Can you Parent and be a Creative?

Much has been made of the gender/childcare divide during the pandemic, with most studies finding that women have born the larger share of both homeschooling and caregiving since losing all the outside resources that previously supported normal life. Less perhaps though has been said about how great those losses have been depending on the kind of work you do.

Those in my close circle who have had more company, team-based work, certainly have required existing on Zoom, sometimes to the point of exhaustion, but have largely kept up their output. Many have been working more than ever. Those who’ve had to be physically in a place of work have felt those pressures also. Those of us in more creative industries have had different experiences again.

For creative parents, you couldn’t get a more perfect storm in terms of conceiving new work than a global, existential threat that leads you to lose all your structures and routine. From just a purely cerebral point of view, your mind becomes overloaded trying to process what is an emergency situation, and all you can think about is how to make sure there is food in your fridge and your family are safe.

Personally, it took me a good month once we suddenly found ourselves in an unrecognisable world to get anything coherent down on a page. I felt completely clogged up.

Stunned in the midst of continuously changing environment and unprecedented experiences. My mind simply did not see the point in flights of fancy or musing on topics wholly unrelated to survival. So my work almost came to a complete standstill.

Alongside that, I, like many other creatives, was suddenly full-time parenting and homeschooling and doing both badly. At times I was still attempting to write, all of which seemed like irrelevant dross, and so I just ended up feeling like a complete failure in every area. At one point I began to write down what I was doing, hour by hour because each day was passing with no memory of achieving anything. New ideas get born often out of change, and shifts that unearth something. With one day indistinguishable from another, there was simply nothing bubbling up.

I was also not one of those parents who were able to instil an immediate routine into my home life. Having two children at different schooling stages didn’t help. I looked at other peoples ‘schedules’ on social media and baulked. Joe Wicks at 9 am, school at 10 etc. Ours was a more blancmange kind of timeframe. Things happened after free play wound down, and then we had lunch, punctuated by constant washing, cleaning and squabbling. After a day of which my mind felt completely barren.

The truth is parenting is often not conducive to creativity. When you are parenting intensely, you lose that ‘other’ space in your head, the place where things gestate, ruminate, and then can be born into a piece of work. It’s a headspace that requires time and solitude, but it also requires a structure.

Structure is, in fact, the key to many creatives productivity. Some of the most esoteric, eccentric creatives also have the most definite schedules. Nick Cave is known to do 9 to 5 hours at the desk, while Roald Dahl famously did 10 to 12 in the morning, before breaking for gin and tonics and smoked fish before returning to his writing shed from 3 till 6 that evening. This routine he would repeat without fail. But there is also a catch with both these examples of creatives who are also parents. These writing schedules were, ironically, supported by women, or others who did the minding.

So much of what creatives do is graft and putting in the hours. But it is also just sitting in a room thinking. It may not appear like work, but it is without question almost the most important part of the process. It is about following a seam of thought to the end, looking out a window and teasing it out some more. It is about conjuring something and then sometimes rubbing back and starting it again from another place.

Parenting small children especially isn’t that compatible with long periods of quiet contemplation. Just as doing menial, thankless tasks repeatedly are compatible with feeling particularly sexy or productive.

Creativity is definitely linked to our ‘id’ and our ego and a sense of exploration, it feeds off movement and newness. Take much of that stimulation away, crowd it out with servile setups and you take away all the fertility.

And for the moment, with much of our work and parenting life still being buffeted back and forth by the current situation, it looks like something we are going to have to manage for some time. For many of us who work creatively, this has challenged our sense of worth, and also our job satisfaction. Most creatives do what they do primarily because they can’t not do it; it is how they interface with the world. And because the sense of satisfaction is second to none.

Losing that normal purpose and feelings of value have been extremely hard. But it has also made I think many of us reevaluate so heavily identifying with our productivity. The idea that you are what you do. It has certainly challenged my relationship with time and output. I have had to write, read, and disseminate quicker than I ever have before. And it has been a good refinement. I was always inherently guilty if I did not hit a certain number of hours of work per day, every day. Now my expectations have shifted, good short bursts are also just as valuable. In fact for writing, at times it has been better.

For all of us working through this, the shift between work-life balance towards more life, not more work, has been the revelation. And from that, I hope springs greater creativity too. Because, while a life unexamined has always been said to be not worth living, without the living there is also nothing to notice. And nothing to say.

Can you Parent and be a Creative?

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