Because I would dearly love as many people to feed back and tell me their thoughts and ideas around interruption and gaps (see end of post), I have lifted the pay-wall for this article. I’d be delighted if you’d like to comment, or share with someone you know.
For the longest time caregiving and creating felt like chalk and cheese. Like oil and water. They were not friends.
I felt split.
I wanted to lose myself entirely in my children
and yet
I wanted to be alone to think and write and create.
All I wanted to do was to mother.
and yet
I felt like I would suffocate if this was all I did.
These two desires – to caretake and to create – tore me in opposite directions. It seemed almost impossible for both to co-exist. Olga Ravn’s narrator in The Work explains:
This old, entrenched idea that everything must be sacrificed at the altar of art prevents a mother from writing, since she does not wish to sacrifice her children1.
For many years I could not see beyond this. I couldn’t see how the two could meet or meld. I did not have a reference for a more layered, slippery, cross-hatch way of being. To think and write and create I needed autonomy, separation, possibly a room. What I had after birth was a baby who did not want to be put down, who needed to be in my arms and nowhere else. I had become porous, less defined, looser around the edges. Which did not fit with my idea of one who could make art.
Below is what I wrote after I got home from hospital with my third baby, frustrated that I could not even manage to write a LIST of what I wanted and needed to do.
Even my lists will not hold. They will not be contained. My to-dos and my have-dones have become less ordered lines on a page and more Imagine Ifs that float around like dandelion clocks, some of which, sometimes, will come in to land. I begin something and then am pulled away. I say I’ll get back to it tomorrow, and then the next day and the next. I circle.
Time moves in eddies and spurts.
My list lies half-written on the kitchen counter, felt tip pen uncapped, drying out in the air. I circle. Everything abandoned mid-way. All paused like inhabitants of Pompeii. My words are ashen ghosts.
A genius is commonly viewed as someone, usually a man, who prioritises his art and creation above all else – who is willing and able to eliminate and purge all potential for interruption and from this pure space (s)he can create a cohesive body of work. As Jenny Offill writes in Dept. of Speculation:
My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamped for him.2
As caregivers this ‘sealing off’, this becoming a one-eyed monster, is not often an option. There are rarely great swathes of earmarked time, and even time that is set aside will always have within it the possibility or potential for interruption – either before it has begun (sick child, clingy child, sleepless night before) or during (scraped knee, hungry child, child with questions or in need of a hug). Even the act of thinking is often fractured, ideas and thoughts flow through interstitial spaces, small gaps and lulls when everyone is playing quietly, as you push a swing, as you stir a pot.
Recently I have been thinking a great deal about what the demands of caregiving do to thought. What does interruption and the constant threat and potential for it do to both the content and the form of a work? Is there something of value in this interruption and in these liminal gaps and chasms and fissures that emerge?
The witching-hour wakes,
the gloaming feeds,
the glazed, sleepy stare.
I fought against these hazy gaps and constant interruptions for so long. I ignored them, filled them, scrolled through them. I needed and wanted everything to cohere, I didn’t want it to be fractured. I wanted great swathes of time. Undisturbed chunks of it. I was, I see now, missing a trick.
Louise Erdrich comments:
‘One day as I am holding baby and feeding her, I realize that this is exactly the state of mind and heart that so many male writers from Thomas Mann to James Joyce describe with yearning – the mystery of an epiphany, the sense of oceanic oneness, the great yes, the wholeness. There is also the sense of a self merged and at least temporarily erased – it is deathlike… Perhaps we owe some of our most moving literature to men who didn’t understand that they wanted to be women nursing babies.’3
Is there value in knowing intimately that there is truth and weight in more than one thing, worth in two things that seem, on the surface, to be opposed?
Is there something to be gained by thought being interrupted, fractured, challenged by life that explodes around us?
What can be learnt from stirring a pot, and answering a question and thinking of how to describe the light on the leaf outside the window, all at once?
What gifts are there in experiencing time as a circular, overlapping, tiered construct ?
Honestly, dear readers, these words feel like the beginning of my thoughts. The ideas feel valuable, but also very nebulous and hard to grasp.
I would love to ask for your help.
Below I have written a List of Interruptions and a List of Gaps. Words, images, ideas that I have been jotting down.
I would love for you to add to them.
Words. Poems. Books. Songs. Films. Images. Smells. Sounds.
What does interruption mean to you ?
What do you think of when you think of gaps and between-spaces ?
Nothing is too obvious, too obscure, too unexplainable, too strange. I would LOVE LOVE LOVE for you to share - either in the comments below or in reply to this email…
Interruptions
of a sentence
of a breath
of a life
of a path
of a meal
of a thought
by questions
by needs
by cries in the night
by games
by stories, inventions, desires & their dreams
by hugs
by Instagram’s lure
by jobs to be done
by lists to be made
by guilt
by worry
by it being too much
by it not being enough
by work
by envy
by insecurity
by regret
by the heat
by the cold
by the rain
by the wind
by fire
by flood
by bad reception
by lack of connection
by panic
overwhelm
by love, hiccups, traffic jams
thoughts & bombs.
Gaps
in teeth
in hedgerows
in conversation
between your legs
between breaths
between bones
between cells
between the vertebrae of your spine
the door ajar
a draft
the light beneath
portholes
wormholes
blackholes
staring
pausing
forgetting
chinks
splinters
sparks
splashes
glimmers
half-light
dämmerung
gloaming
zwischenzeit
forenicht
twilight
margin of a page
edgelands
interstices
hypens
voids
abyss
lacuna
valley
cavity
gulf
What can you add?
Layla x
Ravn, Olga, The Work, p 323
Offill, Jenny, Dept. of Speculation
As quoted in Phillips, Julie, The Baby on the Fire Escape, p. 117
I have been considering too....these days....our construct of time and how I yearn (and have yearned seemingly forever) for a deeper, richer, slower, weightier feeling of time, like bathing in the richness of it. And that - like creating a project, or imagining writing something, or working on a book - it is more about it being steeped in this richness and slowness, allowing something to evolve in the fullest way possible (even if to our modern minds this approach seems so incredibly messy and often slow). I also am not quite sure what I am getting at - but it feels very connected to what you have written today. And I appreciate this post, and your ideas, very much. We are so trained and accustomed to orderly, linear time and to deadlines and neat, easy-to-explain plans but the end results of this approach feel surfacey and superficial or just that the tendrils have not been allowed to stretch deep deep down to really excavate the crystals of what we truly want to say or truly want to experience.
Maybe the gaps and the interruptions are life's way of disrupting the orderly lines which our surfacey, easy, immature selves desire.....
Ah, I love this post, this feeing you’ve captured that there’s surely a Japanese word for. Maybe we need the gaps, they hold the necessary tension for the full human experience, or maybe our creative babies, the books we want to write, the pictures we want to paint, don’t cry loudly enough for our attention so that we can ignore the housework, the cooking, the admin of family life in order to give them the share of attention they need to thrive. At 51 with a youngish son I have a new sense of time feeling finite, which it never did before but that has arrived with a feeling like the sky is also somehow clearer, does that make any sense at all?