Motherhood, Sylvia Plath & The Fear I'd Never Write Again

My grandmother told my sister once that our generation had it the worst. “You’re expected to both work and be a mother now. You get the rough end of both sticks,” she said.

My mother or sister repeated this to me. I can’t remember which, maybe both, when I was in my twenties. “Don’t get married,” my sister told me more than once. “And if you do, pick a task you absolutely will not do and make it your husband’s task.” For her, it was garbage. I laughed. Okay.

In high school and college I read a lot of Sylvia Plath. I devoured The Bell Jar and wrote a term paper on it. My teacher deducted points because I flagged too many portions of the book. She thought I wasn’t discerning enough. Maybe she was right. I had breathed the entire book into my psyche. There was no room for discernment. I became dead set on going to college in New York City. I wanted to go out dancing. To drink vodka. I became increasingly interested in the Rosenbergs. I dated a few boys and told them all I would be leaving for New York. Don’t cling onto me too tight was the subtext.

In the end, I didn’t go to college in New York City. I stayed closer and went to school in Chicago. The cost to go to NYU or some school similar was too high. My parents hated the idea of me so far away. I didn’t want to be away from my friends and my boyfriend (my now husband) and if I’m honest I was a little scared of plunging myself into a giant city after living in a small town without someone’s reassurance it would be fine.

In college I read The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath like the Bible. Picking it up periodically and underlining passages that resonated.

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

I wanted to do it all, to have all the experiences and it felt like I had to do it all right then. As if there was a door slowing closely on the limits of experiences I could have. It was an idea society had sold me about the aging of women. I had a prime and then I had an “after”. You’ll only be as young and beautiful for so long, you better shove a lot of life into those years, society mocked.

Now in my mid-thirties I laugh at the notion. Life becomes so much more interesting once you fully know yourself, once you’re on your life path and no longer deeply concerned about other’s expectations of you. It makes me sad that Sylvia didn’t make it past thirty. That she lived during a time where her intelligence and writing were not celebrated, but tolerated. That her husband, Ted Hughes, used her all up for his own artistic pursuits and physical needs and then discarded her for others. Perhaps if Sylvia had more money to her own name, more autonomy, more respect in literary society things might have ended up differently.

Reading Sylvia Plath’s thoughts on children in my twenties made me wary of having children before publishing a novel. “So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state,” she wrote in The Bell Jar.

I was certain that a baby would take up a lot of mental energy. I had enough nieces and nephews to know they required a lot of care. I nannied for wealthy families in Chicago and saw how even with resources and support, the mothers of multiple children were tired chauffeurs scrambling for alone time. And I wouldn’t have the luxury of a nanny. It would be me. I knew that.

When I was twenty-eight the reality that I hadn’t finished a manuscript was top of mind. It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried, I had. I wrote three separate unfinished manuscripts. Attend a novel writing course at the University of Chicago where I abandoned my first project, started a second, and finally left the program with an unfinished third. While in the program, the literary candle company I was growing was becoming even more demanding. I couldn’t do both. There weren’t enough hours in the day and the candle company was paying me, so I left the novel writing program. I didn’t know what I wanted to work on and it felt like I was wasting money trying to figure it out.

I kept working on that manuscript before ultimately shelving it for another. Nothing was sticking. I submitted poetry and got a few poems published. That was gratifying. I was getting somewhere in the literary world.

I remember crying on the couch of the family I nannied for when I opened the email and saw that my poem was accepted and would be published. The kids were upstairs asleep, the parents out on a date. I didn’t tell them when they got home, but perhaps they saw the tears in my eyes, it’s hard to know.

I wanted to have a child before I turned thirty and that timeline was closing. I accepted the fact I wouldn’t publish a book before I was thirty, but I didn’t stop working. I kept writing and trying to have a baby and eventually my daughter was born.

While pregnant, particularly during the first trimester, thoughts hid under a dense fog. At the time I was writing for a Chicago wedding magazine. Articles about how to find a photographer and the best venues in the city to get married. Before pregnancy, it was an easy byline. But during, I would find myself staring at the computer screen crying. I didn’t care about these articles and I couldn’t will myself to care. My brain revolted the idea, refused to organize my thoughts into a coherent essay. I quit and knew I’d never be asked to write for them. I was right.

When the second semester ascended, some of the fog cleared. Energy came back. Brain power came back. I could think again. I had the will to write. I felt more like myself.

I began writing a series of poems about pregnancy and motherhood I later called The Magic a Body Makes. (A series I hope to one day publish, but for now sits in my computer.) I was relieved to be creating again. Scared that at any point my mind might betray me and choose to go dark again.

After my daughter was born I kept writing poetry about my experience. The short form fit into the time I had before feedings and her need for me. I could perch at the counter with my phone or notebook and jot down a poem that came to me nearly fully formed. It’s still here, I thought. Meaning: my creativity. It was a deep relief.

For the first two years of her life I was swept up in her current. I was running our literary candle business and doing my best to be present with her. The first year of her life I refused to accept any care for her during the day. I wanted to be the bedrock of her foundation. I would spend all day with her and leave after dinner to work in my studio pouring candles until 3am and then come home, feed her, and sleep as much as she would allow. The shadow of that exhaustion clung to me far after her first year.

And then during year two of her life, and my tenure as a mother, the pandemic hit. The ground had just reformed underneath me, only to crumble once again. Soon all outside care was torn for us. We were effectively back in year one, spending our days together. At least this time, my husband forced to work from home or the shop, was around to split our days as much as possible. Every morning he left for work and returned for her nap time and worked while she slept. It was then I would go to the studio and work—pouring candles, running our company entirely alone again and doing 3x the amount of work for half of the revenue.

That spring was the first time a routine was reassuring instead of constricting. Every morning she would wake me up and we’d trudge downstairs. I’d put on a show for her and let out the dog. Then I’d set her up with breakfast and open my computer and write for the hour of screen time. The words tumbled out of me easily. A story I had began the month before while away for a weekend. It was the story about a woman who had lost herself in marriage and motherhood. I felt its edges keenly.

After I wrote for an hour I would get us both dressed and ready, and we would go on a slow walk around the block. Taking in the green rising under the dead leaves. Stopping to say hello to the carved wooden statue of a wise looking old man in someone’s driveway. I named him Father Time as a masochistic joke, best made during a period when time moved both quickly and not at all. Hello Father Time, we would say and wave. We still do this four years later.

In the depths of the pandemic, it was the very thing I was terrified would suck me dry of my creativity that propelled me forward, was my muse: motherhood, a child, my child, my daughter.

How robbed we are of Sylvia’s work in later motherhood. Much the way her words resonated in my twenties that she wrote in her twenties, I long to read her words as a fifty-year-old woman long done with the trenches of motherhood. What revelations would she have for us then?

In the end I can only offer my own platitudes. Motherhood was not the end of my writing journey, but the structure it necessitated. It was the fodder and inspiration and jolt I needed to put pen to paper and keep going. Now my daughter, age six, asks me over dinner, How is your book? She tells strangers we meet out on the town, My mom wrote a book. She’s so proud of me—so invested.

How could I have ever feared having her would be a dead end?

No, she was a wild new beginning.