On Becoming a Mother and Not Becoming an Art Monster

Emily Lackey | April 2024

The first time I saw a video of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Can’t Help Myself, I was sitting on a couch in my living room. The velvet cushions, once a hazy blue that reminded me of the sea, were now spotted with circles of breast milk. The matching throw pillow that I leaned against was matted with the maple latte my son dumped out during his recent obsession with cups. Below me, I could feel the outline of his favorite board book. I was sitting on it so that he didn’t see it, and that I wouldn’t have to read it to him for the seventeenth time that morning. Instead, he ran laps around the ottoman while Sesame Street played in the background. The letter of the day, Elmo sang, was S.

The letter of the day is almost always S or F. I know this because the only thing I have seen more than the pages of Moo, Baa, La La La! are episodes of Sesame Street. 

I was scrolling through TikTok, brushing away videos about birth trauma and baby-led weaning. I was sick of being shown perfectly edited videos of women telling other women how to add to the immense and interminable labor of mothering. It wasn’t enough that we had to get down on our hands and knees and pick ketchup-soaked pieces of chicken nuggets out of the carpet; we also should spend our time beforehand making those chicken nuggets from scratch. 

When the video of Can’t Help Myself appeared on my screen, it was a stark contrast to what the algorithm had been force-feeding me. The video is taken by an amateur, shot with a cell phone as they stand among a mesmerized crowd of museumgoers in a white-walled exhibit space. At the center of the room is a machine, a black stainless-steel arm on a pedestal that rotates like a lazy Susan. Oozing out from beneath it is a liquid the color and consistency of blood. On the end of the mechanical arm is a series of squeegees the machine uses for its one function: to contain the fluid. That is its only job. Using visual-recognition sensors, the arm swivels around the space, following the fluid whenever it strays too far from the center. 

The effect is gruesome. Bloodlike liquid splashes the machine’s parts, the pedestal, and the acrylic walls that separate the exhibit from its audience. There are smears of thick red all over the white floor that the machine has missed, or from where the effort to contain the fluid has become too much. 

I couldn’t look away. I watched the video of this piece over and over again. I wanted it to succeed. I watched, hoping for a brief moment of completion, for the white floor to gleam cleanly for a second or for the liquid to be contained, if only for a beat, in a perfect circle. 

On the website for the Guggenheim, where the piece was on display from 2016 to 2019, cocurator Xiaoyu Weng argues that the installation presents a “Sisyphean view of contemporary issues surrounding migration and sovereignty.” But watching it work, as a mother and as a writer, its struggle felt personal. The way it keeps trying to contain the liquid, the liquid impossible to contain. It’s futile, really, and yet it keeps going. 

*

Before I became a mother, people loved to tell me what it was like to have children. 

The version of parenthood most frequently promoted fell into two camps. The first was that having children would change my life. When my child was placed in my arms for the first time, so many friends assured me, I would experience a love unlike any other. I would be struck by an irrefutable sense of purpose that would transform me into someone else entirely. Someone egoless and unconcerned with anything other than the well-being of my child. 

The other version of parenthood was that children would ruin my life. Especially my writing life. Friends who were both mothers and artists acted like oracles from another world, gripping my arm and pleading with me to do things differently than they did. Get my first book published before I got pregnant, they warned me. Make sure I only had one kid. Introduce a bottle early on so that my baby wouldn’t become reliant on my body. 

Often these same friends posted poetically about parenthood on social media, many of them sharing that Sarah Manguso quote about how “having a child is to be rent asunder, torn in two.” She writes in her essay “The Grand Shattering” that “motherhood is a different sort of damage. It is a shattering, a disintegration of the self, after which the original form is quite gone.”

I tried for a year and a half to get pregnant, and when two reproductive endocrinologists told me that I wasn’t a candidate for IVF, I clung to these depictions of how motherhood would ruin my life. Certainly parenting was incompatible with creating art. Really, I was trying to feel better about never having kids, and the more I read, the more I talked myself into the fact that maybe it was for the best. Contemporary publishing is rife with depictions of women trying and failing to be both mothers and artists. In Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, a mother whose domestic responsibilities take over her drive to make art turns into a literal dog. In Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, the main character’s only option in the face of marriage and motherhood is to become an art monster instead.

When I finally did get pregnant, these characterizations of motherhood scared the shit out of me. 

I didn’t want to become a monster. I didn’t want to be torn in two. And I definitely did not want to fucking disintegrate. Every time another mother shared that Manguso quote on social media, I pictured the scene in Avengers: Infinity War where everyone starts disappearing, their bodies turning to CGI dust until they are gone for good. I remember watching that scene and not being able to take it. When the young Spider-Man, played by Tom Holland, disappears in his best friend’s arms, I couldn’t help myself: I cried and cried and cried. 

What a relief it was, then, to give birth to my son and still feel like myself. 

“Is something wrong with me?” I thought in the weeks after he was born. “Am I doing something wrong?”

But I wasn’t. I was tending to the C-section scar carved into my stomach. I was waking up every three hours in the night to pump. I was sleep-deprived and knocked flat by my son’s premature birth and extended NICU stay, but my brain, every time I thought to check in with it, was still there. I hadn’t disappeared. I hadn’t become someone else. I was still very much me. 

*

When I think about myself as a writer before I was a mother, I think about the mornings in the hospital after I was admitted at twenty-six weeks with preeclampsia, a serious condition that can lead to seizures and death during pregnancy and childbirth. Every morning, they had to draw my blood, but the swelling in my extremities made it impossible. I have extremely thin veins to begin with, and no matter how many times I warned the phlebotomists, they always thought they could find one. 

“I bet I can get it,” they all said, wrapping a tourniquet around my upper arm and palpating my inner elbow with their fingers, feeling for the rubbery give of a vein.

They never could. Or, if they did find one that was big enough, they’d unwrap the needle from its packaging and ready the tube to catch my blood, but the minute the needle pierced the vein, it would disappear. 

“That’s odd,” they’d say. Every morning. “It was just there a second ago.”

I pictured my veins like dried-up husks, shriveled tubes of blood that, once punctured, produced nothing but air.

“Try my hand,” I told them. I pointed to the bulge of blue that extended down from the knuckle below my wedding ring. “This one always works.” But after a few days, even that one wouldn’t. The phlebotomists tried and tried before giving up. 

“I’m going to have to do a finger stick,” they said, and pierced the end of my finger with a needle. They held my hand in their gloved hand and squeezed my blood, drop by drop, into the required tubes. 

When I think about writing before I was a parent, I think of my veins. Sixty thousand miles of blood vessels inside my body, more than twice the distance around the world. There were endless possibilities from which those phlebotomists could draw, like those mornings I spent sitting in my favorite restaurant next to the Sawmill River, listening to the water crash against the rocks as I scraped together a scene in a story. In front of me, a series of empty plates and cocktail glasses, each one a reward for managing to write fifty or a hundred words. 

Time, back then, was endless, but the inspiration was so hard to come by. It felt like those phlebotomists drawing blood from the tip of my scarred finger, filling each two-milliliter tube drop by painful drop. 

*

For the first few weeks of my son’s life, I wrote nothing. My son was born at twenty-six weeks and five days, and nothing in the face of the uncertainty of his life felt less important than writing. I spent my days sitting beside my son’s incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit, willing his too-small body to breathe, to stay warm, to stay, against all odds, alive. 

But then, nearly a month into this new life together, the world changed. 

I was holding my son when I read the news that Roe had been overturned. All two and a half pounds of him was tucked between my breasts for our hour of kangaroo care, a process that involved stripping him down to just a diaper and having his nurses and respiratory team place his seemingly weightless body just so against my bare skin. 

What I remember from that morning was how nothing changed. So much of the legal basis for Roe was founded on viability, the point at which a fetus can survive on its own. For the longest time, viability was considered to be twenty-four weeks, but advances in neonatology had pushed that line back considerably. In the hospital where my son was born, doctors will resuscitate babies born as early as twenty-two weeks, which meant the babies here had become a battleground, a kind of proof to antiabortion activists that termination is a tragedy if those babies could survive on their own. 

It felt surreal to be sitting in that space, seeing the news come in, and witnessing nothing change. The sun still inched its way across the sky so that the light poured in through the windows behind the storage racks. Each bucket of supplies shined in the sun like stained glass—the bin of purple pacifiers, of green Palmolive soaps, of burnt-yellow nipples wrapped in sterile plastic—and I sat as I had for the past month, holding my son, who was the size some antiabortion activists would use to show a fetus when it is aborted.

As I drove home that afternoon, my breasts emptied of milk, my mind filled furiously with sentences. 

I held up my hand when I walked in the door and saw my husband where I had left him, working at the dining room table. “Don’t talk to me,” I said. “I need to write.” 

I climbed the stairs to our bedroom, pulled my laptop from the basket of blankets where its only purpose for the past month had been to watch the live stream of my son while he slept, and wrote the beginning of an essay.

*

When I think about myself as a writer now, I picture that mechanical arm, trying endlessly and futilely to contain the ideas that come to mind amidst the gruesomeness of my everyday life. “For Sun Yuan and Peng Yu,” Sofia Lekka Angelopoulou writes, “the uncontrollable liquid that the machine keeps trying to contain conjures what they perceive to be art’s essential elusiveness, its defiant refusal to being pinned down and fixed in place.”

I was not lobotomized by parenthood. I did not fall down some rabbit hole of burp cloths and bliss. If anything, it had the opposite effect. It radicalized me. It made me rage. It gave me opinions and destroyed my modesty in a way that didn’t make me shy about sharing them. I became aware of things I had only tried to write about before, projecting myself onto my characters like some kind of method actor. But now—now I had come up against real fear, real loss, real illness, real trauma, and I was never going to shut up about it. 

It’s undeniable that becoming a parent has changed the circumstances in which I write. The undeniable reality of having a kid is that I have a lot less time than I did before. But I also have so much more to say. Things come unbidden to me now, essay ideas fight for room at the surface on long walks. I figure out plot twists while I wait for my son to pick out and bring me another book. I consider the structure of what I’m working on while I sit beside the tub and watch him bang two plastic boats together. 

It amazes me how much I write these days, and also how different writing looks. Rarely does it involve sitting in front of a computer screen, pecking away at a keyboard. Sometimes it doesn’t involve a computer at all. Most of it happens in my head, while I’m sitting beside my son as he stacks blocks on the floor, or helping him learn how to use a spoon, or singing Raffi as I rock him to sleep. 

Is it possible to contain all of it, to turn all of the ideas into something? Of course not. But I prefer it this way. Just the other night I had the biggest breakthrough of my revision process, all while sitting in the dark and singing “All I Really Need.” After laying him down in his crib, I came downstairs to find my husband standing in the doorway to the kitchen, asking me what I wanted to eat for dinner. 

“Don’t talk to me,” I said. “I need to write.” I retreated to my office and wrote the beginning of a new chapter. 

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Emily Lackey’s stories and essays have been published by Romper, Literary Hub, Longreads, and The Rumpus, among others. She lives in western Massachusetts and teaches writing workshops at Writers in Progress.