Can You Have Children and Still Write?

I don’t have children (unless you count the three-hundred-plus students in my university residence). I’ve often pondered the question of whether I can have children and still write. I know women who chose never to have children, but devoted themselves to writing instead. I know others who wrote before, during, or after child-rearing. I suspect the question of whether writing and mothering go together has a different answer for every person, every temperament.

I’m posting about this conundrum because I came across an article in the Independent called “The pursuit of life: is it possible to be a mum and write a masterpiece?” via Bookslut. The author, Laura Thompson, touches briefly on the experiences of several British women writers, including Nancy Mitford, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley, to try to draw some conclusions, but the evidence is somewhat contradictory. Nancy Mitford wrote her best books after her hysterectomy. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein after the birth of a child. Rather predictably, Thompson concludes that some writers (“female Tolstoys,” she calls them) like George Eliot probably wouldn’t have had time to produce their masterpieces while raising children, but that “clearly it is possible to write and have children. The real issue, it seems, is the emotional attitude of the woman; and this is only partly a product of her times, her circumstances, her man or lack of one.”

I wouldn’t have gotten so steamed if Thompson had ended there. But she finishes with this paragraph:

When I was pregnant, I thought a great deal about the fact that creating children was selfless, while creating art was selfish; yet did this make them irreducibly opposed or, perhaps, mysteriously similar? This qCan uestion seems to me to sit at the heart of Rachel Cusk’s meditation on motherhood, A Life’s Work, which is infused with Cusk’s fear of losing the essential self that makes her a writer. Yet with magical irony that very fear produced a book. And this, like the image of Claire Tomalin breastfeeding her baby while writing about Mary Wollstonecraft — who, poor woman, was planning her next book throughout the pregnancy which killed her — led me to feel that the two types of creativity might be able to feed off each other: that they might even, sometimes, be twin.

Since when is it a fact that creating children is selfless and creating art is selfish? Is Thompson really serious about this? I am so tired of child-bearing being cast as the ultimate humanitarian act. There are just as many selfish reasons to have children as there are selfless reasons to create art. And the bit about “two types of creativity feeding off each other”: sounds rather romanticized to me. Personally, being inspired with creativity by children is not going to help if one has little time or energy to write.