🔖"Nobody cares if you're a writer except you." Kate Baer on being a writer who mothers. 📝

I highly recommend Sara Fredman’s Write Like A Mother newsletter, in which Sara interviews writers who are also mothers. Some bits from the recent issue with Kate Baer resonated especially with me, so I thought I’d share them here.

Mothers were so punished in this pandemic.

This. I’m playing the pandemic on easy mode - working part-time from home - and I still feel this. The social costs and lack of a village are what’s hurting me most. For the first time since the start of the pandemic, I hung out for a long time with other parents while our kids were at the park and it was huge. Pre-pandemic, M & I spent every weekday morning at a co-working space with a Montessori school on-site. My co-workers were almost exclusively fellow parents of young children, mostly moms and non-binary primary caregivers, and at the time I didn’t really appreciate how special it was.

…nobody cares if you’re a writer. Nobody, nobody cares if you’re a writer, except you. If you want to be a writer, then you have to take control of the situation. You have to think of yourself as a writer, you have to treat yourself as a writer. You have to treat this like this is a job… I have to be the one who cares so much about being a writer. And so I think part of that is just filtering out that noise and just taking yourself super seriously, taking the work super seriously.

I have only recently claimed the title of writer for myself, despite having written all my life and having my first paid byline 10 years ago, and I feel this so hard. I’m still working on taking myself and the work seriously.

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Portrait of the Mother as an Artist – Guernica guernicamag.com

Read: www.guernicamag.com

To think of the mother as artist does not necessitate a conflict, nor does it require a choice between passive domestic surrender or total domestic rejection, although for a long time the world demanded that it did. Such frames only reinforce hierarchies, limit her to merely a fragment when, of course, she is com posed of many pieces.

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Craft — a designation used to subjugate many art-making practices that have been the domain of women: needlepoint, pottery, quilt making. With their connections to the home, these mediums have been historically dismissed, supposedly lacking the rigor and intellectual complexity of high art.

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“I have drawn my children and painted them endlessly and I cannot distinguish them from my soul…"

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she sometimes wonders why an artist must inhabit turmoil or drama to be taken seriously.

🔖📝 The Heartbreaking Ingenuity of the Mother-Writer ‹ Literary Hub

if you’ve read a book penned by a woman with young children recently, there’s a significant chance it was written while hiding, losing sleep, or using inventive distractions. (Or even all three.)

there is no separation between mother and writer, nor can I tease apart the time I spend tending to my child from the time I spend thinking about my writing, or actually doing it.

Finding Literary Spaces Amid the Intensity of New Motherhood 🔖📚💬