10. On Writing With Children
Hi there, welcome to Follow Your Gut, a newsletter where I (Elin Petronella) write about the artist life and business from soon a decade long independent art career.
On writing with children
To write with children means to be interrupted in your thoughts constantly. To never get to finish a thought process or write an entire sentence before it’s back to zero.
Most of my writing happens in random chunks. If I’m lucky it can be put into a coherent text. If not, I’m left with unfinished thoughts and notes scribbled on papers across the house.
The last few weeks have been especially tuff for my writing. My youngest decided that early bedtime isn’t fun anymore and prefer to stir up a nightly dance party that last until every minute of potential evening writing is nothing but a forgotten dream.
It’s frustrating. To say the least.
Sometimes it feels hopeless. Like you’re in absolute surrender to the notion of time as you see the days fly by without crossing a single thing off the list.
As I’ve waved through these weeks of emotional turbulence from despair to gratefulness for being alive and able to spend my days with my children, I realised that this, THIS is the reason why the mother artist column never got written that first transformative year of entering motherhood.
Frustration as fuel for change
Considering my richness on sleep I never got I was in a constant haze of never quite knowing what to expect. And as I’m continuing to regain strength and energy to nurture my artist soul, finally seeing the light at the end of the sleepless nights, the submission to disturbed sleep hit me again.
It feels almost philosophical in some way. Remarkable in the sense of marking the end of a cycle and the start of a new one. That just when I was about to close the baby phase, while also writing about it as a way to process and hold space for others in the same seat, I get taken aback. Right to the beginning.
The frustration.
Frustration could be a good title for a motherhood book. Though, as the ever-loving optimist I am, I’d prefer to study research on how frustration can be turned into positive fuel for change.
I don’t mean change in the way of being less with my children. Because I simply don’t want that change regardless of the frustration. Instead, I mean change around the way we relate to it.
In my first book (and predecessor to this column) “When Will You Get A Real Job”, I talk about (among other things), the two boxes of impact. In other words, what are things that are within your realm of impact, and what are things outside of it?
The trick with being a mother-artist is that the lines of the boxes are blurred. Things that are most likely outside of the box, like how another person sleeps (?), still gets forced IN to a box.
It’s not our fault though. Society wants mothers to think that it’s our responsibility when and how our child sleeps. Just think of the enormous amount of sleep training and experts telling you all the things you do wrong when your child isn’t sleeping.
I’m not saying that we can’t support our child to hopefully sleep better. But ultimately it all has to come with a grain of salt because our child is not US. It’s a separate being with hormones and an emotional turmoil of its own that we cannot control.
If I had to pick one thing that has had the greatest impact on me (on a personal development level) from becoming a mother, it’s the notion that we cannot control as much as we think we can.
As of writing this, fours years into my motherhood journey, I’m reading a fascinating book about the science of storytelling by Will Storr, in which he reveals how our brains perceive the world in stories. And that in doing so it tries to take control of our reality by “understanding it”, or in other words, creating it through stories that we tell ourselves (and others).
We feel a sense of control when we understand something, whereas the opposite is true for the things we don’t understand.
Just think about it for a second.
It is so uncomfortable to not know something, to be a beginner, to just start something new (and potentially risk to fail) that most adults instead avoid it at all cost.
Life becomes an act of preservation of what is already here, or what “we know” as opposed to exploring and trying the things we don’t know yet.
It’s more comfortable to stay within the perceived security of what you already have (even if you hate it), compared to taking a risk (like turning a passion into a vocation).
You who’ve read a lot of my work know that I’m of the belief that trying and failing is better than not trying at all. That if you don’t try you’ve already failed. Or; that trying is a success in disguise (because you will become invaluable experiences richer no matter the outcome).
This is interesting actually, because I’m realizing the more the years pass and the more creatives I encounter both online and offline that to most; To not try (yet), means that they feel as though they haven’t failed and that they can continue to live in the made up fantasy that they will do it one day (whether that day comes or not is a completely different thing).
Now, let’s hypothetically say that someone does try and fail. Thankfully there are a long line of prewritten excuses for why that is. Prewritten stories that our mind understands and can communicate to both oneself and others for why the failure happened. The most famous story is that of “the starving artist”.
“You just can’t make good money with something you enjoy”.
So what does all this have to do with children? And being a mother artist?
Everything! Absolutely everything!
I feel as though the entire process of raising children is here to help us open our eyes to the way our perceived stories of the world and how it functions is narrated. That it’s NOT in our favor and that it’s our responsibility to change it so that it is.
Just imagine if frustration didn’t have the negative connotation it currently has.
That instead frustration was perceived as something positive, because we know it is the root of change. And change is inevitable for stories to evolve and develop into something better (which is great!).
What if, frustration teaches us, more than anything else, that we must LET GO of all the luggage we carry as to how things should be.
What if, frustration is meant to allow us to rest. That when we’re not able to keep up with the pace we think we have to keep, frustration is a gentle reminder on the shoulder that you DO NOT have to complete what you’re doing right now. Take a break. The world won’t end. In fact, your frustration will help you rewrite the story of what you need to do, when and how so that the world will become a friendlier place FOR YOU and the work you’re placed on earth to do.
It may sound silly, but this realization that frustration is my friend, not my enemy, has taken me a month to work out. And ironically, the last installment in the mother artist column talked about the art of letting go.
Sometimes (very often in fact) things don’t make sense until they do.
And we can’t know until we know, which is the most frustrating and uncomfortable bit. But once we do, it all gets crystal clear and we wouldn’t wish for things to have unfolded differently, because it wouldn’t have allowed us to be where we are today.
Thank you for reading!
Elin xx
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Oooh I so relate. Really needed this, Elin. I'm in the late bedtime zone as well and have been feeling so angry and frustrated until one such evening I burst out laughing at how angry I at the fact that a little person wants to stay up and see the moon and read. I laughed because apart from all the plans in my head of things I wanted to do there was absolutely nothing wrong with that evening, with that moment ..
Needless to say I've not written anything on my Substack for ages and have had to say no to clients. Hope to find more pockets of time for creative endeavours and thanks for writing and sharing this. such a fabulous and refreshing post