Mothering Is Not the Enemy of Creative Work
Aaron Gilbreath Many American women struggle about whether they can be both mothers and professionals, especially women with little social and financial support. Female artists know this problem too well. Is it possible to write and to parent? Do you sacrifice your painting career and creative energy to raise children? Yes, our culture says, you do. But at The Atlantic, journalist Erika Hayasaki argues that this is an oversimplification.
Hayasaki, a mother of three, understands the complex truth from experience. Before giving birth to twins, she took her first kid on reporting trips, to book readings and to the classes she teaches. Her writing life thrived. After adding twins to the mix, juggling became more complicated, but as a creative thinker, Hayasaki sees opportunities and advantages in her new paradigm.
To get insight into the relationship between motherhood and the creative life, Hayasaki looks at neuroscience, psychology, and the life of female rats. Tension will always exist between the need to do create and the need to mother. And yes, mothering takes huge amounts of time, Hayasaki argues, but it also involves many of the same elements as creativity: grit, flexibility, resourcefulness, innovation, and novel thinking.
When Abraham became a mom (her son is now 8) she realized she had to change her habits and daily patterns. She knows that fostering creativity often involves changing how you look at the world. “Being a mother gives you a different perspective,” she said. “You’re dealing with a wholly novel situation. You’re discovering a side of yourself that is completely new. All of this could be useful to creativity—which is about novelty.”
In 1953, the psychologist Morris Stein defined human creativity as the production of something original and useful. Rex Jung, a neuropsychologist at the University of New Mexico who studies creativity and the brain, takes that definition a few steps further. For an idea to be creative, it must also be surprising, he says.
Creativity requires making unusual connections. At its core, Jung said, creativity is original problem solving. This is an evolutionarily derived process that is important to survival. Humans who achieve high creativity usually have endurance and grit, Jung said. Creative people take risks, Jung said. They are bold, and adept at finding new and unusual ways to get tasks done.
“In this period of extreme pressure, when mothers are going through massive changes in their bodies, diets, and hormones,” Jung hypothesized, “that is when creativity should emerge as a highly adaptive reasoning process.”
