As published in The Victorian Writer, September 2022:
On writing and parenthood
The house where I write is warm. The room is filled with sunshine and quiet. There’s a percolator of coffee and a window overlooking an ocean, or perhaps snow-covered eucalypts.
It’s perfect because it only exists in my imagination.
My real house has trams rumbling past, a five-year-old pretending to be a dog, and a baby making a beeline for the most dangerous item in the room.
Most of my poems aren’t written in a house at all, or even on a computer. I draft on my phone while pushing the pram around the suburbs, sitting on the grass during my lunch-break, or collapsed in bed at the end of the day.
Parenthood is at odds with the stereotypes of writers: men with coffee-stained manuscripts arguing about literature late into the night; women at their desks with cats on their laps and pots of tea by their side.
Parenthood is also at odds with the reality of writing. Any art requires time and space, both in short supply for many parents of young children. Children cost money and there are few professions less financially profitable than poetry. Writing takes focus, and it’s hard to concentrate if you’ve been awake half the night patting a baby and singing “twinkle twinkle” for the ninety-seventh time.
An established writer recently asked on Twitter how other parents with multiple jobs and young kids find time to write. My heart buzzed with hope as I clicked to discover the secret. It came down to: parenting, writing, stable income, sleep – choose two, or three at most. The truth was validating and disheartening in equal parts.
In mainstream media we are bombarded with children. Cherubs and terrors on TV and in movies. Advertisements featuring mythical mothers who love cleaning. Politicians making claims about “working families”, causing people outside that category to, quite rightly, scoff in exasperation.
After becoming a parent, I sought out and devoured Australian memoir and novels about contemporary parenthood: The Motherhood edited by Jamila Rizvi, Into the Fire by Sonia Orchard, Echolalia by Briohny Doyle, Sad Mum Lady by Ashe Davenport. They spoke of the challenges of millennial parenting, and the ways in which parenthood can separate women from their friends, partners, or former selves. They were stories rarely told in the public sphere.
That is changing more rapidly in some parts of the literary world than others.
In 2020, poet and academic Sarah Holland-Batt wrote, “It is fair to say that any lingering prejudice against poetry about motherhood has now been dispelled.” Yet earlier this year I submitted a poem to an Australian journal which included three words from a child, and was advised to send something else, as children’s voices weren’t literary. Melbourne-based poet Emilie Collyer was also asked to avoid domiciliary matters, turning the request into the title of her recently-released poetry collection, Do you have anything less domestic?.
Anecdotally, women and gender-diverse writers seem more likely than their cisgender male counterparts to write about parenthood. Sometimes, I Google-stalk male poets in their 30s and 40s, discovering they have children mentioned rarely or not at all in their work, despite children being such a dominant part of most parents’ lives. Perhaps this is to protect privacy. Perhaps their partners do most of the parenting. Perhaps they spend so much time parenting that, given the chance to be alone, they want to write about anything but that. Perhaps their poetic passions lie elsewhere.
Perhaps they retain the antiquated idea that parenting is not worthy of literary attention, or disagree with the assumption but find it difficult to challenge, either within themselves or with editors.
That is changing too. Respected poet Toby Fitch brought fatherhood to the fore in his latest poetry collection. Aidan Coleman’s poem, “Barbarian Studies”, features the excellent quip, “The park is full of aggro dads. / I, poet, am one.”
The reality of day-to-day parenting can be excruciatingly dull, but within and beyond the mundane, there is much to say.
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