WORK AND PARENTING: THE SHOCK OF THE CHILD’S ARRIVAL

One of the most difficult pulls in this constantly pulling world is the pull of parenting. There is no more clamoring and necessary distraction than the needs of a child. For most of us there is no dispute about whose needs come first. The infant is king and queen of our days and extends its reign far into the night. There is a psychological shock to the system confronted with the enormous amount of time and worry a child can take out of two healthy people, never mind a single struggling parent. Our pre-child imagination has no comprehension of the way an infant can drain twenty-four hours of any time to rest and recuperate let alone turn our minds to the joys of creation. For many, a child’s youngest years, though filled with other rewards, can be a kind of panicked exile for parents at least as far as their work is concerned. The equivalent of Jane Austen’s wilderness years in Bath and Southampton when she felt completely at the behest of others’ needs with no place to call her own in which to think or rest or build a life she would want for herself.

The psychological shock wave of parenting almost always passes through a woman’s psyche with far more power than a man’s. Though the male psyche may feel devastated and exhausted by a child’s arrival; though he may feel marginalized in the sexual affections of his wife; though he may scour the shops for diapers, breast pumps, bottles and the latest in baby transport; though he may wake as many times in the night, his mode of thinking, his ability to split and compartmentalize his life, and above all, his biological and inherited excuses to go out the door to earn the bread in the early days of the child’s infancy, give him a powerful pivot from which to keep his ambitions and his work alive in his imagination.

Many women are not only overwhelmed by the mighty and often beautiful sense of connection with the newly arrived being just plucked from their person, but often have secondary health difficulties that come with the physical experience of the birth. It is hard to really comprehend how much physiological capital our bodies put into the necessity of giving birth. The evolutionary powers playing through our psyche place the preservation of the human race through reproduction far above the need for a good job or satisfying work. That part of the world that is behind our procreation doesn’t really care if we drag our last burden of nourishment for our infant through the frozen wastes and die in the snow outside the cave door, as long as that burden gets to the child and allows it to survive until the other parent or the grandparent or the tribe can take over and see it through to adulthood.

There are two possibilities, perhaps we can call them necessities, for keeping the marriage with work alive through the difficult years of childbearing and child rearing. The first is to reimagine the way we have named our work and defined its success. We may find that our priorities have been erased and redrawn by a birth or an adoption; that we don’t care for the corporate world’s priorities anymore and that mothering or indeed fathering is now our central work.

We may come to the reimagination of our work through the gladly received, genuine revelations of parenting or especially for women, with difficulty, through a rueful acceptance that the months or years with a child have taken us off the career track and that the sacrifices needed to get back on that moving stair are not worth what it would take. Even if we find that circumstances allow us both to be a good parent and to follow a brilliant career, the moral basis of the brilliant career hinges on not neglecting or abandoning our children at crucial times in their growing, and demands that we reexamine the basis of our marriage with work and many of the outer rewards of prestige we demanded up to the moment we became parents.

OPENING A SPACE

The second necessity is to find a rhythm, often with the help of our partner or our family or our friends that enables us to make short visits to that kingdom of silence and creativity. These short visits on a regular, rhythmical basis may not further the work very much in the early days, but they are essential to keeping it alive in the heart and mind of the struggling parent until time begins to open up as the child grows and goes off to school. As this window begins to widen and allow fresh air into the life of the besieged parent, the work also slowly begins to resuscitate itself and come back to life. Our vocation starts to pick its feet out of the mud and move onto higher, drier ground.

J. K. Rowling famously wrote large portions of the first Harry Potter book in the midst of this caked, slow-moving, mud-walking, desperate parent stage. “There was a point where I really felt I had ‘penniless divorcée, lone parent’ tattooed on my head,” she said in one interview. Living alone with her infant daughter, Jessica, in an unheated Edinburgh flat, she would trudge through the streets wheeling Jessica to a local café and snatch moments at her writing between feeding and comforting her child. It’s a help to know that Rowling felt a general hopelessness during much of that time, and a further encouragement to know that she kept on moving through the mud, kept on writing despite her quiet, private despair.

The café in Edinburgh where J. K. Rowling wrote now has a small plaque on the wall outside to explain who sat there with such private, unsung courage. Most likely the place in which we sit and struggle to bring our work back to life will have nothing to commemorate it except a little window in our own memory that opens onto the small stage on which we appeared during difficult times.

Perhaps each of us should go back with actual plaques and place them in cafés, on walls or in office cubicles with little notes of private courage for the inspiration of others. “This is where I kept my faith alive during very dark days,” “This is where I found the courage to leave my marriage,” or “This is where I realized that I couldn’t have everything I wanted and so felt the freedom to request what I needed.” Such puzzling, intriguing and inspirational signs everywhere might bring us to an understanding of the constant enacted dramas occurring around us. How every chair and every corner holds a possibility for redemption. The plaques that said things such as “This is the table where I gave up on my ideals and took a very large bribe” would be equally instructive for the reader.

What J. K. Rowling and the Jaguar XK 150 tell us is that what human beings need around them to do good work is always less than they think. What is difficult about sustaining a close, intimate relationship with our work is what is difficult in the other two marriages—the willingness to give ourself to its underlying priorities and to do it wholeheartedly, for even just a snatched half-hour, day by day. What is required is to dig deep emotionally, conversationally and thematically, however slowly and however incrementally, in one area. It is something we can return to from powerful evolutionary forces such as child rearing or from other, more seductive but surface distractions that are less overwhelming yet more insidious than the demands of raising a child.

We could describe the inability to focus in our work as a kind of vocational promiscuity—an unwillingness to be faithful to a central theme, an indication either that we have chosen the wrong work just as we might have chosen the wrong partner, or that we are afraid of the deeper context to which it is leading. We may be afraid of living up to that greater context. The intimacies that come with giving ourselves wholeheartedly to a relationship have always been acknowledged as being frightening, but there is also a deeper intimacy and a certain kind of risk that comes with giving ourselves wholeheartedly to a work. Like a good relationship, a good work followed for a goodly amount of time always opens up our own character: our virtues and our many, many flaws; a good work like a good relationship always eventually asks us to be bigger than our own wants and desires, to see ourselves in a much larger context than the self that thought it had gained everything it wanted to keep itself safe.

One of the central disciplines of work is also one of the central disciplines of relationship: not getting caught in abstracts and outer forms but staying close to the internal ground, the sure foundation upon which the work or the couple stand. It is this central foundation where our possibilities of happiness are to be found. This foundation is almost always a place of radical simplicity, unlike many of the towering, tottering, Dr. Seuss-like structures we raise above it.

Though we must have vision it is important not to overburden our work with abstract expectations. My exploration of far horizons may not need a Jaguar XK 150 to find satisfaction in the world. My desperation for peace and quiet in which to do my work may not need a view of the mountains of Connemara. My expression of love and affection for my partner may not need a balcony in Hawaii on which to do it. The relationship depends not only on romance in the Tropics but on daily affections in the grayer climate of the everyday. We may be lucky and find both, but I may be able to enrich the marriage without straining it with extra debt for the hotel and meals in Honolulu. By accident or luck, the work I have chosen may get me the mountain-view study and the Jaguar to drive there, but more likely I will be deflected by those attainments if they were not natural to my interests in the first place. The marriage of work has everything to do with the romance of the everyday.

If we feel we need a perfect partner or a perfect house in which to live out a marriage or a perfect study to do our work, or the perfectly perfect car to feel good about ourselves, it is instructive and humbling to see the conditions under which Jane Austen revised Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility and then wrote from scratch three very “big” novels, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. Her center of operations would have put most writers to despair.

Jane’s study, once she was finally settled into the cottage at Chawton, was no real study at all, but a small family living room constrained by being set in the midst of all the daily activities of the house. Her desk was a small table on which perched a sloping writing bureau under which she seemed to have been able to put away quickly any fresh manuscript page whenever anyone entered by the door, which seems to have been quite frequently. One of the well-loved stories at Chawton that modern-day guides tell visitors is that Jane specifically asked for a squeaky hinge on the door to be left unoiled so that she would have a warning anytime the door was about to open. As the house was filled with the constant bustle of three women—her sister, her mother and a close friend of the family—the squeak must have been a constant annunciation of interruption. All this seems to have provided her, against the odds and against our needs for perfection, all the room and time enough for her to write and revise five classic novels.

The small desk must have constituted an incredibly tiny lens for her to bring such a large world into focus. It must, at the same time, have felt absolutely essential to her happiness as a writer. It was her far-off island, her mountain cabin and her own kingdom all at once. It was to this small desk that Jane Austen returned again and again, living out the settled marriage to her work.

In retrospect, looking back over any marriage, there is an intensity to the days we fill with children, meals, arguments, hilarity and exhausted floppings into bed. Yet as we look back over the procession of days, most of those days seem inseparable from one another; very few particular days are actually preserved unique unto themselves in the amber of memory. In many ways the settled intensity of a good work is very similar. From the outside very little seems to be happening, but in good work we return every day to the desk or the workbench to push it along a little further. We inch along or fly along, depending on what part of the cycle of endeavor we have entered. What we remember looking back, is the rhythm and constant sense of returning to the frontier we have just established. Like the hundreds of times we enter a kitchen in our marriage to make another meal, or join the morning frenzy to get the kids out the door to school, we are in a particular time, but we are out of it at the same time, in a kind of eternity, where time does not seem to have touched us in the same way. Where, if the intensity of focus is deep enough, we seem to feel as if time is actually radiating out from the place we stand. In good work we occupy a frontier between what has been done and what is about to be done, both giving almost an equal sense of satisfaction. Each time we return to the work, that frontier is a little further out and a little nearer to accomplishing what we first set out to achieve. Like being in the midst of a growing family, we can sense the steadily growing satisfaction of a work slowly beginning to form: the coaxing of that work through all the setbacks and the dead ends, the final ability to bring it to a conclusion, and the sense of satisfaction we feel in finally sending it out in the world for others to examine and use, is one of the great privileges of having found a vocation to which we want to give ourselves wholeheartedly.

Jane Austen’s wholehearted return to writing soon had her bringing out manuscripts she had written years before, which had lain in packets during the years of exile in the Bath and Southampton. She worked intensely at the little desk, “lopping and chopping,” as she described it, until she had resuscitated both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice and, we must imagine, her own lost, exiled self at the same time. In the process she must have healed that marriage with the self, which had lapsed over the previous years; she must have brought to a halt the flow of corrosive shame we have about our selves when we cannot get to a work we know we were made to do.

There must have been a curious parallel in bringing the younger self who had written the first draft all those years before into conversation with the person she had become. She was bringing that younger person back alive and at the same time bringing the text up to the standard her mature sensibilities could live with, shading and lightening her characters and her plotlines.

Jane Austen had a great deal of light and dark in her life. The patterns and the crosscurrents of aloneness and community forged her sensibilities as a writer. As a woman she was unlucky to be exiled from the mainstream experience of marriage and as an author very unlucky to be kept from publication and writing until her mid-thirties, though, as with Rowling, one of her manuscripts had lain in a publisher’s drawer for years.

But as a woman who was a serious writer, she was also very, very lucky to have never married. Childbearing and the overhelming identity of wife and mother at that time might have buried her talent as a writer for good. As an author she was also very lucky not to have been published so early. Her early ability to play the giddy flirt may have taken a young and successful Austen into the shallower end of literary London; may have dissipated her judgments and her sense of distance. There is something unmistakable about Jane Austen’s voice as a writer. Her individual form of narration, had become over the years of isolation, that of the consummate outsider but that of the outsider who knows how the inside works. Exile, unhappiness and invisibility gave her a place at the edge of the crowd from which to sit and watch, and from that place she steadily unveiled the structures of everyday life that had been so readily taken for granted by those who were so constantly up on the floor, dancing.

Her close relationship to her work was echoed also by her very close relationships with her sister and her mother. She had a busy, affectionate family around her that also had plenty of what we might term today “dysfunctionalities.” But far more important, no matter the cyclical round of affection and tension with mother or sister, was the fact that they were her family. This was her home, her study, her family, no matter how eccentric or strange.

LIVING WITH FAMILIAR DIFFICULTIES

A marriage with a work, like a marriage with a person, has its particular miseries no matter what the balance of happiness may be. But we know we are right for the work when we feel big enough to live with the particular difficulties it entails. One of the ways we recognize we are married to the right person is that we find not only that we can live with the person’s particular foibles, but also that we can live with the particular form of insanity we create together as a couple. Like a particular marriage, every work has its own particular rhyme and reason but also its strange epiphenomena. As with the strange baby language some couples create to form a private brand of communication, we find ourselves with a particular and sometimes peculiar grammar to our work. This grammar can take very interesting forms. On launching my own career as a writer I had no idea that poetry would take me so firmly into the world of international air travel. I spend as much time in airplanes and airports as I do actually speaking and reading at the end of the journey. To negotiate the air with at least a semblance of dignity it is necessary to become something of an expert on air mileage plans and upgrades, to know the preferable seats on particular aircraft, to join airline lounge clubs and to become knowledegable about the effects of jet lag, diet, sunlight and exercise on a body that must arrive fit and intelligent enough to speak—a skill I did not have the faintest idea I would need when I first gazed at the portrait of Keats staring dreamily off into an imaginative space I would negotiate at least partly by jet plane.

One of the most tempting abstracts of work is also at first sight its prime reality, the earning of money and prestige. There is no doubt that work should keep us from starving and our children from want, but there seems to be more possibility of genuine happiness in life if we let our wants grow naturally along with our income, rather than let it pull us away from the next natural steps in our progression and on into an artificial abstraction conjured from equally abstract wants—wants that may avalanche and overwhelm our commitment to the present.

Work is too easily connected in our mind to money, without our thinking hard enough about what the money actually allows us to do or whether the money itself is poisoning the soil in which the work is rooted.

The most successful novelist of Jane Austen’s time was Sir Walter Scott, who combined his love of the written form with the ability to earn enormous sums of money for his historical novels. His first impressions of Jane Austen’s writing as workmanlike and pleasing soon matured into a broad and deeply puzzled admiration.

We bestow no mean compliment upon the author of “Emma” when we say that keeping close to common incidents, and to such characters as occupy the ordinary walks of life, she has produced sketches of such spirit and originality that we never miss the excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon events. . . . In this class she stands almost alone; . . . the author of “Emma” confines herself chiefly to the middling classes of society; her most distinguished characters do not rise greatly above well-bred country gentlemen and ladies; and those which are sketched with most originality and precision, belong to a class rather below that standard. The narrative of all her novels is composed of such common occurrences as may have fallen under the observation of most folks; and her dramatis personae conduct themselves upon the motives and principles which the readers may recognize as ruling their own, and that of most of their own acquaintances.

Scott was slowly coming to understand that this obscure woman might have a foundation to her writing that he himself struggled to find. He seemed to intuit that she was working with a territory that underlay the workings of the human psyche in a way that he himself had missed or had had difficulty reaching; as if he understood that the outer abstracts of adventure and derring-do in his novels had overwhelmed something far more important that Jane Austen had caught and displayed.

Scott was an exceedingly generous and openhanded man, as virtuous in life as many of the historical figures who filled his books, and his generous character shines through in this journal entry from March 1826.

Read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen’s very finely written novel of “Pride and Prejudice.” That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me.

There is something instructive and vulnerable about Scott’s admitting to himself that he might have missed the forest for the trees. Whether it be in marriage or work or in our sense of personal happiness, we are constantly looking for the big answer, the big bow-wow strain, that will elevate or eliminate the tiny steps we have to take every day to keep the conversation alive and put us into a world where these little acts of vulnerability and frustration do not affect us. The temptation is to look for a kind of virtual existence, a Second Life where we are not touched by grief or age or a realization that our particular individual powers are so dependent on another.

The act of keeping close to the marriage with our work and vocation is the act of returning day after day, not only to the workplace, but to the physical and philosophical foundations that keep it alive in our hearts and minds as we grow and mature and even as we age and die. To be faithful to a work, we must welcome its vulnerabilities and difficulties as well as the many gifts it bestows. We must find the foundation upon which the marriage of work stands and grows and then through the difficult cycles of a human life constantly tend it and nourish it. At the end we may have to have the courage to tend it only through memory, but that memory will be rich with remembered voices and shared endeavor. If we push away the difficulty in work while young or never turn to face it in midlife and hope for safety in the abstract, we will find, as we do in a real marriage, that we are left deserted in our old age, by memory, by those who were never touched by our generosity. We will find ourselves in the company of abstracts, those merely being paid to sit by our bedside, and very far, physically and imaginatively, from those to whom we should have given ourselves more readily.

Though she died at only forty-one, Jane Austen must have known that her particular way of seeing had been passed on to many thousands of people. She would be astonished to know two centuries later how many millions had shared that seeing: she, who felt most at home in a village of “four and twenty families.” She would also have had the satisfaction of knowing that her “children,” in the shape of her characters, were alive and well in the imaginations of others and making their way in the world entirely on their own.

Many of us will have a less public satisfaction from our accomplishments, and many of us will never have our contributions acknowledged at all, but the knowledge that we have affected others and will be remembered even indirectly through our work seems to be a powerful arbitrator of human satisfaction. When we find a real vocation we “marry” our work but we also commit beyond the immediate work to a legacy we will leave behind us; we make vows to an invisible future that will somehow be sustained by an equally invisible harvest somehow gleaned from all the very, very visible effort. In work we marry a hoped-for future as much as we do when we marry a person. The memory and the hoped-for legacy is with us “till death do us part.”

Conclusion: A Settled Marriage with a Work

Looking from the outside on a work is like looking from the outside on a marriage: on any given day, nothing much seems to be happening. J. K. Rowling working at her café table with a stroller at her side would have aroused very little comment; Jane Austen would have been difficult to catch in the actual act of working, particularly if we came in by the creaking door. The dramas and passion of courtship are replaced by what seems at first a hard-to-discern undercurrent. The progression of a settled work or a settled marriage is subtler, the magic being woven less overt. As it is difficult to explain the mechanics of a given marriage, so it is difficult to explain the mechanics of a vocation. Perhaps because it has less to do with mechanics than the slowly building, concentrated focus that gets the job done. The subtle joys of a steady application to a work yielding up its secrets and its subtle triumphs are hard to explain. Just as almost no one wants to know how happily married we are, almost no one wants to know the details of how we gain our sense of satisfaction in work.

We know we have the right vocation and are happily married to a work when we get a song in our hearts simply from doing the work itself, as much as from its rewards and its fruits.

Becoming visible to the world through our work seems to be a central necessity in a vocation. The more invisible we feel, the more unheard, unseen, unheeded, the more dissatisfied we seem to be and the more unreal we seem to ourselves. This attempt at visibility involves not just our effect on the present but also our effect on those yet to follow us. In the marriage with work, our legacy is our favored child, one we have made ourselves from our own body, one that for many years kept us awake at nights, a legacy through which we want to pass on our best hopes and dreams, something with a life of its own and something perhaps, just beginning to create its own future.