“Creating a Life”: On Writing and Motherhood

Creativity is embedded in our human DNA. We need it to survive. But do we need to make art to survive? For many of us, myself included, the answer is yes.

It took me a long while to discover my writing legs after being shut down for decades. The thing is, I always wanted to be a mother too. And while I knew that these things were obviously not mutually exclusive, I was afraid that I’d waited so long to write, I might not become a mother, or that if I became a mother before I found my writing groove, I might never find it.

So, at 36, I decided to write about it. In “Creating a Life,” published in salon.com, I interviewed 7 women writers on how becoming a mother, or not, affected their creative lives. It was in this essay that I discovered who I might become as a writer, and a form that felt right—weaving interviews with memoir.

It was prescient that I named this piece “Creating a Life,” because the real truth about creativity is that as you create a “thing,” a piece of art for example, you are creating yourself along with it. That is what I find most formidable and beautiful about creating art. You discover who you might become.