What’s the best movie you’ve seen in the past year? For me, it wasn’t Slumdog Millionaire, which was riveting but shocked me with its gruesome child torture scenes. My husband and I went to Slumdog on a rare date night and for some reason were expecting a light comedy– we nearly walked out.

Instead, I cast my vote for Who Does She Think She Is, a documentary about women artists who are also mothers, their struggle for legitimacy, balance, connection, fulfillment. I saw this movie a month ago at the Brattleboro Women’s Film Festival with two other mothers. I laughed and cried as I saw my own efforts to combine motherhood and creativity played out on the big screen. Anyone who loves art (man or woman, parent or not) should find a way to see this movie.

I remember reading in a classic parenting book, Nursing Your Baby, that some women artists feel lactation draws from the same source as their creativity. They claim they don’t paint or write much (if at all) during the intense nursing period. Certainly during the years I was nursing round-the-clock, all my creative energy for poetry and writing was absorbed into my breastmilk and ingested by my nursling. I could barely write anything, not even a journal entry. At first I didn’t care. Both my babies grew plump and healthy, and I remember that powerful physical longing to hold them close and nurse them if I hadn’t seen them in two hours– a bodily hunger welling up, impossible to fight.

Now the urge to write comes out of that same deep well. For me it wasn’t feasible to mother an infant and write concurrently. “You CAN have it all, just not at the same time,” said some wise woman whom I will name later. Now another time has begun for me– it started this past January– and I feel the creative part of myself come alive again after lying dormant, hibernating in the Baby Cave, for nearly four years. I am grateful beyond belief that it did not suffocate, that perhaps it even grew on unspeakable new love and baby-warmth.

As Sylvia Plath said, I’ve been storing up material for writing like a bear storing up fat for the winter. Not that I’m likening my poetry to Plath’s brilliance. And hopefully not comparing my cyclical sadness to her own tragic dark side, either.

Tags:   Creativity · motherhood · movie · Sylvia Plath · Who Does She Think She Is · Writing2 Comments