Imagining Motherhood: Mothers of Invention

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. We hope that motherhood will embellish our creative spark and vice versa. Still, writing, or playing viola, or throwing a pot in the middle of the night takes an effort that a leisurely morning at the keyboard does not. As much as I hate to tell Holly and Jenn this at a time when they are stockpiling industrious, happy role models, there are days—no, make that months—when I must keep being creative in spite of my children. “Mama, aren’t you ever going to stop typing?” my daughter has been known to ask.

Curmudgeon that I may be, I do think Holly is on to something when she says that it’s a matter of perspective. “When we think of our creative work as a job, we don’t realize its full promise.”

Last week, I was standing in line at the public library when I saw a woman checking out my book. I couldn’t help myself. I got out of line and introduced myself. “That’s me!” I said goofily, gesturing to my name on the cover. I felt as daffy and proud as I had when I’d first taken my baby girl around. I couldn’t help but want to tell everyone, “Look, look what I made!”