Messy motherhood

On laughing in the face of it all

Writing this amid the chaos, as no doubt many of you are reading it. Thank you for being here. Dinner is half-cooked, neighbourhood kids are in and out, one kid has been on a screen since she got home from school and I’ve given up trying to coax her into anything else for now. One ear on ensuring playtime remains civil, one eye on clock, desk covered in notes and bills and books and half drunk cups of coffee and to do lists that keep superseding the previous to-do list.

My eldest daughter turned twelve last week. One of our traditions is to get out all the photobooks on birthday mornings and laugh at how tiny they were, have a quiet, teary moment for all the hands who held them that are now lost to us. Among the birthday messages there are always a couple of friends who say ‘and happy birth day to you, mama’.

Twelve years. A lot and a blink. The sudden, overwhelming urge to return to writing arrived unbidden with my first child. It wasn’t until just after my second, nearly three years later, that I really did something about it and enrolled in an online poetry course. I suppose, then, I’ve always been a mother-writer, a writer-mother. The two came hand in hand for me.

That dual self means that reading Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch this week has been particularly spectacular.

Damn it is good. So so good. I whooped and chuckled and raged and held my breath. I wanted to immediately call my mum-mates and insist they get their hands on a copy right this second (except they are all too busy). I wanted to buy Rachel Yoder a drink and sit for long hours in a dark bar and ask her EVERYTHING. (Lucky for me I DO get the chance to speak to Rachel Yoder this week - not for long hours in a dark bar, alas - but for M/OTHER festival this Friday at The Wheeler Centre, come join us if you can x)

Reading Nightbitch made me think of the deep dive on mother-reading I did while I was writing The Mother Fault and I wondered whether I’ve got my ‘mother-stuff’ out of my system, or whether it will always be the burning coal I write around.

One of the lodestar pieces (lovely phrase I stole from Steven Johnson’s latest post for Adjacent Possible) I kept returning to during TMF writing was Rufi Thorpe’s Mother Writer Monster Maid for Vela Mag.

“Sometimes,” I said to my mother the other day, “I feel they will devour me. I feel they will use me up like a tube of toothpaste and never even notice.” She nodded, watching me cry in her living room, my baby crawling on her floor.

“They will,” she said.

Rufi Thorpe

I remember first reading the article. I was at Varuna, in the ‘Bear Room’. I was deep in a draft of the novel (before it was rejected by my publisher and I fell into despair until finding a new one - but that’s a story for another time) and I was looking for words that would tell me I was not mad to be away from home for three weeks writing a book primarily about the madness of motherhood, desperately glad to be alone with my words at the same time as feeling swallowed by the guilt and ‘missing-ness’ of being away from my kids.

If you are with your children, you are not writing. If you are writing, you are not with your children.

Rufi Thorpe

YES! I slammed my hands on the table. YES YES YES.

Rufi Thorpe isn’t the first to write on the paradox of the writer-mother and nor will she be the last (her article, which I urge you to read in full, includes a fabulous number of writers and their work on the matter). But her words hit me right in the bruise of it all at exactly the right moment and I have returned to them again and again. Looking at the dizzying success of Yoder’s Nightbitch, I reckon she’s hit that bruise in an extraordinary number of mothers. So, too, has Jessamine Chan, whose book The School for Good Mothers I recently devoured.

Maybe it’s the sly, wry humour in these two books that made me gobble them down so gleefully. In Nightbitch, a mother believes she is turning into a dog every night; in A School for Good Mothers, a child is removed from her mother after a ‘very bad day’ and the mother is sent to a reform school with other ‘bad mothers’ who must constantly repeat the phrase ‘I am a bad mother, but I am learning to be good.’ Both premises give space for the authors to play in speculative worlds - worlds where Nightbitch can relish shitting on the manicured lawn of a neighbour, or mothers are forced to complete SAS style tests where they must sit for hours paying attention to their ‘children’ while points are deducted every time they are distracted by their phone.

These books made me laugh as much as they made me rage, as much as they broke my heart. Maybe I’m looking for a chance to laugh in the face of the things that make me angry and sad and despondent these days.

I had two fabulous conversations in the past week that meandered through writing while mothering and vice-versa. One was with the absolute disco ball of a human - writer Claire Christian - who writes at Pearler and who has a divine (and funny and sexy) new book - West Side Honey - coming out in May. Check out Claire’s always inspiring instagram to get a heads up when our convo on best mates and writing and motherhood will be available for your ears. The other conversation was with writer Cate Kennedy for an upcoming episode of the new season of The First Time Podcast.

Over many hours in Cate’s beautiful home and around her town of Castlemaine, we talked books and writing and people-pleasing and growing older. We also talked about Cate’s experiences of miscarriage and motherhood. Cate has an interview in a book I treasure - Motherhood & Creativity: the divided heart - a collection of interviews with artist mothers edited by Rachel Power. In it, Cate says:

This is one of the major ways being a writer and being a parent correlate to me - they are both full of invisible work, which is unacknowledged and unappreciated, which is absorbed without recognition into the fabric of everything you’re trying to create at the same time.

Cate Kennedy

I’ve been asked to speak at a local IWD event next week. It’s truly lovely to be asked, but despite the fact that I’m not that phased by public speaking, I’m nervous about it. When I dig down into those feels, I realise that my neighbours and school mums and local business owners know me as a mum first. Sure, sometimes they see ‘writerly’ things on social media, but here, in my town, I’m much more likely to be recognised as the harried woman racing back to school camp drop off with the sleeping bag I forgot was on the packing list, or the grumpy mum saying no to icy-poles or the absent mum who couldn’t be at school assembly to see my kid get an award. The invitation (and the currently blank page of notes!) have me wrestling with the question of which self - writer or mother - I identify with first in this instance. I guess that’s the place to begin? (Side note: I’ve made it FAR more fun for me AND for the audience by inviting amazing local Zoe Birch, chef at the two-hatted Greasy Zoes and nominee for Good Food 2023 Chef of the Year to chat with me - win, win.)

It’s taken me a couple of days to draft this. It’s no longer dinner time but the golden half an hour before the kids get home from school and when I seem to be able to plough through my work most efficiently. As I always do (maybe many of us do?), I’m second-guessing myself at writing about motherhood (again) and whether I’ve got anything useful or interesting to add, and whether - the greatest fear! - my kids will one day read my accumulated words on the mother/writing life and wonder if it all just made me miserable and cross.

It hasn’t. It doesn’t.

And while I’m an absolute advocate of not having to footnote the things we say on motherhood with the phrase ‘obviously I love my kids’ or anything to that effect, I will leave you with the total joy of taking my newly twelve-year-old daughter to her first stadium gig to see Harry Styles on Saturday night.

It was the moment I didn’t capture in a picture or video that will stay with me the most; her face lit up in the lights, screaming the words to As it Was, surrounded by a sea of wonderful, adoring fans in sequins and feathers, leaning into my arm as we danced.

Mother. Writer. Both.

K x

Coming Up

I’ve gone ON today and you can check out latest recommendations on the first episode of S6 of the podcast, dropping next Monday 6th march so I’ll just leave you with some links to upcoming gigs which might be of interest.

• Speaking with Rachel Yoder on Friday March 3 at The Wheeler Centre for the fabulous M/OTHER festival. Check out the full program which runs Friday 3-Sunday 5.

• The program for Newcastle Writers Festival (March 31 - April 2) is out and excellent! I’ll be speaking with Brigid Delaney, Holly Ringland and Chris Flynn and getting to as many events as I possibly can!

• Had so much fun and great feedback running the online Talking the Talk workshops that I’ve popped a contact form up on my website to work out best time to run the next one. If you’re keen, let me know here.