Can Making Art Make You a Better Mother?

Two scenes juxtaposed. 

Scene 1:

“If you don’t read to me,” she yells, “I won’t listen to you again!!!” This threat washes over me, barely sinking in. There is so much anger, so much desire, so much need coursing through my four-year-old’s little body. “You’re a bad mama!” I’m exhausted. I sit down, defeated, to read her the book she has shoved into my pelvis.

Scene 2:

The same child sits, calm, but intensely focused. For a moment, it is just her, the piece of paper, her palette, and a brush. Nothing else matters. Her brush moves fluidly and with utter freedom. I envy it. I relish it. I am inspired by it. She pauses. The beautifully paired color choices and dynamic strokes are a sea on her paper. She takes a deep breath. “I’m done, Mama.”

Motherhood, particularly the mothering of toddlers, has been a shock to my system. Before my eldest became a toddler, I don’t think I had ever yelled at a human being. Now, I find myself getting to that point of frustration nearly every day. I often do not feel up to the task of forming these souls before me. I am simply at a loss as to what decision to make, what task to take on, or what words to say. Yet I’ve also experienced some of the deepest pools of glory and beauty since becoming a mother, observing their quiet wonder, their giggles of delight, their warm cheek nestled on my chest.

As Catherine Ricketts writes in her new book, The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity, “More than any endeavor in my life, motherhood will be fraught with tension. The birthing room will contain my deepest agony and highest joy. My infant’s need for me will satisfy and suffocate me. My toddler will reveal in me deep wells of laughter and anger.” In her book, Ricketts artfully dances between memoir and portrait, bringing readers intimately into the nuances of her motherhood while weaving together portraits of artists, past and present, to make the case for why women should persevere in their creative practices after becoming mothers. Within the pages of her book, she gathers a community of women who have navigated the path of motherhood and artistry. The members of this “cloud of witnesses” have taken on the struggle of art and mothering with joy. These women serve as buoys for other women who are trying to navigate this same journey or thinking of taking a leap into those waters.

I have certainly needed this buoy myself. Some days I think, Have I really become a worse version of myself? Yelling, bottling up emotions, hopelessly taking deep breaths that seem to have no effect. Ricketts similarly writes: “Motherhood has introduced me to the worst version of myself – a woman often embittered, impatient, and bored by the bodily imposition and tedium of this endeavor.” The idea that somehow motherhood is changing me – sanctifying me, even – feels laughable at best, dismaying at worst. Often, I am not even sure why I do the things I do. Why did I ignore my three-year-old’s question? Probably my brain is just too slow to answer. This happens several times a day. In fact, sometimes it feels like the scene is on repeat. Other times, it is me doing the repeating: “Please stop saying that, please stop saying that, please stop saying that.” My repetition aims to stop the repetition.

As I flounder through my days, at sea with these children and my desires beside me, other women sometimes swim into my mind. Some are alive today and some lived hundreds of years ago. Many I only know from reading their stories or seeing their art. Others are intimate parts of my own life: my downstairs neighbor, our parish choir director, my own mother, my grandmother. When I’m tempted to wallow in the chaotic mess of our living room, I think of sculptor Ruth Asawa, sitting on the floor weaving wire while four of her children sit around her, the baby naked and drinking milk, a son crouched on the coffee table looking at a book, a daughter cross-legged, lost in her imagination, and another son watching as his mother works. Reminders like this help me to pause and hope. Perhaps, as Ricketts encourages, these examples can offer me a vision for flourishing and not just surviving as a mother and an artist. Women like Dorothy Day, Karin Larsson, Judith Leyster, and the many women Ricketts writes about in her book: novelist Marilynne Robinson, painter Becky Suss, printmaker La Toya Hobbs, and musician Lauren Goans, to name a few, are buoys for me to cling to amidst the rolling waves of mothering.

As a mother, I have come to know deeply why art, stories, words, and images truly matter. I knew this in theory before, but now I know it in the flesh. Ricketts’s book has put into words this deeper knowledge. Art matters because it can revive us. In exploring the work of contemporary artist Madeline Donahue, Ricketts writes:

What strikes me most about Madeline’s work is the way that intimacy is inextricable from chaos…. When I spend time with art like this, I return to my children with a better sense of humor and with more gratitude myself…. In the company of artwork forged through self-reflection, I become reflective by proxy. It’s another virtuous circle: I spend time with art made by mothers; I return to my family with humor and awe; and I can, in turn, make art leavened by the humor and awe I’ve been given.

In the moments when we are overwhelmed by the suffocating “immediacy and fatigue of early motherhood,” art can restore our wonder, expand our capacity for joy, and inspire creative work that will shape others. It reminds us that grace can flow abundantly, even amid despair.

These reminders have the power to work on us. They work on me. In these early years of repeating actions, repeating motions, repeating feelings, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking I should just put my making aside, and put all of my focus on my children. Like Ricketts, I find myself asking, “Why keep writing when no one is reading? Why paint when no one sees? Why work when it doesn’t pay?” One answer that I come back to is that I too am a person, a human being with a heart and mind and soul. God made me to create and foster life, but also to create with watercolors, weavings, and words. Even when it seems impossible, it is important to continue making, to allow that creative part of my body and soul to keep living and breathing.

And yet Ricketts still finds herself wondering, if she wasn’t doing these things, “Might I have slept better? Been more patient? Felt more joy?” I too worry about this, that in endeavoring to persevere I might be straining. In Walking on Water: Reflections on Art & Faith, Madeleine L’Engle writes:

Our firstborn observed to me many years ago, when she was a grade-school child, “Nobody else’s mother writes books.” But she also said, around the same time, “Mother, you’ve been very cross and edgy with us lately, and we’ve noticed that you haven’t been writing, and we wish you’d get back to the typewriter.” A wonderfully freeing remark. I had to learn that I was a better mother and wife when I was working than when I was not.

I too am a better mother and wife when I am creating than when I am not. To accept this was pivotal for me. It was deeply freeing.

So much of these early years of motherhood are a series of repetitions. I often feel outside of myself, watching these cycles pass. Other times I feel too inside of myself, but a self that I do not recognize. I find that there isn’t a familiarity in the repeating; it is a kind of unselfing. And yet that repetition is life, as the sun rises every day upon an entirely new day. That repetition is also art, the work of applying a brush stroke again and again. And perhaps in making, whatever form that might take, there is a freeing and a finding that can happen from within the realm of motherhood.

Ricketts sees the ways that as a culture and as mothers we are tempted to set aside the art of living for mere living. She writes, “Just as arts budgets are cut when resources are strained, creative practice may be the first thing to go in a new mother’s life.” A culture that only values the practical and barely values the feminine is bound to ask about a mother, “How could she justify hiring childcare to do work that might not pay? Why would she abide in her craft?”

In her closing chapter, “Perseverance: Why We Keep Making,” Ricketts explores this repetition and the work of persevering through it:

I don’t wonder whether I will persevere in motherhood; I know I will not leave my children. But I do wonder how I will persevere. What will be the quality of my presence? Will I begrudge this thankless labor? Will I be tired all the time? Will I be short-tempered, escaping into housework while the boys toddle at my feet because laundry demands less of me than the children’s desires? Or will I wake up to the humor of this time – its slapstick antics? Will I notice its magic? Will I have joy with which to be generous?

I have asked myself these same questions. I fear that my answers – in the form of the actions I take each day – will leave me sad and disappointed in the mother I am becoming. And yet what if it is through the very repetition and frustration of motherhood that I am being transformed into a person of joy? What if, as fellow mother and artist Lee Nowell-Wilson said in a recent talk, the mundanity and the repetition aren’t just something to be tossed out and moved through unwillingly, like trash and toys to be picked up and moved beyond? What if, instead, they are the very material that we can work from and out of and through? What if the problem is in part my vision? The greatest artwork is just made of stuff; the greatest mothers are too.

For Ricketts, motherhood, creation, and meaning are not found by escaping the mundane but by loving attention to all its detail. Reflecting on Becky Suss’s painting Red Apartment, Ricketts describes the intense attention to every single detail of the painted interiors: “It’s ordinary but captivating. It’s big: seven feet tall and five feet wide. It’s bold, dominated by a deep farmhouse red. It’s animated by pattern – a checkered cloth, a marble bowl, tiles that conjure meticulously quilted patchwork.” Suss embraces intricacy and interiority by drawing it out through attention and care. As with art, so with mothering. Ricketts goes on: “These paintings take the home – realm of the banal, realm of the mother – and elevate it into the museum establishment.”

For Ricketts, it is not that mother-artists need to explore motherhood directly in their work, but that the act of mothering changes the way they see and create. “Caregiving,” she proposes, can “change her vision of the world, … shape the art that she makes, [and shape] those who encounter it.” In this same chapter, which explores maternal vision, Ricketts quotes essayist Leslie Jamison: “Being with my baby every hour of every day demanded close attention, not just to her … but also to everything else, because the alternative to paying attention was growing bored out of my mind…. My gaze was sensitized, the way your eyes can see more after you’ve spent a few minutes in the dark.” Motherhood, if we allow it – if we do the work of attending – can shape us and our vision. The act of mothering itself, but also taking in art made by mothers, humanizes us.

As I move through my days, trying to be more the mother I want to be and trying to make space for my creative practice, I find myself wondering, Am I letting my heart be humanized within these interwoven paths? Or is my heart becoming colder, harder, made of stone? Often it feels like the latter. And yet something is happening. As poet and mother Amy Bornman recently said to me, “I hope it’s slowly forming me and helping me grow. And either way we are doing it!” How can I retrain myself, my heart? How can I smile more often? How can I find fruit in the repetition, like I do when I repeat brush strokes, or listen closely to find the repeating rhythm in a piece of music. So much of creative practice, in any medium, is built on repetition. What if I could give myself over to it, to see the material beneath the surface? In these seemingly mundane repetitions, can I start to find a thread? The word repetition comes from the Latin repetere, a combination of the prefix re-, ”back,” and the verb petere, “to seek.” Can I let myself be pulled toward the thing I seek? Is it possible that what I seek and long for can be glimpsed in these repeating passages of time? Perhaps I cannot will this interior shift on my own. I need the vision of others, even the vision of my toddlers, to help shape it. Ricketts writes: “If I let Suss’s work work on me, maybe I can cultivate the faculty of attention to draw me into the deepening cosmos of the interior.” Reading Ricketts is a lesson in this cultivating and deepening.  

As our interiors are reshaped, Ricketts proposes that it is not just our own interiors that are changed. In her final chapter, she reflects: “Our vision of the world is shaped by what we see. What an artist sees, therefore, shapes the world that she shows to others in her work. Again and again, I look at these frail, magnificent bodies.” Our children often demand our attention, and sometimes we can’t help but pause and stare at them, in all their glory, in the sunlight, in the darkness of midnight wakings, moving slowly, quickly. The women that make up the cloud of witnesses in Ricketts’s book are women who can see below the surface of these moments and persist in their creative practice. She portrays women, whether writers, dancers, painters, quilters, sculptors, printmakers, who persevere in making art, and are better because of it.

These women, Ricketts proclaims, are women whose “view of the world is reframed by maternal humanism, composed of awe, curiosity, and adoration for the vulnerable ones of this world – which is to say, all of us.” In the straining, in the persevering, there are also deep wells of love, grace, and creativity to be found. Near the end of her book, Ricketts writes, “We need a visual culture, a literary culture, a culture of performance that wakes us up to the dignity of every person…. If art has the power to change minds, if art has the power to shift public opinion, if art has the power to shape new worlds, then imagine with me a world lit by this constellation of maternal virtues. It’s luminous.” And these luminous wells flow out beyond us, beyond our own children, out into the world. It is humanizing me, sanctifying me; I am a better artist since becoming a mother, and hopefully, a better person.