Having Kids and Keeping a Creative Practice
What would my creative practice look like if I didn’t have kids?
I wonder this sometimes. These days, it would not be an exaggeration to say the number one thing I want at all times is an uninterrupted day in the studio.
I’m human. And humans always want what we cannot have.
To be extremely clear, I do not wish I didn’t have kids. I love them more than anything. I am just, as my mother says, “in the trenches.” Especially last week, when my wife and one child had the flu and the other child, inexplicably, had COVID-19.1 Making things has become more of a respite than anything else. A lifeline. A way to become myself again for a few moments at a time.
Before I had kids, I did not crave making things. I loved making things, and to do so made me feel better when I was depressed, anxious, or otherwise compromised. But I didn’t feel the way I do about it now. Now it feels like eating. And I’m hungry all the time.
Now, I write on my phone when pinned by a sleeping child (like I am in this moment). Now, I buy a pocket-sized, self-healing cutting mat and a new X-Acto blade so that I can carry them with me anywhere and make collages when I haven’t been to the studio in weeks. Now, I ignore the laundry and overwhelming mess to sketch or write in my notebook. Now, I pull out my computer when my son is watching the latest poorly dubbed cartoon from Korea in order to work on a book cover or this newsletter or a T-shirt idea.
Now, I am obsessed with making things—even stupid, little collages—because I am afraid I won’t be able to. That I might starve. I wonder, almost daily, if this makes me a bad father and husband. It might. But I know that if I don’t make something, I undoubtedly will be.
The bittersweet irony of this craving, this urgency, is that if I got what I ultimately wanted—eight hours a day in the studio—I don’t know if I’d have the same output. A goldfish grows to the size of its bowl; my laziness grows to the size of the time it is allotted. It is easy to believe that if I “had time for it,” I would have given up on this newsletter months ago. Now it feels integral to my creative output, and my creative output feels integral to carrying on and to one day getting out of these trenches.
Is this melodramatic or what? It’s just that I am finding it difficult to be a parent. Some days, many more in these winter months, I am finding it difficult to be a person. The work—not a job,2 not a career, but the work—helps me feel, corny as it feels to say, more alive.
I wish I didn’t need it to. I wish I could be like those who seem to gather all of their life force from their children. There would be less friction. But friction causes heat. And despite being exhausted, I’ve produced some of my best work in the last year.
This doesn’t feel sustainable, though. I don’t want to wish these years away, but I can’t wait for the time (and money) that having kids in public school will bring back to me. It’s my hope that there will then be a better balance between my emotions, this need to create stuff, and the time in which I have to do so.
Thanks for reading
If you found this, thanks for reading. It felt a little too emotional to send to a couple thousand inboxes, so it lives here as a blog post I can ostensibly delete later with minimal impact. I’m still not sure if posts like this or this belong under the Book Designer’s Notebook banner. It feels related to me, but readers who just want to read about book design may not see it that way.
Should these, dare I say, musings, live somewhere else? If you have an opinion, I’m curious to hear it.
I somehow escaped with just a some sniffles, sneezing, and a lot of sleep deprivation. PSA: Get vaccinated.
Though I do consider my current job a part of my creative practice.
I really appreciate personal insights like this. Hearing from many parents that childrearing prevents parents from reliably being able to access the kind of uninterrupted creative time I live for has helped me feel more solid in my decision not to have children. (This isn't me being snarky, either—it's really hard to feel confident about that decision when most of your friends are pregnant or plan to have kids!) I think it's also helpful because, as a childfree person, I'd love to help my parent friends access that creative time however I can: by babysitting so they can have a few hours to create, by connecting directly with their artistic side through conversation, etc. Everyone deserves to preserve that part of themselves, even if they can't work on their art on a regular basis.
I feel this. I think before parenthood I didn’t realize how essential art was to me. It felt superfluous. It is not. It is how I process the world, how I regulate, and how I connect. When I don’t make art things get very dark.
I only have one kid, but he’s 5.5 now and these last 6 months things are finally easier. He plays Zelda while I redesign my webpage. Or we draw together. And FINALLY we’re not sick all the time. The early years are brutal.