Can I be a good parent and successful creatively?

February 25, 2010 9:32 AM

Artists, creative types, and scholars: What are your experiences with parenthood in the arts and academia? Have you been able to find success in your career as a parent?

I'm a 29 year-old woman working on a PhD in the humanities. At my university, I work on both scholarly and creative projects, though I'm here primarily in a creative role. I'm happy with this life. I'm having both academic and some (small) publishing success, and I feel like I can continue this as I develop as a writer and scholar. I also want to have a child.

I've been married for 5 years, and I feel my husband and I have built a very happy, stable marriage together. Combined, we easily make enough to afford to raise a child (my husband works in the private sector). We both would like to be parents someday.

Lately, I've found myself wanting a child more and more, but I'm terrified that having one would mean that I'd forfeit many of my career aspirations. Specifically, I'm worried about my creative work suffering as a parent. I'm afraid that I won't have the time, energy, or inclination to continue the work that is so important to me right now. I've worked really hard at this, and I still feel very ambitious career-wise. However, I know that, once I am a parent, I'd probably be willing to sacrifice any ambition if I felt it would be better for my child. Complicating this issue is the fact that I expect some possible fertility issues due to personal/family medical history. So, I don't feel as though I can wait forever to try to do this.

Most of the women who are my mentors do not have children. I'm interested in hearing from anyone who manages to do both creative and/or scholarly work as a parent successfully. How have you made this balance work? Did you wait until a specific point in your life/career? I'm especially keen to hear from women who feel they have managed to continue working creatively as a parent, though responses from anyone would be helpful. Thank you! You can email me privately here: [e-mail]

posted by theantikitty to Human Relations (14 answers total)

I hope others weigh in here, but for me as a creative person, the process of pregnancy and parenting a small child was a creativity suck. And I have heard similar from other very creative people. It is as if creating a new person took all the creativity I had. However that is definitely a temporary condition-and I'm not saying that every single creative person has this experience. But it is a possibility.

And yes, very much worth it, I must say.
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 9:44 AM on February 25, 2010

Do you intend to be a full-time caretaker? If so, your concern is certainly valid, but if you plan to continue working, I assume that exhaustion will be a more pressing issue than lack of creativity per se.
posted by halogen at 9:54 AM on February 25, 2010

Sorry for the length.

I am a PhD Candidate and I had a baby in my 3rd year of my program. He was born the quarter before I read for my qualifying exams. I am in the social sciences.

There are a number of books and blogs that you might want to start reading.
Mama PhD blog (and the book)
Professing and Parenting (book)
Bitch PhD blog

But here's my experience being an academic with a kid. (I can't speak to the creative side.)

PREGNANCY:
- I was doing fieldwork during my pregnancy. This was very smart because I didn't "appear weak" in front of the faculty. I could sleep late if I wanted to, no one was checking up on me, and I could blame lack of productivity on "challenges in the field."
- I made every effort to work it out with my department. I didn't take any maternity leave. I took a TAship the quarter that I was due and did all sorts of admin work to make up the time. My son was born in mid-November and I was back teaching in early January. My department is also decently family friendly.

EARLY POST-PREGNANCY:
- I do a lot of front stage stuff - showing up to lectures, events, etc. to try to "prove" that I am still in it to win it.
- A supportive and flexible partner is key to all this working it out and front staging. My SO is able to take off work when I go to conferences and come with. He can leave work early when I have a meeting that I just can't miss. I have no idea how I would do this otherwise.

CHILDCARE/ILLNESS:
- My partner had amazing paternity leave. He spread it out so that he could be with our son 2 days a week when I had to teach. Our son started daycare when he was about 4 months old. Classmates with less flexible partners just can't go back to teaching so soon and are kinda screwed in terms of getting back into teaching. (Although timing your pregnancy could help with this.)
- We have a daycare that is flexible with term-to-term schedule changes, as I try to keep our son out of daycare 1 day M-F. I don't think that all daycares are like this.
- When we are totally screwed is when the baby is sick (which happens at least once a month.) If my partner couldn't stay home with the baby on days that I need to teach, I don't know what we would do.
- Also with sick baby -- I can NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER come close to the edge of a deadline. It is karmic or something that if I do make schedules a little too tight, the baby will get sick and everything is out the window. (Especially if you're breastfeeding... it is the easiest solution to a sick baby and Daddy just can't do that.)

DEADLINES:
- What is hard is that I cannot work all day anymore. I might have a deadline, but I gotta put the baby to bed. I cannot put my entire self into a project anymore.

FLEXIBILITY/TIME:
- I don't have the flexibility that I could have had. For example, I really can't consider taking a 1 year postdoc position. How would we move for 1 year? How would we find daycare for 1 year? My childless peers can do that with ease.
- When money is tight, I can't just pick up some shifts at Starbucks like my childless classmates can. Daycare is so expensive that there is almost no work that is worth doing, other than research and teaching positions.

PRODUCTIVITY:
- IME I was completely and utterly unproductive during my entire pregnancy.
- I was also pretty unproductive for the first 3 months of baby's life.
- I started to be more productive, but not that much more so, after he was 3 or 4 months old.
- Once he started solidly sleeping through the night, I found that I could do SOME work once he was in bed. That maybe only started after he was a year old though.
- Once they're a few months old, however, you can't really type away at the computer as they sit happily in a bouncy seat. I can barely pee, much less do work, with my kid running around the house.
- I'm not done breastfeeding, but I hear from friends that once you're done breastfeeding, it is like a veil lifted away from your face and you can be really productive again.

Hope this helps. I love my son and I am glad that he is in my life. I don't think that I was entirely prepared for the impact that he would have on my output and productivity. If I could do it all over again, I might have waited until I was done with grad school to have him so that I could have gotten a lot of stuff out earlier. However, I imagine that having a child when one is at an assistant professor level has different sorts of challenges too and perhaps less flexibility than one has during grad school.
posted by k8t at 9:55 AM on February 25, 2010 [3 favorites]

As a creative woman, I've worried about that, too. But keep in mind that there have been mothers who have made it work--from Stephenie Meyer to Ursula Le Guin. Having a cooperative partner who is willing to share in child-rearing seems key. I've found this quote, from Le Guin's webpage heartening: "It was tough trying to keep writing while bringing up three kids, but my husband was totally in it with me, and so it worked out fine. Le Guins' Rule: One person cannot do two fulltime jobs, but two persons can do three fulltime jobs — if they honestly share the work. The idea that you need an ivory tower to write in, that if you have babies you can't have books, that artists are somehow exempt from the dirty work of life — rubbish. "
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 10:40 AM on February 25, 2010 [3 favorites]

Contra St. Alia, I found that pregnancy gave me an ENORMOUS burst of creativity (I also connected it to creating a new person, but for me it was as if all my creativity cells went into overdrive and I was just spilling over with it!). This has continued into parenting (so far ... he's 9 months). I don't know if it's seeing things through his eyes, or if creativity begets creativity for me, or if it's that I'm better when I'm busier and boy howdy is life busy now!

I honestly feel like I've been twice as productive since he was born (after the initial recovery and getting past the newborn-feeding-every-two-hours, of course!). I also feel more motivated -- as does my husband -- I think maybe it's easier to work harder when you're doing it FOR someone who really needs you. I like to tease my husband that had I known parenthood would make us such awesome people, I would have insisted on it years ago! (But of course years ago we would not have been ready.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:59 AM on February 25, 2010

I was the close friend and live-in nanny for a couple where the wife was working on her masters in speech pathology. Her bachelor's was in creative writing and she hadn't really done all that much writing up to that point.

Having a child probably put her a year or so behind in her studies, but a lot of that was because her department chair refused to bend on anything - he seemed to have a vendetta against her. However, her actual writing went through the roof. She has now been published several times and is doing well in her chosen sub-genre.

So, my observations (albeit from the outside but up close), actual work is difficult, but creativity can certainly flourish.
posted by charred husk at 11:52 AM on February 25, 2010

I'm a 29 year-old woman working on a PhD in the humanities. At my university, I work on both scholarly and creative projects, though I'm here primarily in a creative role.

Won't the university graduate you eventually and make you move on away from the school? My impression is that a lot of people with incredible resumes and PhDs in the humanities are not finding jobs. Unless you're extremely confident that you're for sure going to score a position/grant/funding that will enable you to continue your work, and your earnings and job security trumps that of your husband, I would think that your choice would boil down to either having an uphill battle career-wise with a kid or an uphill battle career-wise without a kid.
posted by anniecat at 12:22 PM on February 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm (40 weeks) pregnant with my first. I have found, contra Alia and Eyebrows, that pregnancy has not made any difference in my creativity at all. (Perhaps with the exception of the first trimester, when I was too tired to do anything aside from couch-napping). I'm a grad student, although in another field, and I'm currently working on a pretty fascinating research paper... I developed the concept in the past couple of months and my adviser seems pretty impressed with it so far.

I'll let you know how things go after the baby is born, but I am imagining that fatigue will take some toll for a while, but that's less of an impact on creativity and more on production. On the other hand, a professor told me he got a lot of writing done when his child was an infant because the fatigue silenced the overly critical self-editor and enabled his writing to flow out in a different way.

I should mention as well that one of the stereotypes of pregnancy is "mommy brain"-- that you suddenly become stupider and more forgetful. I haven't experienced that in any way, shape, or form. (Frankly the whole concept makes me cranky.)

I do have female professors who publish a lot in their fields and have one or more children. I don't think the inclination to produce scholarly work ebbs with parenthood, inevitably.

I'd like to address one statement in your question: I know that, once I am a parent, I'd probably be willing to sacrifice any ambition if I felt it would be better for my child.

Please remember that children thrive with parents who are happy, fulfilled, and intellectually stimulated. For some parents, they achieve that via stay-at-home parenthood. Others need to work in demanding careers. Barring truly unusual circumstances, parenthood doesn't require you to be self-abnegating.
posted by miss tea at 1:37 PM on February 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm not in a super-creative field but I found pregnancy and motherhood have honed my concentration. It's not so much a creativity boost or block, but I no longer spend time on things that are no productive. So my previous habits of getting stuck down research rabbit holes have become curtailed - I'll indulge if I have the time, but most of my 'free' time is spent actively working on something. Breastfeeding and other down times are when those ideas can percolate. I was trying to explain it to a friend of mine but it's hard. It's not so much that you get better at organising or any of those tropes, rather I've found myself able to organise my thoughts better.

But it's different for everyone. I've got a fully-committed parenting partner and a relatively easy to manage baby. If I were battling my partner for alone/creative time that would be a huge drain and make it all a lot harder. If baby anachronism didn't sleep through (or if we didn't cosleep) that would be a huge drain and make it all a lot harder. I've gotten rid of a lot of other drains in my life but those two are my constants and if they are impeding my career then they will have a much greater impact than almost anything else.

on preview: 'mommy brain' is a total myth. Sleep deprivation/exhaustion/fatigue can screw with you, but it's not "you're a mother and now stupid". And as for sacrificing your ambition - I'd do it if I needed to. If baby anachronism required full time care for the rest of her life I'd be providing it because I work in a highly underpaid career path and the other anachronism doesn't. She doesn't though so we're making a HEAP of sacrifices as a family for me to go back to work fulltime while the other anachronism stays home. HEAPS of sacrifices. Because what's best for her isn't necessarily me at home. Me being sane is far more important.
posted by geek anachronism at 2:11 PM on February 25, 2010

By a funny coincidence, this conference is taking place in NYC tomorrow.

One of the organizers turned Mrs. HotBot onto Brainchild: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers.
posted by shothotbot at 4:10 PM on February 25, 2010

I know plenty of female academics, although more in the social sciences than in creative fields. There are many successful female academics with children, but the common thinking (that is, what I tend to hear a lot, from lots of different places) is that it's considerably more difficult for them.

University family friendly policies generally aren't. Well, they may try to be family friendly, but they run up against the problem that academics are evaluated by pretty standard criteria (publishing and grants, mainly). For many women having children takes away from time that can be spent publishing, which puts them at a bit of a career disadvantage.

Obviously, the ability to keep producing whilst you're reproducing can do a lot to ameliorate this problem. One female academic friend who has recently had her first child seems to have found herself a good strategy – she has a lot of ongoing collaborations that are producing work, and she seems to be able to fit in her contributions around her baby duties. So she's not going to have any sort of "baby gap" in her output. But this wouldn't have been possible had she not been pretty well established in her career already, I imagine.

Also keep in mind that academia is traditionally a boy's club, and in some departments if they get the impression you're not willing to work your guts out in the ways that middle-aged men tend to have the luxury of doing, they wont touch you with a barge pole.

Not that long ago I heard a very senior academic from a very prestigious university talking about this issue. She said that, in her experience, it was more difficult for female academics with children to do well, but that the ones who did were the ones with very supportive partners – partners who understood that academic work often requires long and difficult hours and are willing to put in the extra effort to support that.

I'm not sure how all of this translates to the more creative fields, but from the replies you've already got it sounds like the affect of pregnancy on creative output varies a bit from person to person.

I suspect that, if you're ambitious, and have a supportive partner, you'll be able to make it work. Lots of people do. I'm certainly not trying to put you off having a baby – just relating my experience as a bloke who knows quite a few female academics.
posted by damonism at 4:39 PM on February 25, 2010

I'm not an academic. I am a professional visual artist and the mother of three kids - two now in high school and one in college. When our kids were little my husband and I both worked from home and the combination of his deep involvement in parenting and good childcare made it possible to juggle things. At that point I was not making art full time and found that I chose projects I could work on in little increments as really long blocks of time to focus on big projects was a harder commodity to come by. I will add that personally I did experience "preganancy/nursing mush for brains" - I think that's different for everyone.

As my kids got older I found that being a mother was both a creative outlet in and of itself and fed the rest of my creative life. It still does. My work is no longer explicitly tied in content to being a mother but the creative problem solving needed as a parent has fed into creative problem solving as an artist and back again. Parenting has definitely improved and led me as a teacher as well. Is it a complicated challenging juggle? Absolutely! For me the combination of committed involved spouse and good childcare when my kids were little was essential and I have never had the additional challenge of an academic job but the combination of creative work and motherhood has been the core of my existence for more than 20 years.
posted by leslies at 7:30 PM on February 25, 2010

Response by poster: Thank you for all of these thoughtful responses. I still feel nervous about this issue, but it's probably something that's going to have to work itself out in time. Interestingly, I wasn't even thinking about a blow to creativity DURING pregnancy (and yikes, I was kind of counting on that time to work; good to know there's a chance that may be difficult). I was much more concerned about the years after that, especially when the child is very young. There are ways that parenthood might affect my career beyond time considerations, too. We won't be very mobile, we can't really accept short periods of separation for finite opportunities in other cities, etc.

Anniecat, yes, I'll have to leave this university eventually. And yes, it's very difficult to make a career in the humanities -- it will be an uphill battle no matter what. However, I decided to accept that struggle in order to be part of the field I am really passionate about. I want to give this a full go, and that means that I need to put in lots and lots of time to give myself a fighting chance for a job. In our marriage, both of our dreams pull equal weight, even if one dream is a lot less profitable!
posted by theantikitty at 7:35 AM on February 26, 2010

Was just going to pop back over into this thread to point you towards this recent blog post from a mother and a writer, where she talked about how having a child affected her writing positively.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 8:10 AM on February 26, 2010