QWF Writes

Tag: motherhood

  • Writing, Mothering, and the Wild In-Between—By Gillian Sze

    Writing, Mothering, and the Wild In-Between—By Gillian Sze

    My first reading of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was as a parent. Growing up, I somehow managed to miss this childhood classic, which I now recognize as surprising given its widespread popularity. I was given the book as a gift when I was pregnant with my son, and even then I didn’t read it until after he was born. I kept it safe, waiting on a bookshelf along with the other picture books we received.  

    After my son was born, we were advised that it was never too early to start reading to him. We filled those tiny periods when he was awake with reading. I reacquainted myself with books I hadn’t picked up in years: Mercer Mayer, Robert Munsch, Margaret Wise Brown, Eric Carle. My husband, who took the advice to heart, started with Beezus and Ramona, Charlotte’s Web, and The Hobbit. (It took weeks but we eventually completed them in small increments.) Included in our stack was, of course, Where the Wild Things Are. 

    I was struck by the sparsity of the opening pages of text, words just hanging on their own like Sapphic fragments, sentences spilling across pages. With each page turn, the white frames of the illustrations shrink, the images fill up each page until we follow Max into his dream. When Max announces the commencement of the wild rumpus, what follows is three illustrated spreads of the boy reigning over the beasts. Time passes on those pages, without a single word in sight. 

    *

    When I entered motherhood, I simultaneously found myself entering a period of wild wordlessness. Bleary eyed, I was keenly aware of time and sleep. I saw time racing along as my son filled out his onesies. I saw time cherished as much as it was squandered as I lay beneath my sleeping son, not daring to move lest he wake up again for the thousandth time. I saw time slipping away as more (if not all) of it became devoted to caring for him. I oscillated between too little time (his naps were either short or nonexistent) and too much (nursing in the dark, exhausted and impatient as each passing minute stole from what was left of my own slumber). Moreover, I struggled with how to use my time as both a writer and a mother—the former of which I had identified with for much, much longer. I didn’t know how to fill—or not fill—that time with words as I once had. 

    Sendak’s illustrative spreads in the middle of Where the Wild Things Are remind me of what Anne Carson says about the middle section of To the Lighthouse. Carson describes Woolf’s book as “a novel that falls asleep for twenty-five pages in the middle” (22). Set at night, Part II of To the Lighthouse is entitled “Time Passes,” and describes the changes that affect the characters, their lives, and the house. As the characters in both Sendak’s and Woolf’s works go through their necessary transformations, I realized how possible it was to hold these books and sense Time passing both in words, as Woolf had written, and wordlessness, as Sendak had drawn.  

    In truth, I didn’t know how to “read” those illustrations when I flipped to them with my son. At first I felt compelled to fill the silence with my own commentary, and so I did. “Howling at the moon! (page flip) Swinging! (page flip) Marching!” Eventually, I learned just to observe my son take in the pages, looking at the images without my input.

    However which way Time moved (Mr. Ramsey stumbling in grief along a passage, or little Max riding triumphantly on a wild thing, or my son letting go of the table edge for his first steps), it just did. My anxiety about never writing again lived along with me through those day naps and night feedings. I accepted that becoming a mother meant having to lose myself as a writer. This primal and sleepy period of adjusting to a new person was tinged with mourning. My husband, supportive if exasperated, would remark on my melodrama. But at the time it felt true. It’s only now as my son is approaching six and his toddler-sister is starting to sleep through the night, that I recognize this tumultuous era as something transformative for me as a writer. I think of Carson’s wise assertion of the chapter “Time Passes”: “Virginia Woolf offers us, through sleep, a glimpse of a kind of emptiness that interests her. It is the emptiness of things before we make use of them, a glimpse of reality prior to its efficacy” (23). 

    Words, much like Max voyaging towards wakefulness, eventually “sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day.” It may have taken a little longer, but we arrived together… changed, relieved, and a little sleepier. 

    Works Cited 

    Carson, Anne. Decreation. Vintage Canada, 2005. 

    Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are. Fiftieth Anniversary ed., Harper Collins, 2013.

    Gillian Sze is the author of multiple poetry books, including Peeling Rambutan, Redrafting Winter, and Panicle, which were finalists for the QWF’s A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Her forthcoming prosimetrical collection, Quiet Night Think, explores the early shaping of a writer, the creative process, and motherhood, and will be published next spring with ECW Press. Since becoming a mother, Gillian has started writing picture books and has two books forthcoming with Philomel Books (Penguin Random House USA). Her first picture book, The Night Is Deep and Wide, was recently released in March. www.gilliansze.com

    Photo credit: “Where the Wild Things Are” by Skinned Mink is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 (header banner); Nadia Zheng (headshot)

  • Busting the Myth of Work-Life Balance by Susan Olding

    Inside the Cardinal Studio, one of the Leighton Studios at Banff Centre for the Arts.

    About a year ago, I was invited to give a talk to some graduate students at Queen’s University about what was billed as “work-life balance.” Sure, I said. Why not? That should be easy.

    There was only one small problem. For me, “work-life balance” is an unattainable mirage. I am the farthest thing from an expert on the topic.

    The truth is, most of my days pass in a blur of immediate “to-dos.” And the hours that I so carefully set aside for creative work often go instead to the unanticipated trip to the doctor, the emergency phone call from the school or the rush-rush project for the paid job.

    I used to spend a lot of time feeling resentful, inadequate and guilty about that. Because other people seemed to combine their creative work with the rest of their lives successfully. Other people seemed to have some magical ability that allowed them to flourish in the face of constant interruptions and distractions.

    Except, when I questioned them, these paragons of multi-tasking all felt exactly the same as I did: weary, overwhelmed and vaguely at fault for failing to maintain their inner equilibrium in the face of multiple competing demands.

    “Other people seemed to have some magical ability that allowed them to flourish in the face of constant interruptions and distractions.”

    Those of us who don’t blame ourselves for this state of affairs sometimes blame the pace of contemporary life. After all, we’re all juggling numerous roles, and we’re all subject to the relentless beeps, pings and dings of our various devices. No wonder we feel beleaguered.

    But what if the problem is less about us, less about the world and more about our basic expectations? What if the language we use contributes to our sense of failure? What if the problem is the metaphor itself?

    What does “work-life balance” even mean?

    Imagine a seal, spinning a ball on its nose. Stop that insane momentum and the whole thing comes crashing down over its head.

    Is that how we want to construct ourselves – as performing circus animals? Is that how we want to conduct our writing lives?

    Consider other images of “balance” – say the scales of justice… or a teeter-totter. Load up one side and the other comes crashing to the ground. The whole apparatus seems so precarious! No wonder we feel so inadequate. No wonder we fear the possibility that something might shift.

    Yet shift it must. Change it must. For “balance” implies stasis – and stasis is antithetical to the creative life.

    What if, rather than “balance,” we spoke instead in terms of dynamic harmony, or cycles, or an ebb and flow? That way, we might not feel so guilty or inadequate whenever we had to give one role or another precedence in our lives for a period of time. Say the first few years of our son’s life, or the first few months of a new paid job, or the last few months of work on a novel, when nothing and nobody in the world matters so much as those characters, and we can barely pull ourselves away from our created world to face the real one.

    Thinking in terms of ebb and flow rather than “balance” has made it a little easier for me to give myself fully to whatever role is demanding most of me that moment – whether that be partner, wage-earner, teacher, parent, friend, writer.

    Outside the Cardinal Studio, one of the Leighton Studios at Banff Centre for the Arts.
    Outside the Cardinal Studio, one of the Leighton Studios at Banff Centre for the Arts.

    It has also helped me recognize the enormous value of writing retreats. I’ve been privileged to participate in several formal residencies, at places like the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, Wintergreen Studios in Ontario and Sage Hill and Stegner House in Saskatchewan. Each of these provides a different kind of experience, but every one offers uninterrupted time and quiet – two of the most precious and hard-to-source ingredients for the creative stew.

    Of course, it’s fun to travel, exciting to stare out at different views and blissful to let somebody else do the shopping and cooking and cleaning for a change. But retreats don’t have to be formal or lengthy or costly to be valuable. In fact, some of my most memorable or useful retreats were short, cheap and close to home. Like the weekend I spent in an absent friend’s house powering through the final edits on an important manuscript. Or the day the rest of my family went to Toronto and left me digging in our back garden. In the process, I uncovered the seed of the next book.

    Alas, I never did manage to tell those Queen’s students anything helpful about “work-life balance.” Instead, I read them some poetry that I wrote while crouched on one side of the work-life teeter-totter. And dared to suggest that if we’re lucky, there’s no real dichotomy, and “balance” is beside the point. Work is part of life, not separate from life, and life means growth – and change.

    Susan Olding

    Susan Olding is the author of Pathologies: A Life in Essays, winner of the Creative Nonfiction Collective’s Readers’ Choice Award for 2010, and selected by 49th Shelf and Amazon.ca as one of 100 Canadian books to read in a lifetime. Her writing has won a National Magazine Award, two Edna Awards and many other honours. A graduate of UBC’s MFA program, she lives with her family in Kingston, Ontario. In the spring of 2016, she’ll facilitate a one-day workshop for the QWF called “Telling It Slant,” where she’ll share some strategies for adding depth and originality to your memoirs, personal essays and short fiction. You can find her at www.susanolding.com.

    Photo (top): Inside the Cardinal Studio, one of the Leighton Studios at Banff Centre for the Arts.

  • Writing Post-Partum by Darrah Teitel

    I have this memory that I can’t shake. It is from a time of rebellion. I was in university, a baby feminist, aspiring playwright and general know-it-all. I was listening to Tori Amos’s latest album, Scarlet’s Walk, written post-partum. It stank, I declared to my roommate. Tori had lost her edge. She was writing about domestic themes, instead of masturbation and hating God. I began cultivating a theory: babies killed the cool in female artists.

    A few years later, I was in Montreal studying playwriting at The National Theatre School and Maureen Labonté was giving a class on this Canadian playwright none of us had ever heard of, Gwen Pharis Ringwood. Ringwood had written the award-winning Still Stands the House before getting married in 1939 and having four children. Although she continued to write, her main commitment, until the 1970s, was her family. A mother herself, Maureen raised her eyebrows at me. She knew it would plague me. The next few plays I wrote were explorations of why maternity and feminism were incompatible. I wrote one play about the contempt that ambitious, public women have for maternal, domestic women. I wrote another about how cool and sexually experimental Mary Shelley was before she accidentally had babies. And then, because I had tempted fate, I fell pregnant myself.

    And then, because I had tempted fate, I fell pregnant myself.

    What I knew of parenthood was that it is exhausting; I’d be harried with responsibilities but also full of joy. Though I wished this joy for myself and ultimately chose it, a fear began to grow alongside my fetus. I had learned that in order to write, a girl needs time, money and a room of her own. But I work for the federal Status of Women Critic, and I know the statistics. They show that the gender wage gap grows exponentially as soon as women become parents.

    Even if I tried to ignore the socio-economic barriers, I couldn’t help but notice the interpersonal ones. Many of my childless friends stopped inviting me to hang out, just assuming I was never doing drugs or having hot sex again. The fact that these assumptions were largely correct for the time being didn’t make them less upsetting. I found community elsewhere, which is to say online. One third of the blogosphere is composed of mommy blogs. Many mommy bloggers are really good writers who are totally obsessed with the experience of motherhood. They made me feel less lonely and for that I am thankful. I’ll digress to note that there is no daddy blogosphere.

    When I became a parent, I discovered that there is a fourth thing a girl needs in order to write. She needs something to write about. The greatest threat to my writing career was actually myself, or loss thereof. My plays usually discuss liberated feminine bodies, and they make my parents blush from their seats in the audience. Since having my son, I can’t even watch upsetting scenes from Game of Thrones without covering my eyes. I am not who I used to be.

    The greatest threat to my writing career was actually myself, or loss thereof.

    It’s hard for me to admit that I’ve changed. I’m not sure that I’m okay with it. But now, for the first time in two years, I have managed to get the time, money and space to write. I have a residency at a supportive theatre company, and my wonderful boss is willing to give me some time off to write. These opportunities are essential to writers like me, and are also so infrequent that I feel like the luckiest girl in the world. That’s three out of four. As for number four, it’s coming. I find myself faking it a little, but starting to feel glimpses of the real thing. Like learning to have an orgasm with a new partner, I must familiarize myself with a new body and for the first time, the new body is my own.

    I have come to realize that there are women with small children working, writing. When I was at rehearsals for my play, The Apology, I had a nursing five-week-old in a sling. Joan MacLeod came up to me and welcomed me to the club. On Mother’s Day she sent me a section of Kim Collier’s Siminovitch Prize acceptance speech from 2010: “In a lot of ways I felt like a pioneer – creating ways for these two huge commitments to live together. And I believe one of the great gifts Jon and I gave to our theatre community was an example that it was possible, that family can be the centre of your life while your theatre work is too. To all women director/creators with children: bravo, be brave and break the mould – carry them in the hall, breastfeed between the seats, go on tour together, whisper about process and actors and what worked and what didn’t. Include your kids in your life, let them learn from your passion.”

    And so this is where I am at: I have vowed not to confuse first words or breastfeeding with interesting material for plays, and this article is the closest I plan to come to mommy blogging myself. But I’m writing through my fears. And sometimes, I even write about the kid.

    Darrah Teitel is a playright and graduate of the University of Toronto and the National Theatre School of Canada’s Playwriting program. Her plays have been produced across Canada and her journalism, fiction and poetry have appeared in various periodicals and journals throughout the country. Darrah’s play Corpus is the winner of the Calgary Peace Play Prize, the In The Beginning Playwriting Award and the 2011 Canadian Jewish Playwriting Award. Her play The Apology was nominated for the Dora Mavor Moore Award and the Betty Mitchell Award for best new play. The Apology won the Calgary FFWD Audience Choice Award for 2013. She was a member of the Banff Playwrights Colony in 2007, 2011 and 2012, and was a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellow. Darrah is currently the playwright-in-residence for the Great Canadian Theatre Company and is working for the NDP Status of Women Critic. Corpus will be produced by Teesri Duniya Theatre in November 2014 in Montreal.