On Bending the World to Our Vision

Featured in the “More Organic Than It May Appear:” A Symposium on Creativity and Motherhood, Mary, Queen of Angels 2021 issue of Dappled Things.

It was a quiet I hadn’t experienced before: not deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, nor in a domed stained-glass cathedral. This quiet was pristine, focused, as was my devotion as I studied my newborn son. 

When I married, I wasn’t certain motherhood was for me. The tenderness of parenting had not been modeled in my past. Abuse and neglect had distinguished my childhood and forced me to raise my younger siblings. It aged me, made me resentful, and severed relationships with my siblings who did not prove grateful. 

The thought of parenting was wrought with knots I did not know how to untie. I wondered if I could do it at all: Could I be a mother? 

I resolved to write instead. Writing is reflective work. It demands introspection. With fits and starts, I found the work daunting. It began to be clear just how much of the work, the writing, was entwined with my notion of motherhood. Even if I was writing about faith, art, or literature, so much of it had to do with my view of what it meant to be human, to care for another human. Each loop of the knot appeared connected; I must tug on one to loosen the other. Although there are many ways to disentangle a thread, I needed to make a decision. Could I be a mother? Would I still be able to write? Writing was the only vocation that appealed to me. It tugged at my soul, like some invisible force at the end of a thread. What kind of writer would I be? What kind of mother would I be? 

The prevalent narrative on motherhood and creativity is disheartening. The message echoes: they are incompatible. As my stomach stretched and I felt the flutters of life inside me, my desire to create beauty, too, grew: but with each finished project, friends and family muttered, “Enjoy it while it lasts.” I began to distrust the flourishing I felt in my work and in my soul. Would it end when my son was born?

What I didn’t know was that my neurological circuitry was recalibrating. Brain researchers prefer to work on rats, as their brains closely mirror humans’ in important ways. In her Atlantic article of September 13, 2017, “How Motherhood Affects Creativity,” Erika Hayasaki describes scientists’ findings on brain changes after giving birth—discoveries that might have surprised my skeptical relatives. This research reveals that mother rats are bolder, faster, and more efficient. A mother will hunt for food when risk is high. A mother will capture that food four times faster than before. Her brain has sharpened; she does not have time to waste; she is more efficient. And even if she enjoyed cocaine before she became pregnant, as a new mother, she will choose her babies over drugs. Science finds that rat mothers are innovative, dauntless, and imaginative. 

Mothers discover new and unusual ways to accomplish daily tasks, including approaches they would have not considered before becoming mothers. If this is not creativity, I don’t know what is. 

Creativity is defined as using imagination or bringing original ideas to light, especially in the production of an artistic work. Is this not what a mother learns to do? Each day we stretch and pull, identifying new possibilities, as we care for, communicate with, and entertain our baby and ourselves. It sounds like an environment ripe to push into the realm of art: mothers apply that same innovation to words on a page, paint on a canvas, or notes on strings. 

And yet the message we hear is that it is not. If research shows that motherhood is well-suited for creativity, why do we discourage mothers? Why do we perpetuate the narrative? Why do we set up a mother for failure, instead of rooting for her success? It may be time to take Pablo Picasso’s advice on art and creativity and “bend the world to your vision.”

In those first few weeks with my son, there was nothing to do but notice him. I sat in silence, rapt. I watched him for cues that he was tired, hungry, or needed a change. I noticed the curvature of his face, inspected his soft head, counted his fingers and toes. My entire existence during those weeks was simply to notice. 

In my youth, I had felt guilty taking time to daydream or spend time looking intently at something. I remember once, when I was in kindergarten, I was understandably punished for dawdling on the way home for school. A kitten stuck in a tree had caught my attention. We spent a good amount of time meowing at each other until my worried mother found me a block away from home. 

I had always associated dawdling and meandering and daydreaming with guilt and consequences and unproductivity. And now, I was given permission to dawdle, meander, daydream. I took in every expression of my baby. I started to see stretches and movements he made that I had felt in the womb.

Writer Leslie Jamison was told a similar motherhood narrative to the one I heard. People told her she would lose everything: time, sleep, freedom. For Jamison, on the contrary, those first few weeks felt like “exhausting plenitude.” In a May 14, 2020, article for the New York Review of Books, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” she writes:

Being with my baby every hour of every day demanded close attention, not just to her—whether her fluttering eyelids meant she was waking up or just dreaming, how close she’d rolled to the edge of our bed—but also to everything else.

From her window, Jamison noticed the habits and behaviors of her neighbors. On walks she noticed nooks and crannies she hadn’t before and learned names of trees she had walked by for years. 

Motherhood both gives us permission to notice and develops an aptitude for observation. Paying attention is one of the building blocks of creativity, sharpening our curiosity and helping us find patterns in the natural world. 

Creativity also takes time and reflection. Even when one seems dormant, one is gathering. As Jamison noticed, she gathered, finding new material to share with her readers. Motherhood attuned her eye to the very thing she needed to be more creative. 

For me, it wasn’t just the permission to notice but also to play. I hadn’t played much as a child. I cooked, cleaned, and helped take care of my siblings. Now play was an essential part of my new job. Motherhood brought a new facet to my spirit that I had not been able to experience before. 

When my son became a toddler, I created small worlds for him to play with his dinosaurs or Playmobil figures. These small worlds were larger format dioramas I created inside the sort of shallow storage containers one stores seasonal clothes in and then shoves under the bed. I saved my morning coffee grounds for dirt, broke apart Styrofoam from Amazon packages to fashion icebergs, and cut small branches from our apple tree for my son to explore in. 

These worlds were just as much for me as they were for him. Many nights, after I tucked him into bed, I’d work on a small world instead of going to sleep myself. I loved the challenge of using items I had around the house and creating something out of “nothing.” I found absolute delight in playing in these worlds with my son in the mornings. I saw how he used the space provided, and it informed my next creation. We took turns telling stories, back and forth, as a collaboration. Not only was I becoming more creative, I was modeling creativity for my son. 

Writer and mother Haley Stewart notices the phenomenon of co-creation. But Stewart takes co-creation to another level: we are collaborating with God. She writes, “Motherhood is holy and creating art is holy.” How could they not influence each other? Art happens when we are influenced by new experiences. Any artist knows it does not happen when we are simply staring at the page, canvas, or instrument with the hope that something will emerge. While experiencing the holy work of mothering, we are inspired in new ways.

Writing for Plough magazine in May 2021, Stewart quotes Madeline L’Engle, the beloved author of Wrinkle in Time and Walking on Water, who said, “God is love, and it is the nature of love to create.” For L’Engle “an artist is a nourisher and creator. We do not create alone . . . it is a collaboration.” Stewart agrees saying “God is constantly creating, in us, through us, with us, and to co-create with God is our human calling.”

This was my discovery as well. Like God—who, as no human can, created Ex Nihilo, out of nothing—I created life, my son, out of “nothing,” in collaboration with my husband and my Creator. As my love for my son grew, so did my desire to nourish and create, until it took on a life of its own. As we are all made in the Image of God, our Creator, “creator” is the deepest identity in us all. I no longer had to struggle to find creativity; creativity found me.

When I looked into my son’s eyes, I too, saw the Image of God reflected back at me. As I watched him grow, I discovered new things about God and about myself. My son not only mirrors my own face, as he looks just like me, he mirrors my behaviors.  We laugh easily. We love easily. Through him, I see how we reflect the Image of God. I also see how my impatience and moodiness affects his.

Two years after my son was born, a second son arrived. The younger shares his father’s looks and disposition, balancing our family perfectly. Through these family dynamics, I learn not only about each of us, but about God’s love, perpetuating L’Engle’s assertion that “God is love, and it is the nature of love to create.” The cycle is indeed circular. 

Like Leslie Jamison, I too found that this time with my sons at home seemed dormant, but I was gathering. When both began school, the writing work that had, for years, been interrupted with fits and starts, now took focus. Not just focus: my writing flourished. 

I made the most of those school hours. I had so much I wanted to say, and I wrote and wrote until it was time to pick up the children from school After years of being timid, I was now bold. I submitted essays which were indeed published, and I stretched out of my comfort zone, trying out new genres and topics. I even began writing a memoir, addressing those childhood issues that had previously seemed so knotted. 

R&B artist Alicia Keys also experienced this focus after children, telling Harper’s Bazaar magazine in 2019:

Motherhood gave me a stronger sense of clarity. I used to be less aware of how I wanted to spend my time and more influenced by other people. After I had my kids, I felt like I had found my North Star. I was less wasteful; I worked more effectively.

Motherhood brought a new clarity and sense of self for Keys. She no longer cared about what people thought about her. Motherhood freed her of “any inhibition that would have stopped [her] from saying certain things and writing certain things or touching on certain things.” Motherhood made her more creative. 

A friend of mine noticed this increased clarity and efficiency in the workplace. She told me that, as an employer, she prefers hiring moms: “Even if they only work part-time, they are efficient problem-solvers.” A mother herself, my friend attributed these skills to motherhood. 

Artist Lenka Clayton noticed that, in the art world, art was expected to be done outside the home. “It felt quite offensive that somehow you are more creative away from your family than with them,” she said in a May 26, 2021, New York Times interview with Mara Altman. Clayton wanted to change the narrative that motherhood and creativity were opposed. In 2012, she founded a free self-guided artist residency, An Artist Residency in Motherhood (ARIM). No need to apply or travel: the only pre-requisite is that the residency takes place in your home with your children. Clayton wanted to empower artists who are mothers. “Instead of getting home life out of the way so you can work, it’s looking at those obstructions—nap-length studio time, fragmented focus—as inspiration and material to make work out of,” she said. 

This conjures images of wire-sculpture artist Ruth Asawa, mother of six, photographed by Imogen Cunningham. In the photograph, Asawa works on a sculpture on the floor of her front room surrounded by four of her children. Her naked one-year-old drinks from a bottle, while an older child draws crouched atop a coffee table. Asawa weaves in the middle of this beautiful chaos in a stream of sunlight. Her daughter, Aiko, now grown, said “It was always just a part of our life to just see her always working.” Asawa herself wrote, in another New York Times interview published on Christmas 2013, “Art is doing. Art deals directly with life.”

During her own residency, Clayton was prolific. She created new pieces such as “63 Objects Taken From My Son’s Mouth,” a 40” by 40” display of just that: objects removed from her son’s mouth on safety grounds while he was between the ages of eight and fifteen months. The objects include buttons, rocks, and a cigarette butt. She also created limited-edition, signed artist books of photographs of the objects. The collection documents the intense months of the life of mother and child. The piece reminds me of Andy Warhol’s time capsules: 610 sealed cardboard boxes with items he and his staff gathered from around his NYC gallery during the last thirteen years of his life. Clayton’s piece frames motherhood as a source of artistic discourse and just as valuable a subject matter. 

The piece also addresses the concept of co-creating. These objects were found by her son and turned into art by herself. The piece became collaborative. 

Before the pandemic, artist Reut Asimini kept her career and family life separate. But when the lockdowns began, Asimini found herself looking after her eighteen-month-old daughter, Mia. Art supplies in their tiny apartment were limited, and soon Mia had commandeered the pencils and paper, scribbling over every single piece. As Altman describes in the same New York Times piece for which she interviewed Clayton, Asimini seized the opportunity and began to transform Mia’s doodles. Scribbles became hair, or a tangle of pencil circles became a mouth, screaming. Before the pandemic, Asimini thought motherhood too boring or simple for art, but now “for the first time in [her] life, [she] didn’t judge everything [she] did.” “I just did it,” Asimini said, “and it was so refreshing.” Like Asawa, Asimini discovered art in the midst of real life.

In his letter to the church in Rome, St. Paul writes: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Romans 8:22). I do not think St. Paul was being frivolous when he used the metaphor of childbirth in relation to creation. In fact, it was not the first time that the work of the Creator is depicted as a mother in childbirth. The prophet Isaiah uses childbirth to characterize God three times.

For a long time I have kept silent,
I have said nothing, holding myself back;
Now I cry out like a woman in labor,
gasping and panting (Isaiah 42:14).

I think of all the women, like myself, who spoke of how their creativity was stunted or held back until they had children, how the act of participating in creation indeed brought out their own creativity.

Writer and Episcopal minister Lauren Winner reveals the beauty of the Hebrew language in this passage, in her book Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God, reprinted by HarperOne in 2016. Winner says the image is “much more specific than ‘God is like a woman in labor.’” Isaiah used three different verbs that pertain to breath in this verse. Pa’ah, translated here as “cry” but often “groan,” is used only once in the entire Bible. With the next two words, nasham and sha’aph or here “gasping and panting,” Winner suggests the reason Isaiah spends so much attention on breathing is to connect childbirth to an earlier biblical breath, Creation, when God breathes life into Adam and to anticipate the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, whose New Testament, Greek term is pneuma or breath. 

Motherhood is an opening, a cracking open of life force within a woman. This burst of new life is intricately interlaced with original creation and our connection to the Creator. It is time to create a new narrative and vison regarding motherhood and creativity: one that uncovers how motherhood reveals new perceptions about the world around us, how motherhood brings a new sense of play and innovation to our art, how motherhood pinpoints our focus and efficiency, and ultimately how participating in creation itself connects us to our Creator.