Poetry Doesn’t Need a Room of One’s Own
A year ago, I walked away from academia after fifteen years to become a full-time homeschooling mother and a freelance writer. I was sure that the first of these would go well. I had doubts about the second, and that possibility was making me a bit verklempt. I had been in school in some capacity—whether as a student or as a professor—practically my entire life. Could I even exist apart from the academic environment that had become so closely entwined with my identity and soul, to a point where it was quite obvious that it was, as is the case for so many academics, an idol rooted deep within?
Necessity led to an uprooting—of the idol and also away from our former home, as we moved halfway across the country for my husband’s new job. And now, as I reflect on what a gift this past year has been in so many surprising ways, I am reminded of the importance of the stories we tell ourselves. The modern world is happy to fill our minds with stories that glorify creative endeavors over all else, stories that will assure you that human sacrifice is essential—either you sacrifice yourself to be able to make art (or not), or you sacrifice others to your art. Such a way of thought is part and parcel of the modern secular ideal of independence. It also is not true.
Motherhood has always reminded women that we do not belong to ourselves alone. Everything about motherhood is embodied and serves to connect the mother to her child—from the earliest sensations that let a woman know she is pregnant, to the visceral process of labor and childbirth, to the nights of sleep loss while caring for the fragile new life, to the “Mom Brain” that can last for years and that scientists are still trying to fully understand, to the scars and other reminders of pregnancy and motherhood that mothers acquire for the rest of their lives. To be a mother is an identity stamped into one’s body and soul. This is, indeed, a theological truth, and not just the findings of modern science.
What do we make of it all? Perhaps the best-known tale of creative and embodied motherhood is one that we too often overlook—to our own detriment. It is a true story about a young woman, unexpectedly pregnant and not yet married. Overwhelmed with awe at the secret that is within her, she bursts into poetry as she sings a song of praise to God.
The woman in question is, of course, Mary, and her song has become known as the “Magnificat,” after the first word in the Latin Vulgate version of it. Mary’s song is so simple yet stunning. She is resigned to her fate—except putting it this way sounds too grim to be accurate. Rather, to put the facts more simply, pregnancy made Mary into a poet. She embraces the embodied truth she is living, carrying God Incarnate—her “soul magnifies the Lord” and her “spirit rejoices in God.” She cannot do otherwise. And this truth directly leads to her creativity. The knowledge of her impending motherhood makes her burst into poetry, into song. Without the first (motherhood), the second (art) would not exist.
This is a beautiful image, and one that is easily lost in much of modern feminist writing about motherhood and creativity. More often than not, recent books and essays have complained of the hindrances that children offer to the creative life—one might note Julie Phillips’s The Baby on the Fire Escape, which catalogues the artists who never fully reconciled their art with their mothering; or Christine Smallwood’s recent essay on reviewing books, in which she bemoans that “it is impossible to know what ideas never came into the world because someone couldn’t or wouldn’t accept an hourly rate that barely covers the babysitter.”
The mention specifically of a sitter makes Smallwood’s condemnation of the inadequate conditions for freelancers clear: she is talking specifically about creative mothers who wish they could write more—but cannot. This was, certainly, my own secret fear when choosing to walk away from academia. I too wondered: without childcare, how might I continue to do the thing that brings my creative mind joy?
Lived experience of different mothers is going to vary dramatically. Such is simply the nature of lived experience. And yet, I must admit, I find such knocks that pit motherhood and creativity against each other as irreconcilable enemies unduly condescending and cruel. Besides, too often such questions turn into self-fulfilling prophecies for those who ask, depending on their own presuppositions. Mine, in particular, are different from those with which Phillips approaches her project. While she concludes that art should come first, and most of the creative mothers she selected sacrificed their children to their art, I proceed from the assumption that image-bearers should always come first, ranking ahead of any art, no matter how beautiful. In her recent book, The Mother Artist, Catherine Ricketts agrees—art and motherhood can coexist, even if it takes much work, constant stress, incessant wrestling with ever-changing limitations on the mother’s body, mind, and soul.
And with this admission, we come back to Mary—whom pregnancy unexpectedly made a poet. Indeed, if we judge the success of one’s literary production based on the number of readers, Mary’s poem is an all-time international bestseller, contained as it is within the ultimate international bestseller that is the Bible.
Such was not Mary’s aim, of course. Unlike male poets of antiquity—from Homer to Hesiod to Pindar to Lucretius and Vergil—who were openly conscious of their desire for immortal glory and invoked the Muses’ blessings upon their labors, Mary’s only desire is to praise God, to thank him for the gift of this child. The glory, she knows, belongs to God—although she recognizes that others in the future will call her blessed. Ironically, through this surrender of all glory to God, she achieved the goal she did not seek, but which is the dream of all writers: to be read by a lot of people.
And so, her story has something encouraging to offer for mother writers like me. Making art as a way to seek our own glory is silly. It is also a usurpation of something that is not ours. Just like our talents, our children, or anything else about us, none of our art belongs to us anyway. These are all gifts from God, to be used to bring glory to him and him alone. This is a countercultural admission to make in our age of social media, clicks, and hyper-personal striving for success, whatever that might be.
But there is more about this, and this more extends to how we order our everyday lives. Ever since at least Virginia Woolf’s exhortation that creativity for a woman demands “A Room of One’s Own,” the demand has been for that great divorce—the separation between the woman as writer or creative being and the same woman as a wife or mother or, generally, a woman. For men, after all, as Woolf rightly notes, such a separation between the domestic and the working spheres has always been expected. And so, the expectation goes, to be able to create one must have a designated space, time, and amenities.
And yet, I spent fifteen years as a full-time academic, but found my creativity stifled and discouraged. Instead, since walking away from academia a year ago, I have written more than ever. That is the great paradox. Full-time motherhood apart from academia—the normally expected realm of creativity—made me more creative, not less.
Forget the utter lack of “a room of one’s own,” absence of designated writing time, lack of access to an academic research library of any sort, and the perpetual state of chaos. I have been conditioned by years of academic existence to expect that all of these things are essentials, the sine qua non of good writing, and yet, it turns out, when the choice is simply to write or not to write, I can do without all these things.
True, it would be nice to have any space of my own in this house that has not been taken over by my children with glee. Instead, the desk I thought would be mine when we moved into this house a year ago now has cut-out paper dolls and half-made bead bracelets and partially completed puzzles that the kids are working on. I am typing this—as I have done much of the book I wrote this year—while seated on a chair, my laptop precariously balanced on my knees. I strongly suspect that there are some small toys stuffed into the back recesses of this chair. It feels oddly lumpy, and at some point, I will clean it out.
It is fine, really. Because this creative activity is not about me, but about something greater—this is about the glorious and surprising strangeness of motherhood in the modern world that does not know how to handle such things. Instead of stifling me, this chaos all around inspires me daily, even if sometimes it can be exasperating. Ultimately, it reminds me that my creativity is not the only one that exists and is not the only one that matters. My children too, the image-bearers of the Creator God who made us all to love art so much as to wish to create something ourselves, are daily creating something. And while not epic by any stretch of the imagination, this life of creativity lived together with them is so beautiful.