On writing with babies.

One of the questions I'm most often asked is how I managed to write a novel while bringing up young babies. This is the story.

I started writing The Night Flower when I was thirty-four weeks’ pregnant with my first child. My editor finally signed off the version now published when my second child was twelve weeks old. The two-and-a-half years that fell between these dates were the most productive of my life so far, which flies in the face of Virginia Woolf's famous declaration that, ‘The most prominent barrier to creativity is the pram in the hallway.’ 

            As far as I can see, there has always been a belief in the power of babies to destroy the ability to think. When I announced my pregnancy to colleagues, one of them could barely look me in the eye as she said, 'You'll lose the ability to concentrate at around twenty weeks. It can take seven years to get it back.' Later, in the weeks before I gave birth, it was normal for people - mostly women - to look at my bump and say brightly, ‘No more writing for a few years, then?’ I would tell them that I'd just started a new novel and that I would be moving to Northumberland to start a PhD when the baby was seven months old, and they all laughed the smug laughter of the initiated. These were the wise women, the ones who knew from experience that the moment I pushed a baby out of one passage, I would simultaneously expel from the other one, not a giant shit as many of us fear, but my brain. 

 

Whenever I spoke of my plans to keep writing after giving birth, I was met with the same response: this ambition to write a novel while bringing up a baby was folly. There would be no time, no silence, no space in which to think. Or if I did somehow find these things, they would be wasted because, having become a mother, I would no longer possess the ability to string two words together.

No one seemed to be fighting this ‘truth’ that a mother of young children somehow became incoherent. They were simply accepting it as the way things were, or even, perhaps, the way things ought to be. Having become a mother, I would have achieved the ultimate feminine goal and no longer possess any need to string sentences together or communicate imaginatively with the wider world. Motherhood would direct all my energy where it needed to be: in sacrificial, feminine devotion to someone else. Motherhood would silence me.  

This, unsurprisingly, is the approach of the Daily Mail, which reported in 2009 that, 'Baby brain is real and makes you a better mother.' The reason behind the forgetfulness and inability to communicate anything more profound than that you've been feeling slightly shit all day is that, 'Women's brains change during pregnancy with the result that they are better able to concentrate on their baby and are less focussed on other things, such as where the car keys might be.' (It is interesting to me that the Mail uses the image of the car key - symbol of freedom, independence and escape - as being something that a woman no longer needs once she has children.)

In February 2010, my daughter Bonnie was born. I did lay aside my writing and concentrate only on her. I fed, I changed, I stayed awake, I stayed at home, I fed, I stayed awake, I fed and fed and fed and stayed awake. I also acquired a whole new language. Every day, words and phrases I’d never heard before entered my vocabulary: foremilk, hindmilk, calpol, attachment parenting, baby-wearing, co-sleeping, Gina Ford, controlled crying. At the same time, childless friends would talk to me in a language that no longer made any sense. ‘I’ve just spent three days in bed with a cold,’ they would say, and I would stare at them blankly, not having a clue what this meant.

After six months of this, almost entirely without sleep, I had become a stranger to myself. I was the happiest I'd ever been, but I had trouble recognising this woman who, instead of writing novels, now spent large chunks of time walking in circles round dusty church halls with other women who once were normal singing, ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush.’ I recalled those questions I used to be asked at job interviews or in online questionnaires. ‘Where do you see yourself in two years’, five years’, ten years’ time?’ Never once did I say, ‘Standing over a worktop, squeezing my breastmilk into a bowl of carrot puree.’ And yet here I was. A low point in my identity.

 

            I decided that motherhood must have limits. I needed to get back to writing before there was nothing left of the person I used to be. Of course, there are people who disagree with this. Of course, there is a wealth of scientific research which proves that it is preferable for an insanely sleep-deprived mother to bundle her baby into a car and drive off a cliff than it is for her to leave the baby with someone who isn't her for three hours twice a week. Nevertheless, three hours twice a week is what I decided to do. I sent Bonnie to a brilliant childminder and told the researchers - and, I might add, some other mothers - to go fuck themselves.

            So I wrote. I was fierce in my discipline. I started the minute Bonnie left the house and I didn’t stop until five minutes before she came home. I wrote fast. I wrote as if my life depended on it and after a year, there was a novel in my hands. It needed some rewriting, so I rewrote it. In October 2011, the book went out to publishers. There was some rejection. In January 2012, it was accepted for publication and I was six weeks’ pregnant. 

            My editor and I were still battling with the manuscript when I gave birth the following August. I sent him text messages from my hospital bed. ‘Historical inaccuracy half-way down page 263. In hospital. Baby boy. Sam. 6lbs 12oz. Might miss deadline.’

            By the skin of my teeth, I didn’t miss the deadline. For Sam’s first six weeks, I used the night feeds as time to get the editing done. I would sit up in bed every two hours, with a baby on one arm and a laptop on the other, correcting typos. It wasn’t a way of life I’d recommend, but it got the job done.

           And now, finally, the book is in print. Bonnie is three and a half and about to start school. We celebrated Sam’s first birthday three weeks ago and I’ve just been awarded a grant from the Arts Council to write another novel. There is still a pram in the hallway, though it is changing form all the time - it's currently a pushchair with a buggy board and before long it will be replaced by scooters and roller blades, and one day I suppose it will be high-heeled shoes and overpriced trainers, until eventually there will be nothing in the hall at all, and it is that, I suspect, which might be the greatest enemy of all.