A room of my own: trying to survive as a creative woman with young kids

History is full of missing women. Where are the female artists, the composers, the sculptors, the philosophers, the mathematicians….?? Where are the women in virtually every aspect of cultural and scientific development that men dominated for hundreds, even thousands of years (and in many cases still do). 

Is it because women have less talent, or less time? In the days before contraception, if a women wanted to create anything other than children then she either needed to be celibate, or sterile. Without contraception women having sex with men are doomed to go through an endless cycle of pregnancy, birth or miscarriage until they reach menopause. Your body is plunged from one physical and emotional crisis to the next. 

Then what happens when you have children – a standard family of husband and kids? You are constantly pulled down by the mundane details of keeping that family going. How can you compose a symphony when the children have no clean clothes and dinner won’t cook itself?

Of course money can help. If you can afford to pay someone else to do the cleaning, look after the kids and pick up a takeaway, maybe you might have more time. Except that to earn enough money to pay for that help you will need to do a pretty high powered (and time consuming) job. 

So even today, unless we have money or stay single and have no kids,  we are still trapped – except now we are trying to work, and look after the family, and create? When exactly can we create? 

What about women’s lib?? It didn’t free us in the way we imagined it might. Now women don’t have to choose (as they once did) between having a job and having a family. We can have both! And still do all the laundry, all the cooking, all the mundane daily tasks that we did before. 

How can we reach a profound level of thought when constantly interrupted by children who need a wee, need a nap, need a bath, need some food, need the toilet again…. How can I be a philosopher when I have only had 5hrs sleep, every night – for the LAST FIVE YEARS. No wonder pairing socks is the level of thought my poor brain can cope with.

We are sometimes our own worst enemies. We obligingly juggle more and more balls, and the family marvels at our skill without ever wondering whether we like juggling or even wanted to perform in a circus. We do those jobs when maybe it would do everyone good if we gave up and sat on the sofa for 2 weeks. Surely when there is no more dinner, no more food in the fridge and no more plates, someone else will step up to take some (one or two?) of these daily tasks off our hands? 

When is ‘my time’? When the kids are in bed, in the hour before I fall asleep? When will women be allowed to do anything other than just struggle along, satisfying the needs of their dependents without ever having the physical or emotional time necessary to fulfil their intellectual and creative ambitions? When will women be able to create AND have a family?

What can we do about this predicament? Don’t wait for men to change, you could be waiting forever. Don’t wait for things to get better – there may never be any more time, any more help, any more sleep. Concentrate on making the current situation work better – bit by tiny bit you need to win back some time to think, some time to create, and rediscover part of you that you though you’d lost forever. 

How can this be done? 

1. Assess the tasks you have to do in order to complete your target – then work out how much time and effort each of those things might take. I am a non-fiction writer. For me I might look at a new book as a series of tasks that includes: doing research online, doing research in actual archives, interviewing people, transcribing interviews, picture research, bibliography, picture captions, index, writing introduction, writing chapter 1, 2 , 3 4, 5 etc etc   

Some things are very hard to do if you don’t have much time – writing the main copy, visiting archives, and interviewing people all fall into this category. However, pictures need to be found, and if you have had 3hrs sleep and only have an hour spare on your laptop, you can do some picture research online that will still be a useful contribution to the book you are trying to write. If you are reading lots of books for research, reading in depth needs time and brain power. But scanning for useful quotes is faster and less arduous. 

2. Be realistic about the projects you can do. A novel or a symphony might be too hard, but a book of short stories and a song or two might be far more achievable. When I was looking after a baby and a toddler I wrote a 10,000 word book. One of a series, the format was fixed, the word count low, and the research almost entirely possible from home via cheap books and online sources. It wasn’t easy, but it was possible. The format of 5x 2,000-word chapters also made it feel like a series of essays – far less intimidating for a sleep-deprived Mum working at 30% of her usual capacity. 

3. (As Doctor Who will agree) Time and space are both important. You need time. But don’t expect to get the hours and hours you once took for granted. You have far less time, so you need to use if very efficiently. However busy your family life is, it should be possible to negotiate a hour or two a week to yourself. Maybe your partner gets up with the kids every Sunday and you work (in a room with a lock, on a laptop) till 10am? If you are a single Mum maybe a group of friends could get together – by agreeing to look after a friend’s kids for an hour or two a week you ‘earn’ an hour off while they reciprocate?

So you have one or two hours. If these take place at a regular time each week you can start to think ahead. Have a way to take notes (phone memo or notepad, anything easy you have to hand most of the time). If you remember an interesting article on Tuesday, but your free time isn’t till Sunday, write down the URL or page ref and then on Sunday you already have something to be getting on with. 

4. The place where you write can be important. If you have a family it is very hard to sit at home to work on your own projects without thinking you could just get that last bit of laundry done, or put away the clean dishes. If you can manage to, get out of the house for your creative time. Spend the money to buy a drink at a café with good free wifi and work there. You will get much more done and won’t be distracted by home responsibilities (or toddlers, or cats). 

You may only get your time and space to create for a short time each week, but try to do a tiny bit every day. One sentence written, one illustration located, one lyric worked out. It is only by giving yourself permission to create that you will start to feel more like yourself and less like a cross between Cinderella and Ivan Denisovitch. 

Your family won’t expire if you feed them pizza one night so you can finish that page you were writing. Your partner can do the washing up without you feeling they have done you a favour, and your whole family will benefit from having a happier Mum at the helm. 

*note: this is written from my own experience as a straight women with a family, I have only written about what I know, but I am sure many other groups of people have similar issues*