Writing and mothering is the least glamorous thing
Navigating the push and pull between perfectionism and creativity
From a certain angle, with the light just so, I can see and know myself as a wild soul. A creative wisdom keeper and storyteller who can wander through woods and catch poems from the morning air.
In all the other angles, I’m a woman stretched thin while attempting to hold onto the creative fire and inner succulence that keeps me steady and alive. This is who I see in the mirror, a woman attempting to live the life of a writer while tending to my children and myself.
This woman is not glamorous, she’s ragged and undulating. She surfs the waves hard, with salt and sand in her hair. Is she fading? Or is her power and magic growing concentrated and more potent by the day?
Believe me, I try to keep my passion alive. That’s why I’m here, writing and publishing poems, putting as much of my soul on the page as I possibly can. It’s why I take flower essences and talk to trees and beat on my big, black drum.
Still, the feeling of being wrenched into pieces at every step, to the point that it seems like my brain is melting a lot of the time, is hard to shake.
And why is it so hard? I think it’s because mothers are so deeply and purposefully under-resourced, disrespected, and taken for granted, that it leaves us skeletal
Women are asked to divide their attention across a broad spectrum of skills and competing priorities. Hover over the children, keep the house tidy, look hot and remember to brush your teeth, cook, shop, make doctor’s appointments, volunteer at the school, and also work outside the home. It’s impossible to get this right. More truthfully, we know that in order to get one thing right, something else will suffer and wither, and it’s heartbreaking.
Our choice is to suffer or rage. Grow resentful or check out.
I don’t have an answer for us, I just do what I can to stay close to the wilderness within me. I hope that if I can keep that fire alive in me, that eventually this season of life will shift. One day this nest will be empty. I may even feel bored in some way. Yes, it’s hard to imagine, but I’m told it happens.
I decide every morning to be a writer. To carry my notebook and pen with me at all times. Then I forget that notebook and go buy another one. I have a lot of notebooks.
I write poems with foolish optimism, and irrational devotion. I walk away from the messy house, and instead of vacuuming, I look up at a crown of red oak leaves or across a wide river to the other shore. These vistas help me put it all in perspective and remind me that life is glamorous when it is raw and unfiltered.
My life is short. Your life is short. Writing is my breathing and solace. Writing is an umbilical cord that keeps me whole, nourished from the inside out. Writing is how I mother myself.
I’m wild and unwilling to be tamed.
I’m in the process of releasing all the expectations that have been placed on my shoulders, and choosing joy over perfection. I’m keeping my heart soft and tender so it can feel more love.
I’ve decided to speak these things out loud, because in whispered conversations with other women, writers, and mothers, I believe I’m not alone in this experience. This part of the path is steep and rocky, but I like to believe we can help each other reach the summit together.
Not a summit of looking good or finally achieving a picture perfect home. No, no my love, not that at all. The pinnacle of this stretch of our creative tangle is to express ourselves with the razor-sharp clarity that can only come from cutting away all the dead weight of other people’s opinions.
The work isn’t glamorous, yet it makes us shine.
If you’re in this same unglamorous season of mothering and writing, or perhaps you’ve survived it and come out the other side, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments…
Leah Kent is a green witch and flower essence practitioner who drums before writing. Officially a book coach and author who helps wisdom keepers and visionaries write and publish transformational books about their work in the world.
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