For weeks I throw up every day. I can’t smell the diaper bin or the dishwasher without heaving. I can’t exercise without churning my nausea. I go to sleep at 7:30 pm. In the mornings, I log in to meetings where my male colleagues don’t know that just off-screen, I’m beginning to show.
They don’t know, either, what it feels like to be in a body like this: to ache and retch and long to collapse, and still to show up for work; to manage a household, with its tedious chores and consuming mental labor; to welcome a toddler from his grandparents’ at sunset, fatigued by the force of his energy and curiosity but straining to stay gracious and cool. They’ll never praise me for this work. They’ll never pay me for it.
The work of the mother and the work of the artist are undervalued and undercompensated. Creative work, after all, is “nonessential,” as the pandemic has made explicit. And while most everyone would affirm that the work of the mother is essential, her work is still largely taken for granted. Most communities lack substantial structures to compensate, validate, or buttress her in her labor. It is challenging to persevere in either vocation and especially challenging to persevere in both. Just as arts budgets are cut when resources are strained, creative practice may be the first thing to go in a new mother’s life. Amid the thankless labor of caregiving, why would a woman take on still more work that might go unseen? How could she justify hiring childcare to do work that might not pay? Why would she abide in her craft, and how?
Madeleine L’Engle’s writing career was already underway when, during the years she was raising her children, she received only rejection letters from publishers for an entire decade. The author best known for her fantastical novel A Wrinkle in Time had been writing since she was a child in the 1920s. After college, as an actress living in Greenwich Village, she wrote between scenes in the theater wings, piecing together her first novel. Titled The Small Rain, her debut was published in 1945, when she was twenty-seven. The New York Times called it “evidence of a fresh new talent,” and it sold well, paving the way for her to publish a second novel 14 months later. That same year, she married an actor she met on the set of a Chekhov play. In 1947, their daughter Josephine was born.
Amid the thankless labor of caregiving, why would a woman take on still more work that might go unseen?
L’Engle kept writing through the first years of motherhood, publishing a third novel the year of her second pregnancy. But after that book, her literary agent was unable to sell any of her manuscripts. As her family grew, editors’ interest in her work withered. She gave birth to a son, Bion, in 1952 and adopted a daughter, Maria, in 1956. By then her family had moved from Greenwich Village to the dairy farm village of Goshen, Connecticut, where she and her husband bought an old farmhouse and the town’s general store. He took the lead managing the market while L’Engle split time between caregiving, writing, and tending the store. She persisted in sending out work. But by 1958, nearing forty, she was so worn by editors’ indifference that she vowed to give up writing altogether.
A rejection slip on the day of her fortieth birthday appeared to seal her fate. “This seemed an obvious sign from heaven,” she remembers in her memoir A Circle of Quiet. “I should stop trying to write.” She blamed her literary ambition for her deficient domestic skills, comparing herself to the other Connecticut mothers with their polished floors and country pies. “And with all the hours I spent writing,” she went on, “I was still not pulling my own weight financially.” Why keep writing when no one is reading? Why paint when no one sees? Why work when it doesn’t pay?
The summer I first conceived, I began writing letters to literary agents, seeking representation for a collection of essays written after the deaths of my father and brother. The book was a meditation on grief and beauty, and writing it had trained my eyes to see light even in the midnights of human experience. It would meet readers, I hoped, as a companion in the dark. But first, I’d need an agent to get my work on editors’ desks. Before the baby was born, I sent inquiries to over fifty agencies, and I received as many rejections.
Two years pass. The boy is growing. I continue to send letters.
Finally, in the winter of my second pregnancy, a literary agent invites me to sign with her agency. I am so glad that I pour an illicit glass of champagne. Together, we develop a proposal for the book, and she presents it to editors at eighteen publishing houses. It’s January, and the bright field behind our home after a snowfall sprawls like a future. But one by one, the editors send their regrets.
As Madeleine L’Engle’s family grew, editors’ interest in her work withered.
Now the white field is just an empty page. I thought that an agent would open the door where I’ve been knocking; in this case it means only more disappointment, channeled now through a benevolent proxy.
Soon I’ll have a newborn again. Life with two children will not amble to the slow cadence of that first summer with my son; it will be arrhythmic and bewildering. I am not yet at a stage in my career when anyone depends on me to keep making art. As the poet Kate Baer says in Sara Fredman’s interview series Write Like a Mother, “No one cares if you’re a writer, except you.” Now would be a reasonable time to quit.
“I was born with the itch for writing in me, and oh, I couldn’t stop it if I tried,” L’Engle wrote in her journal as a teenager. Rather than quit on her fortieth birthday, she kept going. Her agent found a home for her 1960 novel Meet the Austins, and with that success, L’Engle returned to her typewriter. There, she began to work out an idea about a courageous girl named Meg Murry and her quest through space and time to save her physicist father from the forces of evil. As she resumed her practice, she established patterns that would last a lifetime. Her granddaughter remembers that she turned in at nine each night so that she’d be fresh for the next day’s work. Whether in her country house or at the library of Manhattan’s Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where beginning in 1966 she was writer-in-residence, she wrote every day. She did so not because she was inspired every day but so that the tools of her craft would be sharp when a rare moment of vision struck. As she writes in the memoir The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, “Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.”
I don’t write every day as L’Engle models, but I do keep writing. In the final months of my pregnancy, to my great satisfaction, I place articles in a few magazines. I pitch new articles to magazine editors with a six-month lead time so that after a twelve-week maternity leave, I’ll have something to work on. And my agent urges me—after the baby comes, when I’m ready—to prepare a proposal for a new project.
My second child is born in early June, a boy as golden and fair as the month of his birth. He nurses vigorously and sleeps deeply. He’s a quiet baby, and his brother approaches him reverently. At first.
Why keep writing when no one is reading? Why work when it doesn’t pay?
Within a week, our calm splinters into ceaseless cries of need, all of them directed toward my body. The baby cries to eat. The toddler protests sleep unless I lie down beside him. He will not bathe unless I bathe him. All he says to his daddy now is, “not you.” A new question of perseverance comes to the fore: How will I abide in the chaos of early parenthood, chaos that with two children is not doubled but squared?
Picture this scene: The newborn wakes in the violet light as the sun is beginning to rise. I scoop his body, limber as a kitten, from the bassinet at my bedside and carry him to the kitchen, where I put water on the stove for coffee. Then I open the back door to let the air in, and we walk to a plush chair in the living room. I cradle this new boy with one arm, tuck three different pillows on my right and left and lap, and single-handedly roll up a swaddling cloth to place beneath the baby’s cheek, elevating his head so it meets my breast. How strange it is to care for a person so frail, so fresh, that he hasn’t the strength even to put his face where he needs it to be. He begins to eat.
Down the hall, a doorknob. His brother is awake. Now two years old, he has graduated from crib to bed, and I’m still startled he can open his own door. I brace myself, preparing to speak sweetly. Footsteps down the hall. A drowsy figure in the doorframe. Then he climbs onto the chair’s arms, suddenly lively. Now he is sitting on my shoulders. Now he is hugging my face. “Lovey, Lovey, Mama needs some space.” Now my hair is in my eyes, and my neck is bending sideways, and the baby is so new he doesn’t notice and so he’s still nursing, draining me, draining me. And the water is boiling.
Austin is sleeping. I’m angry that I’m alone with these two needy creatures. My first impulse is to shout help to the other side of the house like a real drama queen. Instead, I huff audibly to let it be known that I have been inconvenienced. Then I clutch the baby carefully, squirm out of the toddler’s hold, stand up, and feel the pillows tumble to the floor. I turn off the boiling water. I do not make my coffee. My oldest is sitting in the chair where we were, and I pull up a TV tray and a laptop. He gets a show. He gets pancakes defrosted in the microwave. He gets grapes, served whole because I have weighed the risk of his choking against the risk of slicing fruit while holding a newborn and have selected not the safest option but the option that requires less effort.
Within a week, our calm splinters into ceaseless cries of need, all of them directed toward my body.
In the bedroom, I pat Austin’s shoulder and say, in a tone that is both a whisper and a bark, “I could use a little help.” Then I return to a chair beside the toddler, recreate the pillow rig, and resume nursing the baby.
Here is trouble so subtle it seems barely worth telling about. But it frays and inflames me. How to abide in this chaos?
I don’t wonder whether I will persevere in motherhood; I know I will not leave my children. But I do wonder how I will persevere. What will be the quality of my presence? Will I begrudge this thankless labor?
Will I be tired all the time? Will I be short-tempered, escaping into housework while the boys toddle at my feet because laundry demands less of me than the children’s desires? Or will I wake up to the humor of this time—its slapstick antics? Will I notice its magic? Will I have joy with which to be generous?
The spark that lit A Wrinkle in Time came to L’Engle by starlight. Her children were seven, ten, and twelve when she and her husband made plans to move from their rural home back to Manhattan. The summer before the move, they took their kids on a ten-week camping trip. They wanted to see the stars. L’Engle, once an English major without any interest in the sciences, had recently read about quantum physics and the theory of relativity. More than the theologians esteemed at her country church or in the Anglicanism of her childhood, Albert Einstein and Max Planck seemed to her an opening between the mundane and the metaphysical.
On their road trip, beneath her feet in the passenger seat, she stowed a crate of books about the making of the universe. At night while the children slept, she sat outside her tent reading and gazing heavenward, feeling at once small and magnificent. In her reading of cosmology, human beings were part of a fantastical system, one in which time could wrinkle and love was magic enough to defeat evil. From these meditations, L’Engle began to draft a novel to tell this story.
Feeling new resolve after her agent succeeded in selling Meet the Austins, L’Engle persisted as 26 editors passed on this new manuscript. Finally, after two years of effort, L’Engle handed the pages directly to John Farrar at Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, who accepted it enthusiastically. A Wrinkle in Time was finally published in 1962. It was instantly beloved by children and adults alike, and won the Newbery Medal the following year. By the time it was turned into a major motion picture in 2018, it had sold more than ten million copies.
Maybe this is all I need—not the satisfaction of my literary ambition but simply to be still awhile with this child. This could be enough.
Over the course of L’Engle’s career, she published more than sixty novels, memoirs, poetry collections, and plays. Though in her thirties her efforts to reach readers were thwarted, she continued to write. “It didn’t matter how small or inadequate my talent,” she reflects in A Circle of Quiet. “If I never had another book published, and it was very clear to me that this was a real possibility, I still had to go on writing.” She wrote in such volumes that I suspect it wasn’t merely a drive for acclaim that motivated her; something deeper called her again and again to her writing desk.
“Why does anybody tell a story?” she asks in The Rock That Is Higher, a nonfiction meditation on myth. “It does indeed have something to do with faith, faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”
That’s why L’Engle kept writing. Because she believed that our little human lives matter cosmically. Like Amy March, who insisted that her sister Jo write her story even if it was “just about our little life”; and like Della Miles, who saw Jack Boughton as “a holy human soul”; L’Engle was lit with awe for the human person, small as we are in the cosmic drama.
She never could distinguish her novels as either for grown-ups or for children. When I read L’Engle as an adult, I believe again in magic. She writes in Walking on Water, “The artist, if he is not to forget how to listen, must retain the vision which includes angels and dragons and unicorns and all the lovely creatures which our world would put in a box marked Children Only.”
While I don’t see dragons, I do, after hours in L’Engle’s authorial mind, start to see stardust. There’s the glimmering surface of my children’s skin, the light in their eyes, the sacred nature of their wonder, and the uncanny fact that they exist at all and are entrusted to my care. This is a powerful elixir against the tedium of motherhood, a shot in the arm for the adventure before me.
The new baby is sleeping. When his brother wakes from his own nap in the late afternoon, we recline in a chair, and I read to him. The Happy Lion. Owl Moon. Books where children encounter jovial beasts and mystical birds, where the scrim of the ordinary opens into the otherworldly. I wedge him between my hips and the chair’s arm, and he rests his neck on my elbow. He wears a muslin gown and drinks a bottle of warm milk, his neck and cheeks hot from sleep. “Read more books, Mama,” he says. Maybe this is all I need—not the satisfaction of my literary ambition but simply to be still awhile with this child. This could be enough. On the other hand, how powerful will it be to show my son that I, too, write books, and to impart a legacy of courage to pursue a career—artistic or otherwise—that pays not in money but in meaning?
When I finish reading, my oldest stays with me, not wired as he usually is but docile. I dip my cheek onto his fine hair and stare at his hands, bigger now but still plush like a baby’s. His little brother wakes, and we go together to my bedroom. The toddler climbs into the bassinet and curls his body around the newborn’s. I guide his movements to protect the baby while encouraging tenderness between them, carefully watching every limb.
Our vision of the world is shaped by what we see. What an artist sees, therefore, shapes the world that she shows to others in her work. Again and again, I look at these frail, magnificent bodies. I look at them to be sure they’re safe. I look at them because they demand it of me: “Mama, look at me.” “Mama, come find me.” And I look at them because they are so beautiful that I can’t stop looking.
When I’m with them, I catch myself staring. When I leave them, I study their photographs. In all this looking, my view of the world is reframed by maternal humanism, composed of awe, curiosity, and adoration for the vulnerable ones of this world—which is to say, all of us.
Why persevere in making art? Because our communities need art made by those who can’t take their eyes off of the vulnerable ones of this world. We need a visual culture, a literary culture, a culture of performance that wakes us up to the dignity of every person. A mother artist brings certain virtues to the creative life—gifts that she gives to her audience.
We need artists who have tamed their egos enough to care for others, then revived their ambitions to be generous with their talents.
An artist who’s been transfigured in pregnancy gives us the body in all its strange beauty. An artist who has lost a child refuses to explain away tragedy, and companions all who grieve. An artist who’s been through the calamity of childbirth shows us women’s vulnerability and strength. We need artists who have tamed their egos enough to take time to care for others, then revived their ambitions to be generous with their talents. We need artists who reimagine women’s desire in all its complexity. We need artists who rightly balance self-emptying with self-possession, and artists who stand up for others’ dignity, and artists who give themselves in interdependence to their communities. If art has the power to change minds, if art has the power to shift public opinion, if art has the power to shape new worlds, then imagine with me a world lit by this constellation of maternal virtues. It’s luminous.
This is not to say that every mother is as virtuous as the vision I’ve laid out, or that any mother is virtuous all the time. Motherhood has introduced me to the worst version of myself—a woman often embittered, impatient, and bored by the bodily imposition and tedium of this endeavor. But as I interact with artwork made by mothers, virtue comes more easily, as I become alert to the magic and humor shared between me and these tiny bodies. Carmen Winant, in an essay in Frieze, puts it this way: “As I tend to my own children and reach for the fortitude to be a parent, I am struck by the ways in which—now more than ever—I need art, across books and visual exhibitions, to feel assured of my own daily capacity for resilience, patience and affection.” The more mothers persevere in making art, the more we draw out the best in one another, thus inviting our audiences to imagine and work for a world humanized by the love of a mother for herself, her family, and her communities.
I wrote the majority of my book while caring for both an infant and a toddler, and I still wonder whether this was the right time for an ambitious creative project. I’ve been so tired. Consumed at every moment by the book, or these bodies, or both. What enrichment for my children might I have dreamt up if my mind weren’t crowded with insight and worry for this book? If I weren’t writing, might I have slept better? Been more patient? Felt more joy? Every day I wonder.
I have not yet resolved many of the tensions. Except for this one: whether an artist comes back to her art practice three weeks or thirty years after her child is born, her audience is better for her departure, and for her return.
Excerpted from The Mother Artist. Copyright © 2024, Catherine Ricketts. Reproduced by permission of Broadleaf Books. All rights reserved.
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