We had some friends over for a dinner party last night; ten adults, two
small children. Gnocchi and meatballs in tomato sauce, a green salad,
Hemingway’s favorite dessert. Not enough chairs. The kids, after warming up
(at different speeds) ran amok, investigating surfaces, climbing on furniture,
one parent always hot on their heels. During dessert, the mothers broke away
to join their kids in the living room to read and play with toys. Both mothers are artists, one a painter and the other an animator.
Casually, I expressed admiration in their abilities to parent and produce art work.
“I’m not going to lie,” our friend said. “It’s not easy.” Her gaze drifted over
to her daughter who sat by her side, flipping through a picture book. “It’s not
impossible," she said, "but it’s not easy.” I was silent but I wish I that I knew her better to ask what she
meant, what the calculus looked like, what a great instance of time management
felt like, what kinds of frustrations she experiences trying to make time work
in her favor. Not being very close friends, I had hesitated to ask. Balancing babies with personal ambitions seems obviously challenging
but it’s the kind of challenge personal, and in which the solution is not obvious at all. The moment passed, the kids were off! and conversation at the dinner table drew our attention away.
I just finished reading Kate Atkinson’s 1995 book, Behind
the Scenes at the Museum. The book follows the matriarchal line of a family over four generations; charting each individual's struggle to marry family life with individual ambition. The book is mostly
narrated by a preternaturally insightful child, Ruby Lennox, who gleans the
existence of a family secret just well enough to give the reader the sense that Ruby is
woefully unaware of some terrible fact about her life. (It’s not until the end
of the book that Ruby – now a volatile teenager – and the reader uncover the secret.) Atkinson writes in a trippingly
blithe narrative voice, even when the unfolding story is the dark stuff of
betrayals, death, disappointments in marriage, in children, and resulting
brittleness in middle age. Shot through various stories of domestic discontent is
Ruby’s vitality, her cleverness and loneliness. Leaving a particularly stormy family vacation
to Scotland, Ruby spies a stag in the road. Scotland has proved far from the
place that Ruby imagined. And then she sees the stag. She is “astonished to see
the head and shoulders of an heraldric beast emerging from the mist like a
trophy on a wall…I must be dreaming. Somewhere just beyond the mist, there’s our
real Scottish holiday – and perhaps all the other holidays we never had as
well…” Ruby's observations can be acid but she is no cynic. The last line of the book is (not a
spoiler), “I am Ruby Lennox,” a testament to her self preservation not in spite of, but because of, the inescapable legacy of family.
As someone contemplating the time crunch of personal and professional ambitions, I suddenly can't get enough of hearing what anyone has to say about how to solve this puzzle. Many of my childless friends claim they've heard from that parenthood makes creative ambitions easier; that time is an imperative
that can no longer be squandered on an hour or two of Netflix streaming, on internet surfing that yields washed out pictures of spare and beautiful living spaces, that non-essential time wasting goes out the window. I've heard this claim proffered too by people speculating on whether it's easier or harder to have a nine to five job whose success is independent of creative vitality. Easier is not the word I'd use. Still, maybe there's no great mystery beyond the simple act of work. Difficult, our friend
said, but not impossible.
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