Daphne Merkin writes in the New York Review Of Books:
* Whenever I pick up a new book by a woman I check the author biography on the back flap to see whether she has children. I’m not entirely sure why I do this and what, exactly, I am trying to gauge, but I think it has something to do with an abiding interest in how other women writers have arranged their lives and enabled their ambitions: Do they view writing as a sacrosanct vocation and themselves as secular nuns of a sort, for whom few distractions—especially one as time-filling as motherhood—are to be allowed? Or do they accept their creative aspirations as part of a larger, often messy whole that includes a child or children?
I go on to wonder whether the writers who don’t have children seem more productive—or perhaps even, in an instinctive process of self-selection, more talented. I have done this sort of accounting since well before I became a mother myself and continue to do so, unsure whether I admire the single-mindedness of women who forgo the maternal role or suspect that they might come to regret their choice one day. The decision to become a mother while pursuing a career as a writer or artist certainly affects the division of one’s labor; tackling the chores of motherhood while also trying to find the time and concentration to write or sculpt or paint is a supreme juggling act.
* I will never forget the time, years ago, when a younger friend of mine, the daughter of a leading book critic, told me that her writing teacher, known for her astutely observed short stories, advised the class that if the female students intended to become serious writers they should abjure having children (as she had). I wondered immediately whether such draconian pronouncements emanated from her inflated sense of her own talent, of a sort that brooked no diversion, or from a conviction that the one activity would inevitably wither in the face of the other.
* In his poem “The Choice,” W.B. Yeats presented a male artist’s options in drastic terms: “Perfection of the life, or of the work,” putting in succinct words the dilemma women have mulled before and ever since. What, then, is one to make of the various choices—some intently focused, some more slapdash—of all these undeniably gifted and independent-minded women? Are the ones who abstain from having children the ones most fully empowered to pursue their ambition? Or is this not the real question to be posed, mainly because there are no conditions whereby a particular writer or artist will be in full possession of her talent, whichever way she decides to live? Nonartistic issues will always impinge, no matter how much one tries to avoid them, and will end up shaping the course of one’s life.
Could it be, I find myself asking, that there is no real dilemma, other than an imaginary one? Some women may see motherhood as an imposed and idealized bondage, refusing to sacrifice the primacy of their work to its claims. Olsen, for one, came to insist, as Doherty writes, that “mothering and all its rewards took away from artistic inspiration and execution: you could not live in the world of your novel in progress and live with your children simultaneously.” And then there are women, like Sylvia Plath, who can’t imagine even the richest intellectual life without the generative impulse: “It is not when I have a baby, but that I have one, and more, which is of supreme importance to me,” she wrote in her journal in June 1959. “And for a woman to be deprived of the Great Experience her body is formed to partake of, to nourish, is a great and wasting Death.” Having children may not save a person, as it did not save either Plath or Sexton, but it may add to their portion of pleasure (if also drudgery).
As the mother of one child, a daughter—and as an aunt to twenty nieces and nephews—I have rarely tried to parse whether I would have written more if I had remained childless, if only because I know myself to be ceaselessly drawn to distractions in whatever form they arrive. If anything, I have pondered whether my life would have felt fuller and more intensely focused if I had had another child or two, the better to force me to schedule my time more fruitfully. Then again, perhaps my work doesn’t mean enough to me to give it the kind of sovereignty that Celia Paul and others like her do. Or perhaps, like Plath, becoming a mother was an experience I longed to have every bit as much as I longed to write. This might make me a victim of the patriarchy and its creation of the sacral myth of motherhood, or it might make me simply a writer and a mother, as proud of one kind of expression as the other.
