, freelancing), I should be doing it by writing a second novel. Instead I’m procrastinating on all of those things and seem to have nothing to show for it except guilt and shame.
Is there a way to talk about motherhood in the arts without reducing it to a women-only conversation? Because I’m noticing that when men talk about financing their creative lives while working and raising a family, they’re lauded and seen as progressive—but when women try and bring the conversation to the forefront, we’re told we’re being patronizing to other women, or we shouldn’t be talking about this anymore.
I think there are particular psychic and spiritual challenges that come with motherhood, but those are things that can be worked out in art. As far as the practical side of things, I don’t there’s a logistical problem that motherhood poses that money wouldn’t solve—that is just as true of fatherhood, or caring for an ailing relative, or feeding yourself, or buying a home, or any other obligation! In America, money means time and freedom. So if people are feeling fussy about consigning themselves to a mommy corner, I think the problem can be avoided by advocating for greater transparency about money in creative professions. (This is something that people like my friend Manjula Martin of Scratch Magazine and the subsequent Scratch anthology have been saying for a while.) I personally have no issue with being asked about how I balance motherhood and the work of writing, because I think about it all the time, but I’m interested in hearing every working writer talk about how they manage, just because writing is intensely unremunerative and time-consuming and American life is expensive and having multiple jobs of any kind is hard. Framing the question like “how do you make your life work as a writer” and asking that of everyone would bring it all up—motherhood, if it’s in play, but also all the other circumstances people face that make the production of art a challenge.
What books inspire you, and what are you reading right now?
Clare Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus, Elisa Albert’s After Birth and Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai inspired me as far as describing the experience of being with children. Michelle Huneven’s Off Course inspired me as a gorgeous California book. Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back and Norman Rush’s Mating inspired me by having absolutely killer restless first-person female narrators.
Lately I’ve been reading new books: Rumaan Alam’s That Kind of Mother (also great on being with children), Ling Ma’s Severance, Vanessa Hua’s River of Stars, Lillian Li’s Number One Chinese Restaurant, and Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know, and loved them. Right now I’m reading every single thing by Karl Ove Knausgaard because I’m interviewing him in September and I’m terrified beyond belief.
What advice would you give to a writer trying to juggle parenthood and writing?
They are all clichés, and as with all writing advice, it’s so personal and specific, but here goes: It is very unfair since the pay is so dismal, but if writing is going to be your job, you have to treat it like a job as far as your children are concerned. You have to arrange for time where you are alone working. You have to have people in your life—whether it’s a co-parent or family member or mom community—who take your writing seriously and respect your need to do it, and help you figure out ways to do it if you can’t afford to do it full-time. If you don’t have those people in your life—who believe that writing is a worthwhile activity and that you are someone who deserves to do it—you have to seek them out.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
I want to write another book! I also want, in my secret heart, to have another baby, but I don’t think that’s in the cards.
Jaime Rochelle Herndon graduated with her MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia and is a writer and editor living in NYC. She is a contributor at Book Riot and a writing instructor at Apiary Lit, and her writing can be seen on Healthline and New York Family Magazine, among others.
Author photo by Andria Lo.