Acknowledgments to a Mother Writer
It was in the middle of a writing conference, surrounded by strangers, when I started to cry.
Andrea Jarrell, author of I’m the One Who Got Away, was the guest speaker, presenting a talk entitled "How I Stopped Sabotaging my Writing Ambitions: Confessions of a Late Bloomer." As attendees settled into their seats, her title slide popped up on the big screen projector. That was when the tears began. How did she know?
This was my first writing conference. In fact, the only reason I was in this room today was because I liked a photo on instagram and won a free ticket. And also a very small part of me carries a dream not yet fully voiced. I never wanted to be a writer. I don’t have stories to tell you about the picture books I penned when I was seven or the journals I diligently wrote in as an angsty teenager or the writing classes I devoured in college. The closest I ever got to writing ambitions was in the form of thank you notes my mom made me write every Christmas.
And yet here I sat in tears over a talk about the very thing I never knew I had, "writing ambitions." We were nearing the end of our day and up to this point I had faked myself through meet and greet conversations with published essayists, successful novelists, ambitious freelancers, trying to demonstrate pride in my silly little blog while mentally shaming every word I ever strung together. Why am I here? I’ve never taken a writing class. I never put "publish" in a 5-10 year plan. I’m not a writer. I’m a fraud and they all know it.
I was sabotaging my writing ambitions.
I know to pay attention to tears, that they tell us what matters. These tears today were grabbing me by the collar, shaking me from the sleep of my desires and shouting at me "Wake up! Don’t you see? You want to be a writer! You ARE a writer! And you are sabotaging yourself!"
While I collected myself, looking around sheepishly, worried that others could hear the shouts of my tears, Jarrell continued with her story. I know there were others in the room, but in those minutes, it was only Jarrell and I. There might as well as have been a cafe table between us instead of this conference table, the hum of a coffee shop instead of the projector, and the gentle conversation among friends instead of the speaker and conference attendees. She told of the many attempts she made at being a writer, shared the struggles, the doubts, and the pressing pause of her dreams. All the while I sat there nodding in humble recognition, as if she was telling my story for me, only the story I had just begun to live.
And then she showed a photo. In the image it was a younger Jarrell, sitting at her computer, eyes focused, reading the screen, serious expression on her face, lost in a world of her own writing. And on her lap, sat a squishy baby of maybe nine months. As I took the photo in, I instinctively reached for my belly and whispered "that’s us!"
I was three months pregnant with my third baby. I was exhausted already from pregnancy, my writing suffering because of it. Adding another child AND staying on top of my creative dream sounded absurd. The message swirled in my head all day. How was I ever going to make motherhood and writing work? I can’t do both. Not now.
But this picture, in it’s blurry, dimly lit, unedited image, was beautiful—a mother and her baby, a writer and her work. Nothing remarkable was happening here, but I saw beyond the story. I saw a woman wading through the excuses to keep her ambitions afloat. In one hand, I saw her grasping one of her loves, her child, with care and confidence, and in the other hand nurture with attention and patience her other love, writing. I saw her doing both—writing and mothering. And in her, I saw me.
Then she showed the next slide. It was a picture taken recently, shortly after her first book was published. There stood the author—the dreamer, the writer—and next to her was a boy just graduating from high school. This boy, she told us, was the baby in her lap. It took her most of his childhood to complete this book, to complete a dream. She told us how she returned to her computer, baby in her lap or not, and tried and tried and tried again to make the dream a reality. She labored, she doubted, she felt insignificant, and yet that passion held on. The ambition to write never faded. Her baby grew, and so did her ambitions. She has the picture to prove it.
When it was hard, when she had lost the faith, when she could not read the future, she wrote anyway.
I will too.
I promised that baby, barely stretched to the size of an avocado, that I would write. Because it mattered as much to me to be a writer as it did to be his mother. We would do this together. I would document it every step of the way, knowing that one day I would have the proof to him, but most dearly to myself, that we grew up together.
So I started to take the pictures.
From the earliest days nestled into a cacoon of joy and pain and depression that encompass postpartum, I wrote what I could in the pockets of time. And I took a picture.
When he only wanted to sleep in my arms, I typed with one aching hand into the notes of my phone. And I took a picture.
If I had a moment of inspiration while he played on the floor, I set my computer right next to him. And I took a picture.
Just as I found a quiet moment alone, but they found me anyway, I captured the words snuggled up next to them. And I took a picture.
While they played, while they read, while they distracted me with their silly grins and endless questions, I wrote, and I took a picture.
The practice is now as much a part of my routine as the writing itself. And when I feel the anxious chatter of a doubtful self attempt to stand in my way, I only have to open up my phone to silence it. Every click of the camera becomes a gentle nudge to my heart that I am doing it— I am mothering AND I am writing. Maybe it began as nothing more than a whisper of an ambition, but it is growing. And I have the pictures to prove it. Jarrell, and many other mother writers like her, taught me that motherhood and creativity can happen alongside one another. In fact, they need one another to thrive.
And they also need other mother creatives. Andrea Jarrell gave me a gift that day—the gift only another mother can offer. She handed me the reassurance that no matter what my dreams were before, my writing ambitions of right now are both beautiful and possible. I won’t stand in the way of that anymore.
I also recognize as I grow, I have an important role—to invite other mothers like myself to grasp on gently to a dream. We need each other, for encouragement and mentorship. Perhaps one day one of these shots I have taking up room in my photo storage will be the image that inspires tears in another mother with creative dreams. Maybe it will be just the push she needs to stop sabotaging her ambition and instead lean in, one picture at a time.
This post was written as part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to read the next post in this series "Acknowledgments."