Imagining Motherhood: Mothers of Invention

My twenties were bumpy. Grad school, temp work, and barista duty were punctuated by bouts of depression. When I turned thirty, I was itching for a fresh start, preferably one filled with stability and domesticity. Although motherhood had never been a given for me, I began to ponder the possibility. Okay, that’s being kind. Fret myself to within an inch of sanity may be a more apt description of how I went about considering the Baby Question for nearly five years.

Just when I’d be certain that my mind was made up—absolutely no; never—I’d  see a cool looking family playing Frisbee together or receive a hilarious e-mail from a friend whose precocious four-year old was learning to read. Well, maybe … Yet the reasons to avoid motherhood were as bountiful. The world was a mess; how could I bring another person into it? I wasn’t sure who I was yet; how could I help form someone?

My indecision was finally broken when I wrote and published a book. In part, I was deeply affected by the subject, a spirited young man who accomplished a lifetime in his twenty-two years. Finally, I understood that one life could make a difference. Just as important, I no longer felt that writing was a hobby or a dalliance; it was a calling I could claim.

I turned in the book manuscript in May, and by September, I was happily nauseous. The following spring, I carried baby Bella into a bookstore and saw my book on a shelf. I felt legitimate for the first time in my adult life.

The decision to have a child is one of the toughest a woman faces. Some are blessed with an internal compass set distinctly to motherhood. If they are lucky enough to find a game partner or brave enough to go it alone, these women will never know the kind of scab-picking worry to which I subjected my husband, friends, and several therapists.

A filmmaker I’ll call Holly—the Baby Question makes otherwise outspoken women turn shy—is one of those lucky decisive women. She and her husband are currently trying to get pregnant. Still, when I tell her the story about my dual book and baby births, she recognizes her own path toward motherhood.

“I attribute our decision to try to my age, but it’s also a matter of where we are in our lives, and how creatively fulfilled we feel,” she says, noting that they recently completed making a feature-length documentary film, a two-and-a-half year journey that tested the mettle of their marriage and their creative moxie like nothing else.

“Getting this project done was hugely cathartic,” Holly says. “It left us both feeling alive with possibilities. It’s like now we can move on to a new, enormous project.”

Creative work, especially when publicly acknowledged, can provide satisfaction and accomplishment, good qualities with which to enter motherhood. But such work also offers an alternative. Fiction writer Jenn Shreve has toyed with the idea of having children for years, but never felt a tremendous tug. “I get so much creative fulfillment from my own work that the urge has been less strong,” she says. “I feel very maternal about my fiction.”

After being on the fence for years, she credits her imagination with leading her to the decision to have children—the pressing question now is when instead of if. She and her husband had fictionalized an entire brood for themselves. “We knew all their names!” she laughs, recalling the elaborate narrative they’d spun while telling them selves that parenthood wasn’t for them. “Finally, we recognized that ‘oh, yeah,’ we do have this desire.”

A painter friend, Jane, said that after five years of trying to get pregnant, she finally let go of motherhood and her art blossomed. During those years, she and her husband opened a design studio together, and a huge amount of their energy went into that entrepreneurial offspring.

“It’s only been since it’s clear that we’re not going to have children and the business has stabilized that I’ve been fully immersed as an artist,” she reflects. Today, Jane is juggling exhibits in the Midwest and New York, receiving public and private commissions, and helping to run the couple’s successful business. She is without regrets, but she wonders what course her art would have taken had she become a mother.

The meditative quality of her paintings—she calls them “a distillation of a visual language”—has been gained through extensive solitude. “I’ve been able to refine and extract because I don’t have a splintered, crazy life with a million responsibilities.”

It’s no surprise that an artist’s style changes when she has children.