Human bodies can create new life, and yet, after giving birth, I don't view myself as the creator of that new life, that new being, that new human. I rather view my body as the channel through which that new life chose to come into the world.
I believe that the soul of the child chooses the parent, or we choose each other, because there is something we are supposed to teach each other in playing these roles for each other in this life. I know it may sound provocative, particularly if you have a rough relationship with your own parent/child... And you don't have to agree with me. I don’t know if I wholly agree myself. Let’s say that I'm writing the thoughts out in order to test them, to process them, to view them in written form. And now I am testing the thought that this child is not mine. I don't own them any more than I own any person, not a friend or partner. But since I did make an intentional decision to become a parent, and be the channel through which they arrived here, I have agreed to take responsibility over raising them to the best of my ability.
One thing that I have noticed in becoming a parent is that it annoys me when someone tells me that my child is my greatest creation, or rather, expects me to view them as a creation at all. So, in this piece of writing, I will try to unpack this reaction and ask myself: why does it annoy me when my child is being described as my creation? The resulting contemplations are going a bit all over the place, and I can’t seem to tame them. May this piece of writing function as a testament to the complexity and conflicting emotions and thoughts that arise in me as I try to tackle this question, and my conflicting feelings concerning parenthood overall. As always, feel free to comment and share your own experiences and views on the subject. Maybe we can untangle this question together, or complicate it even more.
Partly, I belive that my reaction arises out of a history of inequality. By being told that the only "creations" they should care about are the new humans that come through their bodies, women have been kept from creating things based on their skills, intellect, mind, hands, craftiness or overall creativity. But a woman's body includes the brain, the mind, the hands, the heart, and more, in addition to the womb. If I am to be respected, I want to be respected for all of those things, and how I choose to use them, not just from the natural workings of my body and my womb.
Then again, as I write this, I feel like I stand at the risk of going too far in the other direction. I notice a tendency in myself to focus overly much on my mind and my intellectual capabilities, and sometimes wonder whether I associate my self-worth mostly with my mind, instead of all my faculties and my body and soul as a whole. It's as if there's a battle raging within me still. No matter how much I instinctively resonate with the notion that I am a whole, consisting of all different kinds of faculties that all have their place in the whole (thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting, body, mind, heart, soul) I still feel drawn to the mind’s piercing, discerning qualities, to the detriment of other functions. Perhaps this is not that strange, considering my context: growing up in an academic household, within a culture that rests on a foundation of rationalism, where mind has been valued higher than matter, and intellect raised above feeling.
So, I can’t help wondering whether I am not actually devaluing my body when I want to be respected for the workings of my mind instead, or even my creative talents? Am I looking down upon the miraculous power of my womb, if I instead want to focus on the creations that I can plan with my mind or craft with my hands? And in my tendency to want to gain respect for my creative pursuits, instead of from raising a child, am I devaluing my role as a parent, and the importance that this undertaking does have on life - both my child’s life, and my own, and society overall? What if, by placing the emphasis on the pursuits of my mind or my aesthetical senses or my craftiness, I am actually only furthering the notion that a mother (or any parent) better get back to work, and get back to doing things that “really” matter, whether that is in the form of doing manual labor, working for a company or institution or even creating art, and that the care of the child should be done a bit on the side, as an afterthought. The last thing I want to do is to devalue the magnificence that giving birth also is, and the significant undertaking, and meaningful experience that parenting also is.
In considering these matters, and trying to express my feelings about them, I feel like I am teetering on the edge of an extremely narrow knife. Or attempting to walk on a tightrope between two skyscrapers, risking to fall down if I go too far in either direction. I don’t want to devalue parenthood, and my intention is not to criticize anyone who resonates with this being their main identity. I am just trying to unpack my own experience and process my own contradicting emotions when it comes to this balancing act of being a parent, a creative person and just a human being. So, in writing this, I am trying to walk out on this tightrope and somehow keep my balance, even as I sway this way and that.
Let me be honest: I am a person who gets a deep sense of satisfaction from working in a professional capacity of some kind. I love being able to use my talents, whether in the form of contemplating, organizing, teaching, or creating various creations such as music, visuals or pieces of writing. And more than loving to do it, I have a deep need to do it. If I go through periods of time where I can’t create, I become anxious, frustrated or even depressed. And this happened at the end of my parental leave period. Again, I feel myself teetering on the knife’s edge as I am writing this. It feels wrong to admit that parental leave was a difficult time for me, particularly as I am lucky enough to be living in a country where I was able to get one and a half years of support for focusing on taking care of my child, during their very first years on this earth. I wish everyone could be granted that kind of support, wherever they are. And yet, if I am completely honest, by the end of my one and a half years of parental leave, I was starting to feel like I was going crazy. I arrived at that point while still somehow managing to squeeze in the undertaking of planning and executing my first solo art exhibition, when my child was still only one years old. I worked when my child was napping. I stole time from my evenings and nights. It was way too much work and way too little sleep to add on top of being on full-time parental leave and having only recently gone through the tremendous shift that becoming a parent entails.
Looking back, I wonder whether I was a bit crazy for doing that exhibition. But I also know that I would have gone crazy in another way, had I not done it. Because I desperately needed to have something else, just something to keep me anchored in my creative practice, to balance out the mother-identity, and keep it from completely taking me over. At least, that’s how it felt at the time.
Strangely enough, when becoming a parent, I felt a completely new sense of passion ignited in me, for other things in addition to my child, and particularly for my creative expressions. I have always loved creating things, but before motherhood I did it with a kind of nonchalance, somewhat passively, a bit here and there but without a clear direction. Something shifted after giving birth. It was like a flame lighting up inside of me. I was awakened from my slightly distanced, objective stance into a more intimately connected one, into a deep and all-encompassing caring. I think it started with the child that I now had to care for. The all-encompassing caring I felt for that child also magnetized other areas of my life. Basically: now things truly mattered. Now there was something at stake. And when I had less time to create, the need to do so gained a burning quality, it was simply imperative. This burning need was met with the severe restrictions that caring for a newborn does impose on a life. Yet it was exactly the existence of that newborn that had somehow played a role in igniting this burning creative fire in the first place.
Still, I felt that it was a cosmic joke of some kind: I had taken the intentional decision to become a parent, and I had intended on giving full attention to that child over my parental-leave period, but with the entrance of that child into my life, I found that my creativity was lit up to such an extent that I simply had to find some channel for it. And at that moment, my channel was in the form of finally planning and executing an exhibition consisting of artworks that had gathered up over the years, that I had managed to create, even in my more nonchalant, slow-going way of creating. Somehow, when I became a mother, I had the drive to direct my energy in such a way that the exhibition could finally take place. Maybe I could have waited a year or two. Maybe I could have found another, less stressful channel for my creative energy. But at that moment, and in that slightly frenetic, postpartum-colored state that I was in, that was how it turned out.
I hope that other mothers (or parents overall) have managed to balance out their different idenitites and needs in a more healthy way than I did. In the end I realized that my expectations of myself both as a mother and a creative were extremely hard to live up to, particularly in this new life situation. The contradictions between my need to create and the restrictions of actually being able to do so caused a great tension between the roles of being a mother and a creative. A big reason for why I felt so frustrated and suffocated by my mother-identity was also that I started out my parental leave period with the approach that I would have to sacrifice everything else for the benefit of my child. My mind had somehow created a mental model for motherhood totally based on self-sacrifice: Only if I were sacrificing everything of my own was I a good mother. At the same time, I had also internalized an external requirement of productivity, which was highligted even more as I was unable to be “productive”, because I now had a child to take care of. So, even as I was only getting used to this new role, I was pressuring myself to prove that I could still be “more than just a mother” and wouldn’t lose sight of my other goals even while I was caring for a child. I cringe as I write this. But in addition to unreachable ideals of the self-sacrificing mother, my entrance into motherhood came with a lot of internalized fears connected to the narratives and ideals of my work-centric culture.
As a result of these contradicting ideals and pressures, I chose to start planning my exhibition even while I was still on parental leave. I simply had to release the pressure somehow: both the pressure I felt concerning being productive, and the pressure concerning the ideal of being a self-sacrificing mother. On top of that being too much pressure for me, that is also way too much pressure to put on a child. So in the end, while stressful, the exhibition did help me in navigating the balancing act of caring for my child and allowing myself to stay in touch with my artistic practice. Creating that additional outlet for my creative energy to flow out released some of the pressure that was put on the relationship between me and my child. The advice that I felt being blasted at me from the outside was that I should simply put all other things on hold, and only focus on my child. And in a way, I wish I could have done that. It would have been easier. But I feel like that was simply not possible in my case. I think it would have been harmful to the both of us if I had not allowed myself to find a way to divide my energy between nurturing my child and myself. And in my case, the nurturing of myself includes the nurturing of my creative practice.
So how does this all tie back to the initial issue? Well, if I don't view the child as my creation, but as their own being, it leaves space to reimagine what our parent-child relationship can look like, and how our roles are manifested in practice. Maybe it doesn’t need to be so hard to live up to as I first imagined? Maybe there could actually be more space for me as a creative, and not only as a self-sacrificing mother? Sure, we have different roles to play. I still have to make sure their basic needs are met when they can’t do it themselves. But in fundamentally viewing the child as their own, autonomous being, I can reduce the pressure I put on myself as being a totally self-sacrificing mother, that has to continuously cater to the childs every need. It is easier to leave a child at a caregiver/ day care if you see it as an opportunity for this autonomous being to learn something more than what would be possible at home. If you instead consider the child to be so tied to you that no one else could possibly take care of them, it is very hard to take any time for yourself, even when you despreately need it. That was what I did in the beginning. I felt like I had to be with the child all times, otherwise I was a bad mother. Now I can see that that attitude is partly derived from the fact that I did have quite a severe case of postpartum anxiety after my child was born. But because I was still seemingly functioning and didn’t fall into the deepest reaches of a depression, neither me or my close ones were aware of this fact.
My attitude of having to be constantly tied to the child was also derived from the strict type of attachment-parenting that the medical proffessionals presented us with, as the only right way to raise a child. While it is a beautiful notion that the child and parent should be attached at all times for the first few years, it simply does not work for all parents, at least not to the extent that we were presented with. Let’s be honest about this. If you’re a person who is introverted and sensitive to stimuli, you’re still gonna need time to unwind and charge your batteries alone. I know I do. And in the long run, it’s better for the child to have a moment away from the mother so that she can recharge, rather than being tied to a frustrated, exhausted mother who is staying there only because if she doesn’t, she’s afraid that some medical professional is going to wave their finger at her for failing to do attachment-parenting. Good enough is good enough. And every family has their own particular type of good enough that will look different from another parent’s and family’s good enough. And that’s fine.
… Ok, so that went into a bit of a rant against attachment-parenting. I feel a need to add that I am not against the approach of attachment-parenting per se. I’m only critical against the way that these approaches are often used as a way to judge and place overly strict requirements on parents, instead of using them as guiding posts, where there is room for variation, depending on that particular family’s situation and needs. We are all different, and while there is a value in advice and guiding posts for parenting, in the end everyone needs to find a way that works for them.
Now, let’s get back to my initial starting point for this piece of writing: questioning that the child is my creation, and instead introducing the notion that the child is their own. Here I would like to present a quote from one of my favorite books, The Prophet1 by Kahlil Gibran. This poem, On Children, is what I have found most closely resembling my own view on parenting.
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said,
Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
I first read these words as a 15-year old, when my grandfather gave me this book. As I read these words again now, in the role of being a parent myself, they gain a new weight. I can see from an additional perspective now: No longer only the arrow, flying through space, but also in the role of the bow, that wants to watch the arrow of my child fly free, wherever they need to go.
But in addition to being a bow or channel for my child to come through into this world, I have started to develop this sense connected to my other creative pursuits as well. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure any creations are truly mine. I resonate more with the view that I am a channel through which they have chosen to take shape. This feels very natural, and yet, even channeling things into the world is work. I have stepped up to do that work, so it still holds a connection to me, through that activity. And the things that are brought forth (visuals, writings, songs) have a life of their own, but they feel much easier to view as things I created, as they have more of an object-quality, than the thinking feeling being of another human being, a child. At least through my human lens it is easier to view it this way. My child is not my creation. My artwork is. But it is also not. I have attached my name to this piece of writing, but in the moment when I share it, it will get a life of its own and be transformed into all the ways that it is perceived by others and what they will do with it.
I am still carrying the fire inside of me that was ignited in giving birth, but now, after two years of being a mother, the fire has developed into a steady, patient glow. I still get impatient, though. My ideas still keep flying higher and farther than what I can capture or put into practice. My written notes on ideas get longer and longer while the works I actually manage to publish are fewer and farther inbetween. I do get frustrated by the restrictions that exist around my creative pursuits. But I also know that these restrictions have their own value: creativity needs tension. It is nurtured by it. At least that has been my experience. And I also know that this huge shift in my existence (into motherhood) is something that has brought a new, deep source of inspiration into my life, which will, and already is, flowing out into my creative work. For example, now I have these new experiences and these vantage points to look through, that this whole piece of writing is based around. And now I have this intimate connection to life, through my opportunity to perceive it unfolding from the very beginning, in a new being.
While writing this, I can feel that I have a deep need to express my feelings about motherhood. It feels like I can access previously hidden perspectives when I write, and by the end of this piece of writing I am in a different place than I was when I started out. I feel that I have been transformed by my own writing. Writing is magical, in this way. At the same time, when I am writing about parenthood in particular, there is a voice at the back of my mind that is telling me that I stand at the risk of alienating people who have not gone through this experience, or who have chosen not to have that as a part of their own life path. While this is not my intention, I accept if this happens. My need to process my experience is too great to be silenced. But I also want to add that I do hope that readers of this know that I don’t think that anyone’s path has to resemble mine. I think that the creative flame can be ignited by other events in life, not only parenthood. Life is so strange and variable and can flow in so many ways. Furthermore, I’m not sure if all cases of creativity even need to be coming from such a powerful burst of energy. There is value in the variation of different types of creativity. Even my earlier stages of “passive, nonchalant creativity” were not worse in any way. It was just different. Different approaches aree needed for different aspects to be explored and expressed in different ways. And different ways of living a life will bring different findings. All are equally valuable.
What I most appreaciate about the tensions that now exist in my life is that I am growing into a new kind of a patience. Sometimes, when I get impatient or frustrated, it helps to remind myself that I am taking part in a maraton, not a sprint. And the maraton that I am taking part in is vaster than just my creative pursuits. It is a maraton of life, with all its different sides. Or maybe it should be simply called a journey, to sidestep the competitive aspect that the metaphor of a maraton brings. Life is an adventure, where the whole is larger than its parts. And creativity connects to it all, because, what is life, if not creative? Whether we believe that we are the creators or channellers, the creation exists.
I remind myself that I am now both the arrow
and the bow.
And in my bow I am holding a new little arrow.
My child still needs me to hold them. But the day will come when I have to let go.
And they will fly off into the air.
This image fills me with both sadness and longing.
Until then, my creativity takes the form of a slow, patient background glow. And it takes new forms, that stem from both my mind, my heart and my life. Inspired by, and connected to, the new life that now accompanies me.
What is creativity anyway? Is it only the artwork so formally recognized or the piece of writing published? Or could creativity be expressed in all the vehicles and animals that I draw, under the instruction of a two-year old art director, who hands me the crayon of their choice, while promptly directing my work, clearly and concisely stating their requirement: “piirrä auto!” (“draw car!”). Could creativity be in the way that I keep singing the lullabies, softer and gentler (and sometimes impatiently, after the 10th time), until my child feels safe to sleep? Or could I even view creativity in the way that I mix in the berries into my child’s porridge, so that they just happen to eat all the oatflakes as well?
My view on creativity has expanded greatly after becoming a mother. In addition to my own actions, I have learned a lot from watching my child. In the way that they will swiftly construct a lego tower, only to destroy it just as swiftly, I am reminded about the connection between creation and destruction. How destruction is needed for something new to be built. And that both can be equally enjoyable. And in the look of awe and joy on their face as the car appears onto the page with just a few lines of the crayon, I am reminded about how creating is essentially a magical act. In creating, it is as if something is appearing out of nothing. Where there was previously only an empty page, there is now a car, or a tree, or an animal. And my child’s face is lit up in joy.
Where have we arrived at, coming through the initial jungle of tensions and contradicting emotions? I feel like we have landed in a calmer space, where we can rest for a while.
I hope that this piece of writing has given some food for thought, or something to compare your own thoughts and emotions to. As always, whether you disagree or not, feel free to write a comment. I'm curious to hear more perspectives on this matter.
Carry on, create
and then
Let go.
P.S. I have now opened this Substack for paid subscriptions, simply to allow for anyone who feels called to support my creative work to have a simple way of doing so. As a paid subscriber you get access to audio voiceovers of me reading my writing out loud, and sometimes these voiceovers include a few additional comments.
If you are a free subscriber, rest assured that my writings will still remain free, and you can even access the archive. Sometimes the Substack platform might send out a default message that says that only paid subscribers can access the archive, but please know that this is not true for my publication. There might also be a marking next to the title that says “paid”, but this is only for the audio voiceover. The text still remains accessible for everyone.
Please know that I truly appreciate all types of support, whether sharing or commenting or just sending me some caring energy. In a way, my main reason for enabling the paid option is part of my own journey with my creativity. At this time, I need to show myself that I plan to nurture my creative work, and to allow others to nurture it too, by opening up to receive support in any way it wants to come.
Sincerely,
Minnamari
Kahlil Gibran (1923) The Prophet. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, but now also available in the public domain, for example on gutenberg.org: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/58585/58585-h/58585-h.htm
The images are digital collages consisting of photographs taken during my first years of motherhood and drawings created in collaboration with my child.