For our second Mothers Who Make blog, we hear from another participant from our monthly peer-to-peer support group for mothers who are also creatives, makers and artists. This time around, it’s Irish-born, Manchester-based writer Valerie O’Riordan who looks at negotiations and expectations and the ways in which having a support group of like-minded people can help you break through both…
I’m a fiction writer in my mid-thirties and a mother of two. I used to work in television – I moved from Dublin to Birmingham in 2004 to take up a post-production job at the BBC – but I quit in 2009 to study for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. I began sending my work out to competitions and, just as I was wrapping up the MA, I won the Bristol Short Story Prize, so I reckoned I was probably on the right track. The following year we had our daughter (she’s now five) and I started to worry about the next steps; when she was seventeen months old, I enrolled on a PhD in the same department. I submitted my dissertation earlier this year, a month before my second child, Tadhg, was born. My PhD manuscript was a collection of short stories, several of which have already been published, and I’ve just started work on a new book. I also co-run a book review website and edit an online literary magazine.
I heard about Mothers Who Make through a friend, an actor who’d been to one of the previous Manchester sessions. I thought it was an excellent idea for a movement because the relationship between artistic practices and motherhood seems, to me, to be a very fraught one, both in terms of practicalities (time, money) and in terms of how mothers, especially mothers who make, are positioned in (and often judged by) society. On one hand, there’s endless talk about ‘fitting it all in’, and though that’s a real issue, there’s an implication that one could as easily not ‘fit in’ the art at all; my husband, who’s a visual artist and a very active parent, is rarely asked how he ‘manages’ – his art is seen as non-negotiable in a way that’s harder to establish for creative mothers, who are still supposed, by society, to prioritize home-life above everything else. The flipside is that the actual baby is sometimes mooted (generally unintentionally, I think, but still) as a hindrance – the pram in the bloody hall – as if parenthood must be detrimental per se to one’s creative life. This doesn’t ring at all true to me: in fact, raising children feels like an invaluable asset to me as a writer because it’s made me hyper-aware of how I negotiate the world, how we as humans learn to think and behave and become moral agents. I’ve become more political since having children, because I’ve had to think in very real terms about how political systems will affect the future world; because I’ve had to explain social injustices to small children; because I’ve had to analyze how and why I relate to other people and to the world around me. And all this feeds into my writing – what I write about, how I write about, why I write about it. And I’ve also had to think about how I want my children to see me as a woman in the world – deliberate, engaged, fulfilled, ambitious. My children aren’t a chore or a day-job that I have to sweep side to get the real work done; they’re part of me and they make my world a richer place – even if I’ve now got fewer hours in the day in which to write.
And so, the idea of finding a peer network of people who were trying to negotiate the same territory was very exciting. The Mothers Who Make sessions have been truly inspiring: having these conversations about expectations and assumptions and problems, and hearing about other people’s practices and ambitions and coping mechanisms, has been an overwhelmingly positive and galvanizing experience. Writing, as a career, can be quite solitary, so the opportunity to build a network of like-minded people, even if we’re working in different fields, is stimulating – we’re all facing broadly the same challenges, and it’s fascinating to get to know how we’re each doing it.
Head here to read our first Mothers Who Make blog about understanding your own creativity.
Want to know more about Mothers Who Make? Our next session is on Mon 16 Jan 2017.
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