I might be particularly attuned to this stuff, but I feel I’m always reading about women – mothers – I admire powering triumphantly through the very real obstacles of early parenthood, creating and innovating in nap times, evenings and early mornings. “Though time for writing is now more scarce – she mentions the ‘in between’ moments snatched in the car and the office – motherhood has made her a ‘better writer’.” That’s a recent interview with the author Kiley Reid. A Vogue article on motherhood and creativity last year had several examples: “I found motivation and grit I had never felt before,” one interviewee announced; another “wrote her first book between the hours of 4am and 6am during the first two years of her daughter’s life”. Caitlin Moran expands on the idea at length in How to Be a Woman: “In the tiny windows of time that your child is asleep or someone else is looking after her, you find yourself becoming almost superhumanly productive. Give a new mother a sleeping child for an hour, and she can achieve 10 times more than a childless person.”
These women aren’t boasting; they’re exploring some variation on “How do you do it?” or “How has being a parent influenced your work?” (questions almost never asked of fathers). It’s a vital corrective to the long-held assumption that a working mother is less-than, distracted and conflicted; to what Vogue called “the common perception that once a woman has a baby, she will automatically have no time or energy left for writing” (or for whatever her job is).
