High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [40]
Here at last is a rallying cry for the throng of maternal employed. The best defense against a teenager’s independence, and probably a toddler’s as well, may simply be a matter of quitting before we’re fired. Or not quitting, exactly, but backing off from eminent domain, happily and with dignity, by expressing ourselves in the serious pursuits and pleasures that we hold apart from parenting. Individuation goes both ways: we may feel less driven to shape a child in our own image if instead we can shape policy or sheet metal, or teach school, or boss around an employee or two. Luckiest of all is the novelist: I get to invent people who will live or die on the page, do exactly as I wish, because I said so!
I’m told it is terribly hard to balance career and family and, particularly, creativity. And it is, in fact. Good mothering can’t be done by the clock. There are days I ache to throw deadlines to the wind and go hunt snipes. I wish for time to explain the sensible reason for every “no.” To wallow in “yes,” give over to a cow’s timetable, stop the clock, stop watching the pot so it might splendidly boil.
I also long for more time of my own, and silence. My jaw drops when I hear of the rituals some authors use to put themselves in the so-called mood to write: William Gass confesses to spending a couple of hours every morning photographing dilapidated corners of his city. Diane Ackerman begins each summer day “by choosing and arranging flowers for a Zenlike hour or so.” She listens to music obsessively, then speed-walks for an hour, every single day. “I don’t know whether this helps or not,” she allows, in A Natural History of the Senses. “My muse is male, has the radiant, silvery complexion of the moon, and never speaks to me directly.”
My muse wears a baseball cap, backward. The minute my daughter is on the school bus, he saunters up behind me with a bat slung over his shoulder and says oh so directly, “Okay, author lady, you’ve got six hours till that bus rolls back up the drive. You can sit down and write, now, or you can think about looking for a day job.”
As a mother and a writer, I’d be sunk if either enterprise depended on corsages or magic. I start a good day by brushing my teeth; I don’t know whether it helps or not, but it does fight plaque. I can relate at least to the utilitarian ritual of Colette, who began her day’s writing after methodically picking fleas from her cat. The remarkable poet Lucille Clifton was asked, at a reading I attended, “Why are your poems always short?” Ms. Clifton replied, “I have six children, and a memory that can hold about twenty lines until the end of the day.”
I would probably trade in my whole Great Books set for an epic-length poem from the pen of Lucille Clifton. But I couldn’t wish away those six distracting children, even as a selfish reader, because I cherish Clifton’s work precisely for its maternal passions and trenchant understanding of family. This is the fence we get to walk. I might envy the horses that prance unbridled across the pastures on either side of me, but I know if I stepped away from my fence into the field of “Only Work” or “Only Family,” I would sink to my neck. I can hardly remember how I wrote before my child made a grown-up of me, nor can I think what sort of mother I would be if I didn’t write. I hold with Dr. Steinberg: by working at something else I cherish, I can give my child room to be a chip off any old block she wants. She knows she isn’t the whole of my world, and also that when I’m with her she’s the designated center of my universe. On the day she walks away from my house for good, I’ll cry and wave a hanky from my lonely balcony; then I’ll walk to my study, jump for joy, and maybe do the best work of my life.
It’s never easy to take the long view of things, especially in a society that