Life and time...

It's been a long time...

If only time wasn't so finite. I wish I felt time was less my enemy and more my friend! But as it is, I feel that with every project or activity I turn my energy towards, I'm forced to let a whole lot of equally meaningful things slide.

But certain things trump all else. And for me lately this has been the needs of my beautiful daughter.

People have always described my daughter as special. She is a dreamer, with large eyes and a tendency to stare, which draw people in. But now I look back and realise that when people called her "special" they might have been seeing more than they, or I, knew.

In the past year or so I have entered this whole new territory of having a "special-needs" child. My little girl's issues are mild compared to many, but they still require huge amounts of time and energy from my partner and I to help keep her engaged with learning.

It's all been a bit of a shock, admittedly, after having a son who seems to just soak up information by osmosis through the pores of his skin.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, that's where I've been. But I haven't finished with this darn blogging business yet. And in the meantime, I came up with some answers to some lovely questions from artist, blogger and all-round creative Jodi Wiley.

You can read them on her blog, Art by Wiley, where you can also see a really bad photo of a drawing I did of my son with me and my messy bedroom perfectly reflected in the glass! That's got to be a metaphor for something...

It's BIG and it's beautiful

How exciting to arrive home on Friday afternoon and see this stuffed into my letterbox.

The second issue of 'BIG Kids Magazine' is out now.

I don't know how they do it, but they do... Brilliantly so.

Che & Fidel's Divided Heart

I have been a bit distracted of late, so apologies for the lack of posts.

But while I work my way up to writing the next "real" post, I just thought I'd direct you across to Jodi Wilson's wonderful blog, Che & Fidel. (You probably already know it!)

Jodi has been sweet enough to feature The Divided Heart on her blog this week, and run an interview she conducted with me, all about arting and mothering.

She also has one copy of The Divided Heart to give away -- though the comp ends tomorrow (March 28th), so quick, run don't walk! All you need to do is become a follower of Che & Fidel and leave a comment with your name and email address.

Sorry not to let you know earlier, but you know me... always late.

Lost in Living: A new doco about art and motherhood

Yesterday I got one of those messages in my inbox that makes your heart skip a little beat.

It was a message from American filmmaker Mary Trunk, telling me that my book, The Divided Heart, played a part in helping her develop her now almost completed documentary feature, Lost In Living, which tracks the lives of four women artists.

To cut a long story short, I'll share her words below:

I have spent the last seven years following four mothers who are artists. Two of them I met when they were pregnant (they also happen to be best friends) and the other two are older and have adult children. During this long and fascinating process I was given your book "The Divided Heart", which I found so powerful and moving. I have since been following your blog, which I thoroughly enjoy. Your book is incredibly inspiring and insightful. It helped me figure out the approach to my film, the interview questions over the seven years I documented these women and confirmed that I wasn't completely crazy to make a film about this topic. Thank you!

Going by the initial footage she has released, it is clear that Mary has captured something very raw and honest in her subjects -- with regards to art and mothering, but also female friendship.

As I have since told her, it never ceases to amaze me how common the issues are for women artists -- how the same feelings get expressed time and again, often with the exact same words. I also fully relate to her fear that it might be crazy to document this topic, when so many people tell you it's just a "niche" subject without any great import for the world at large.

It is humbling to know that The Divided Heart has reached the other side of the world and played even a small part in Mary's film.

As she continues through post-production, she is posting short clips on YouTube and her blog, touching on subjects like "What's so great about creativity?" or "Baby and sacrifice: what do you give up?".

I will endeavour to keep you posted about possible screenings of "Lost in Living" here in Australia. Till then, you can watch an extended trailer below:

Badinter strikes again (this time in English)

Here I am, late again. I've no doubt the blogosphere went mental for a while there when the English translation of French feminist Elisabeth Badinter's book, The Conflict: Woman and Mother, was released here last month.

I'm afraid it mostly passed me by this time around, but I did read this very succinct review from Ruth Quibell in the Fairfax press, who does a great job of summing up a very complex book.

Whatever you think of Badinter's ideas, there's nothing like having a strong, provocative second-wave feminist saying it like she sees it to force us modern feminists to define our own thinking.

Every generation shapes itself in response to the previous one, and it's clear that younger women (meaning women in their 30s and 40s now) have felt the need to reassert the value of mothering.

The question is, in doing this, have we risked losing ourselves all over again, or have we reached a better balance in terms of where we want to put our energies?

I have seen a lot of responses from women agreeing with Badinter that they feel burdened by notions of the "perfect mother". It's true that mothers can be their own (and each other's) worst enemies, with our excessive judgements and our guilt and our intense fears for our children.

But I fear Badinter has all the wrong targets in her sight, particularly the "breast-feeding zealots" and "muesli-crunching ecologists" she blames for driving women back into the home.

Modern women no longer operate with the either/or mentality when it comes to work and family. Most of us are undertaking some combination of paid/unpaid work and parenting, amid our other roles as friends, partners and carers.

No, that doesn't mean we have reached a perfect balance. Women are arguably more stretched, and stressed, than ever. But I think few would blame breastfeeding, co-sleeping and the use of cloth nappies for that.

In fact, rather than being duped by the values of so-called “natural” mothering, as Badinter argues, I'd say women who are making conscious choices about their parenting methods tend to be among the most politically conscious and active people in our communities — in ways that extend well beyond mothering.

For Badinter’s generation, baby formula and disposable nappies might have proven liberating. But younger mothers are engaged with the bigger picture. Petrol-fueled cars have been pretty liberating too; but is that a good enough argument for their continued use into the future?

I've always felt that mothers have the potential to be a powerful political force on the issue of climate change. Who has a greater stake in the future of this planet than the women who are giving birth to the next generation?

Second-wave feminism had good reasons for focusing on women's right to equality in the workplace. And we know the fight for equal pay's not over yet.

But isn't the ultimate goal of realising workplace rights to give women — and ideally men, too — greater choices about their lives? Is it really that surprising that many educated mothers are now making the active choice to stay at home or work part time when their children are small?

The great achievement of feminism is that Western women, speaking generally, no longer feel that becoming a mother is their sole biological destiny, or that as a mother they will be defined primarily by that role.

That doesn't mean that, in having children, women don't discover that being a mother is a meaningful aspect of their identity — for good reasons, as motherhood can be genuinely transformative. The love we feel for our kids isn't inherently oppressive; it can also be a force for change and empowerment on all sorts of fronts.

Badinter's argument that "it remains difficult to reconcile increasingly burdensome maternal responsibilities with personal fullfilment" -- while true for many mothers -- ignores the fact that the two are not always mutually exclusive.

When talking about women's interests, I always feel there is a strong need to separate out the mothering of children and the associated demands of running a household.

In targeting children as the "tyrants" holding women back, Badinter lets the real culprits off the hook: the lack of economic policies supporting real choices for women through access to equal pay, superannuation and quality part-time work, all of which compounds the unequal division of labour in the home.

After all, the years spent breast-feeding, co-sleeping and changing nappies are a mere blip — albeit, a pretty special blip, in my book — in the course of a woman's life.

The reading and then... the doing

This is a brief post as I am in my studio where I am not meant to be procrastinating by writing blog posts!

Yes, life is madness. But then there is also the human capacity for self-sabotage, the power of which never ceases to amaze me. This can be a force so much stronger than how much or how little time we have -- particularly when it comes to doing the things we want to do most.

Isn't that precisely the problem? Meaningless tasks are easy. But meaningful ones -- fear of failure is too simplistic a term for summing up the resistance we can feel to undertaking the things that might challenge us in profound ways.

That is why I have set myself a very basic goal: 750 words a day, 2 days a week. That should give me 60,000 words by the end of the year.

(That is of course 750 words of fiction, very much in addition to the stupid number of words I write in my other pen-pushing capacities as journalist, blogger, letter-writer and general scribe.)

A friend recently introduced me to The Writing Coach, founded by novelist Jacqui Lofthouse. This site is full of sound, no-nonsense advice, especially her "Ten ways of finding time to write when you have no time".

She's into the "mosaic" approach (not the masochist approach, which seems to be my default setting!), ie. each word a single tile in a picture that will eventually make sense when all the tiles are laid.

Now back to the challenge of acting on that advice, not just reading it as yet another way of putting off the inevitable...

Artist couples and the politics of envy

This week, my family has gone to the beach for a holiday, without me. On the couple of strange, formless days that I have spent at home without them, I have been writing. But I have also been digging out those twisted clumps of mouldy, neglected clothing compressed into the bottom of the washing basket, and hanging load after load of these long-forgotten items on the line.

I know that when my partner is home alone for any length of time without me and the kids, the idea of performing this kind of task wouldn't even enter his head. Instead, he would have focused all his energies on his creative work and come up with the goods, in a far more substantial and satisfying way than I ever seem to achieve.

Last week on Triple R's Aural Text program, Peggy Frew and I had a long chat about a 2003 article, "Envy", written by writer Kathryn Chetkovich.

Chetkovich is the wife of literary superstar Jonathan Franzen, and what starts as an astoundingly honest personal story about professional envy goes on to encompass so much more about the nature of creativity, particularly that desire for a sense of "permission".

She and Franzen (who she only refers to here as "the man") met while they were both struggling early-career writers. Not too long into the relationship, though, she was still struggling, while his efforts had produced an international smash-hit.

She quickly realised that, for her, struggle means battling the external demands and the dilemmas that chip away at her confidence. For Franzen, writing may at times be a struggle, but his sense of conviction remains intact.

When two artists live under the same roof, one of two things is eventually bound to happen: success or children.

After that, a couple often has to draw upon every reserve of generosity in order to keep supporting each other's work and not become bogged down in resentment and competition.

Chetkovich notes in the article that in the time it took Franzen to draft several hundred pages of his novel, she had penned a 15-page story, a short play and part of an "inadequate" screenplay. Under normal circumstances, that wouldn't be such a bad effort, surely. But she was comparing her output to the behemoth that was The Corrections.

When you have fallen for another artist, you are confronted by what Chetkovich calls "its peculiar calling card": the fear of what you want for yourself. And she is extremely honest about the impact of her husband's success -- the proof that the world wanted and needed his work -- on her own creative life, and on their relationship.

She admits that she sometimes withdrew from him emotionally and sexually as a form of revenge; that at times she wanted to drag him down and see him fail. "That if I could not be happy I was ready to make us both miserable."

How to mantain a sense of equality and not be mired in envy when your partner's success only serves to highlight your failure? What does it mean when you are no longer your partner's best and purest champion?

When the British rights to The Corrections are sold, "The part of me that was his girlfriend put her arms around him and told him how happy she was, and the other part, the miserable writer within, kept her distance," Chetkovich writes.

But what Chetkovich also exposes in her remarkable article is those differences that persist between male and female writers: the inner conviction men seem to possess about their right to create; the way women are held back by their desire to be attractive and likeable; how easily they are drawn into a life dominated by caring and servitude; the ever-present fear that writing is an unnatural occupation for a woman, and that unless her work is doing good in the world, it is mere self-indulgence.

All these elements generally make women's hold on their creative convictions far more tenuous than that of their male counterparts. Franzen's previous wife gave up writing when their marriage broke up; but if she had found success first, Chetkovich feels sure that Franzen would have kept writing with the same robust resolve he had always possessed.

"What I envied were what his talent and success had bestowed on him, a sense of the rightness of what he was doing," she writes. "I wanted what women always want: permission."