On writing about my children
Should I write about my children? What will they think about the things I have written about them when they’re older? And how have other writers approached these questions?
Recently, I’ve been spending a lot more time on the Substack app. Probably because I’ve been trying to spend less time on Instagram (more on that in a future post). As I was scrolling through my Notes feed one day, I came across a Note that sent me down a rabbit hole. Come with me. I hope I don’t lose you along the way.
As I was scrolling one day, I came across a Note from Substacker Eloise Rickman, who in turn had quoted from an interview with Merve Emre on Sara Fredman’s Write Like a Mother blog.
I read this Note and felt a stab of anxiety because it’s a question I’ve asked myself before.
Merve Emre is an academic and critic, and I must confess I had not heard of her before reading the Write Like a Mother interview. In the interview, Sara Fredman brings up Emre’s New Yorker review of Minna Dubin’s Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood. I read Dubin’s book at the end of last year. It is part memoir about her own experience with “mom rage,” part examination of the causes of mom rage, and part guidebook for the reader dealing with their own mom rage.
There are moments when Dubin writes about her experience with “mom rage” that I found hard to read. In her review, Emre calls these scenes “ill-advised candor” and writes that there are times while reading the book when “one wants to shield both Dubin and her son from such exposure…” Emre uses similar language in the interview with Fredman when she talks about some of the questions she was exploring with the Mom Rage review: “…how much can you expose your children? How much can you expose them when they can't consent to that exposure, and how much can you allow them to expose themselves even after they can consent to it?”
I think “exposed” is an apt word here. I often feel exposed when publishing a blog post, or when I sign off on the final edits of a piece I’ve written and submitted to a literary journal. I think I’m cautious by nature. I self-edit a lot. But I also worry about being too candid. In an essay published in Sea & Cedar Magazine, I wrote about the boredom I sometimes felt during the first year of the pandemic, when I was home all day, day after day, with C. I wrote about the guilt I felt for being bored. When I read those passages now, I can feel myself trying to both be honest and reign myself in. I can feel myself quietly asking: what will C think if she ever reads this? What will she think? I don’t know. I only know that when my own mother admitted to sometimes feeling bored during the years she was at home full-time with me, I felt absolved, just a little, of the guilt. In another piece, published in MUTHA Magazine, I went further. I wrote about depression and suicidal ideation. When I read that piece now, I can feel my heart beat quicken. I feel laid bare.
In thinking about the question of whether we can write about our children, I turned to three books, all memoirs, that have shaped how I think about this topic: My Wild and Sleepless Nights: A Mother’s Story by Clover Stroud; After the Storm: Postnatal Depression and the Utter Weirdness of New Motherhood by Emma Jane Unsworth; and small on motherhoods by Claire Lynch.
My Wild and Sleepless Nights is about Stroud’s pregnancy and first year with her fifth child. It is also a year in which her oldest child, who is fifteen at the start of the book, is starting to pull away from her. Stroud finds herself dealing with all the expected challenges of a newborn, while also facing, for the first time, the challenges of parenting a teenager. At the start of the book, just before Lester is born, Stroud’s oldest child, Jimmy, is expelled from his school after he is found in possession of marijuana. Later on in the book, a police officer comes to her house to talk to Jimmy because Jimmy had taken a throwing knife to school to gift to a friend.
In her Instagram bio, Stroud states: “I write about the way life feels. I use words to communicate the big emotions of human life.” I sense this when reading My Wild and Sleepless Nights. I can feel Stroud searching for the words that will help her convey what mothering five children really feels like. Stroud is enviably good at simile and metaphor. Of her son Jimmy she writes, “Even when we are in the same room, it’s like I am holding on to his shadow as he walks away from me.” As she watches the policeman drive away from the house, she feels her loyalties “scattered all over the place like marbles running across a wooden floor.” And perhaps my favourite line of the whole book is when she describes the feeling of sitting down to play on the floor with her preschooler Dash, while Lester sleeps upstairs: “Time settles around us, as invisible and quietly uncomfortable as lightly falling rain.” Through words, Stroud metabolizes that boredom I too have felt as a long day with small children stretches before me, and she turns it into something beautiful.
But in striving to write about the way life really feels, Stroud exposes a lot too. She exposes her teenage son’s misdemeanours. She writes about her sex life. We are given many, many glimpses into Stroud’s family life, the good and the bad.
After the Storm is about Emma Jane Unsworth’s experience with postpartum depression, following the birth of her first child. Unsworth likens her depression to a building storm, clouds slowly banking on the horizon over time. Then suddenly, a series of breaks. First, the neighbours start drilling at 8 p.m. at night, waking the baby, and Unsworth responds by repeatedly bashing the wall with an old hole-punch. Second, she throws a cup of tea at her husband when he reminds her that he will be going away for a few days to an academic conference in Berlin. Third, while her husband is away, she pushes her baby. He has been crying a lot during the day and has woken every few hours through the night. He wakes and doesn’t want the bottle she offers. “What more can you possibly want from me?” she yells at him. And then she pushes him, “hard, with my right hand.” Her baby falls on his side, though it seems he isn’t hurt. I wonder what Emre would make of this candour, this exposure?
Claire Lynch’s book small on motherhoods is about her and her wife’s experience conceiving their three daughters (twins and a singleton) through IVF, including Lynch’s own attempts to carry their child. Lynch writes beautifully about her children’s babyhood and early years, often zooming in to match her children’s perspective. She picks out details of life as a parent that really resonated with me: princess stickers on the backs of chairs, the milk bottle lids that become biscuits for dolls, admiring the little hats that acorns wear. Lynch even manages to make the early sleepless days of parenthood sound fun: “At night, our daughters sleep in baskets, one either side of our bed. Paper dolls, all in a row. When they wake to feed we have midnight feasts, two bottles, two cups of tea.”
It’s not that Lynch never touches on the hard stuff. She writes about her own miscarriage, about her wife’s early labours with both pregnancies (the twins were so premature they spent weeks in the NICU), and about the inconsiderate and demeaning ways she and her wife are treated because their family doesn’t fit the presumed model. She also hints at the difficult moments of parenting:
“Although I have let a wild scream of frustration fill the kitchen, and watched their faces change. Although I have held a small wrist, too tightly, as I marched a screaming toddler from a shop. Although I have been furious and tired and despairing, on the very edge of my own control. The shame and guilt of using your power, the big over the small.”
This is the question that Emre poses in her interview: How would that child feel once they read the words that you had written? Fredman asks where this leaves those wanting to write about motherhood and parenting. Emre says that one approach is to write autofiction. “The other… is just relentless sublimation. You don't have to write an essay about your marriage and your divorce. You can just write a piece of criticism that's about a book like Liars [by Sarah Manguso], and you can betray so much about yourself and still not be exposing or betraying others.”
Stroud, Unsworth, and Lynch clearly haven’t chosen sublimation, nor have they written autofiction or literary criticism. So, how do they answer Emre’s question? Because it is clearly one they too have considered.
In the acknowledgements, Stroud writes that because she has written so openly about her children, she has talked to them about the book, and that Jimmy has read all the parts of the book that are about him. She shares a text message that Jimmy sent her after reading the final draft of the sections about him, in which he says that he is happy with everything she has written. Yet Emre also questions how much we can expose our children, even when they can consent to it. Can Jimmy, as a teenager, meaningfully consent to having quite significant details about his youthful indiscretions published in print? Can he know what impact it might have on his life down the line? Stroud also has this to say: “I hope that if the children do ever look back at My Wild and Sleepless Nights when they are older, they will read it as a portrait of my complete love for them. The darkness I describe is mine alone.”
Unsworth tells us that she was reluctant to write After the Storm. She asks herself “What if my son reads it in ten years and gets upset, or thinks I didn’t love him in the beginning?” But she has justified the decision to write the book because she feels it will help other women who are struggling with postpartum depression. What’s more, her son will be an adult one day, and Unsworth will be able to have an honest adult conversation with him about what she has written: “My son will have his own opinions one day, and I hope we can have conversations about it and he’ll understand that I’m doing this for all the women who might be struggling and don’t know how to say.”
Unsworth also expresses her reluctance to write about the night she pushed her infant son, but again she feels she has to because silence won’t help other women who are feeling overwhelmed:
“I want you to know that it breaks my fucking heart to write this now. But I must write it, I think, for all the women who are at breaking point or who think they are monsters because they feel the violence rising… I must write it because it’s the truth, and if we’re going to move this conversation forwards we have to stick our necks out if we feel we can.”
I actually heard Claire Lynch on the Not Too Busy To Write podcast before I had read her book. In the interview with Ali Millar, Lynch says something the essence of which has been lodged in my brain ever since (transcription mine, edited for brevity):
“When I was writing, I made a sort of pact with myself that I had to feel confident that anything that they read about themselves in the future... they would feel the truth of it. That they would recognize it, but also that they wouldn’t feel patronized or embarrassed, or that I wouldn’t reveal anything that I thought was exactly that, I wouldn’t talk down to them in the book or about them because… I mean, maybe they won’t be bothered and it’ll be the last book on earth they’d ever touch when they’re older, but the idea was, that was the ground rule that I had to have in mind.”
For Lynch, the answer is to tell the truth, but without stepping over a line she has drawn for herself. Her children should be able to read her book without feeling embarrassed or as though motherhood was nothing but hardship.
Ultimately, I don’t think we can easily answer Emre’s question, at least not when the children we are writing about are still little children, too young to verbally object or meaningfully consent. If I was writing about my children as teenagers, I would probably, like Stroud, allow them to read anything I’d written about them before it goes out into the world. What would Stroud have done if her oldest son had said he didn’t want her to publish anything about him? Her book would be diminished. It would lose its central conceit. If my children asked me not to write about them at all, to delete everything I’ve ever written about them, every photo I’ve ever posted, from the internet, then I think I would respect their wishes. I hope, too, like Stroud, that my love for my children is evident in my writing. I hope they know that any negative emotions I’ve felt are so much bigger than them.
In part, like Unsworth, I’ve felt motivated to share my experience of motherhood because I think it might help others. During 2020, I attended a weekly online Zoom meeting for parents. There were around eight mums who attended regularly, and over the course of a few months I got to know them well. I heard about the challenges they had faced, were facing. They were all parenting, mostly alone, during a pandemic, whilst contending with other griefs and losses. We were all tired. Sometimes the baby wouldn’t nap and it was enough to send you into a spiral of tears and self recrimination. When I heard these women share their struggles, when I saw them crying, I felt a crack opening up inside of myself. I felt compassion for them, and in turn, I could feel just a glimmer of compassion for myself. I hope my writing can be that lever, the thing that opens up a small space for self-compassion.
When I read my pieces for Sea & Cedar Magazine and MUTHA Magazine now, I feel that sense of self-compassion. I feel too, the joy and beauty that comes with raising small children. I also see how different life is now, how different being a mother for the second time is, without the stress of a global pandemic and all the pressure I was placing on myself to “have it all.” C is much older and that does change the way I think about writing about her and J, and my experience of mothering them. I think, going forward, that I will have Lynch’s ground rule, or something like it, in mind. I hope I can tread that line between telling the truth of my experiences — which, after all, my children are also experiencing and forming memories of — without embarrassing my children or making them feel too exposed. How will they feel if they read my writing? Only time will tell.
I’m curious to know what others think about this topic, so please do share your thoughts in the comments below!