This talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love makes me feel like putting more energy into my writing. Hearing writers talk about writing almost always makes me feel like making more time available to sit down at the computer and just write what comes.

It’s so hard to try to balance everything, to carve out the time for the things that keep me in balance, to choose to spend my time on the things that really matter instead of the things that really don’t (like Facebook). It’s also hard to try to find the right balance between directing my care and attention to nurturing others and paying attention to achieving my own goals, or, for that matter, actually setting goals that I want to achieve. Somehow family-related goals like wanting to stay home to raise children don’t seem as creative or challenging as setting a goal of writing a book, but it’s still a massively challenging undertaking, and one which can be done in a thoughtful way or not. So am I just undervaluing my current goals by dreaming about currently impractical ones? Am I buying into society’s attitudes towards the value of childrearing and domestic life vs. creative pursuits, thereby reducing the value of my own daily work?

Gilbert talks about those moments during a creative process in which the artist is infused with the divine, when an artist is no longer an ordinary human but a conduit for divine creative energy.  I can see how this experience might take form in a poet or writer or painter, but I have a harder time imagining what this looks like in the work of raising children.  Parenting seems to be more about stepping back and allowing your child’s creative impulses to take shape, rather than shaping and creating them yourself.

Anyway, I just wrote a rambling blog post about my inability to concentrate on writing while raising children. During the time it took to write this, Bea drew all over her hands with a black marker and nearly kicked Claire in the head. We also went to the park, cooked lunch and read eight stories before I had the chance to read it over again and edit it.  Ah, motherhood.

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