Is Domestic Life the Enemy of Creative Work?

Kim Brooks, writing for New York Magazine:

As I aged, married, inched closer to the world of domesticity, I’d feel reassured whenever I learned that one of the contemporary writers I admired also had a family she hadn’t abused or abandoned (at least to anyone’s knowledge). Why should it be so hard to walk this line, now that domestic burdens were distributed more evenly between men and women, now that parenthood had been stripped by machine and innovation of much of its drudgery and transformed into something more elevated and imaginative? Surely, I thought, there was no reason in the 21st century that a person like myself couldn’t be a great wife, a great mother, and also the sort of obsessive, depressive, distracted writer whose persona I’d always romanticized.

I was so confident in this conviction, in fact, that it took me almost a decade to admit to myself that I was wrong.

As per the norm (these days), this piece's conclusion isn't nearly as drastic as it's open would have you believe. That being said, the answer to the title's question is obvious—of course it is.

Nothing has impacted my ability to find time to write (or lack of time to write) like having children. As I type this, an episode of Magic School Bus is blaring in the background, competing with a baby wailing in the other room and a three year-old chomping on fruit snacks. It's not quite the environment I imagined back in grad school.

But, the life I was leading in grad school? That wasn't going to produce much in the long run, either.

At the end of the day, domestic life is only the enemy of creative work if you refuse to change how you approach your creative work. And the good news is that there is no better way to learn about adapting to change than to have a couple of kids.

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