Hiatus: Mothers of Invention

I was grief stricken. Not writing meant losing a crucial piece of my identity, as well as my primary tool for understanding my world. My sacrifice lasted about two weeks. There was no way I’d quit, I told my therapist, though at the time I also thought to myself that my need to write was self-indulgent. A good mother would stop.

But good mothers aren’t always what they appear.

“When I had kids, I thought the most important thing was for me to give them an ideal life,” says Deb Blair, who has four children and works as a paramedic. Though her husband, who runs his own company as a heating-ventilation expert, maintains a creative writing schedule, working on essays and a novel, Blair didn’t permit herself what seemed like an extravagance. Instead, she volunteered at the kids’ schools, baked cookies, and cleaned the house. As her marriage threatened to break apart, she realized some changes needed to be made. One of those was returning to a creative pursuit. Before having kids, she’d written and drawn, but now she took up sculpture. “I realized that seeing me be creative was good for my kids and, more importantly, really good for me.”

Jill Smith also took an unintended break from her creative life. Less than a month out of a program at the prestigious Art Center in Pasadena, California, she was intending to move to Europe to work as a commercial photographer when she discovered she was pregnant. Although her boyfriend was eight years her junior, and had fewer material possessions than she (“And believe me, I had just about nothing!”), she took the pregnancy as a sign and scrapped her plans.

“Once Scarlet was born,” she recalls, “every cell in my body as a mother took over. I couldn’t fathom getting on a plane to go show a potential client or agent my portfolio. It just didn’t seem that important.”

Smith didn’t mean to let her career go by the wayside, but that’s what happened. “I would tell myself, ‘I’m just putting this on hold for awhile,’ but then a little while became longer and longer, and no one asked about my work any more.” What had been her lifelong self-identification as an artist disappeared.