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Reading back through your posts, now that I've learned you're on here, and I think the biggest echo is this one right here:

"Creative work requires attention that is always in direct conflict with children. For me, it requires solitude, silence, reading, writing, staring into the nothingness, and deep rabbit holes. This is basically the opposite of what my toddler does and needs."

And the eternal struggle to balance creating and parenting culminates, for me, with the question: "What will my child remember of this?"

It's from a male perspective, but Ben Rector addresses this in a song I've had on repeat for two weeks:

"Sometimes I wonder

What they'll say of me when I am gone

When my daughters livin' on, yeah

Will she care if strangers thought that I was famous

Or just that I was never home?"

I'm nodding along to your penultimate paragraph, the other balancing act. Staying in it all when the peaks seem far off and the valley endless. But you gotta still keep putting one foot in front of the other, right?

Thanks Elaine :)

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