Anne Truitt's Daybook is an essential read for artist/mothers
One thing I love about re-reading a book is how you can find new guideposts for the season of life you’re in now. I also enjoy touching in with my younger self. My books are well-used. I write in their margins, I underline sentences, I make notes in the back. A faded receipt can bring back memories of the neighbourhood we no longer live in. So returning to a book I once loved can re-kindle a love affair. They are to me, what Proust’s madeleines were to him. Anne Truitt’s Daybook, a journal kept by the artist and mother is, for me, one of those books.
I first encountered Daybook when I was a new mom in Brooklyn. At the time, I was looking for someone who could show me how to be both an artist and a mother. The physical and psychic intensity of caring for a baby made it seem as though I was looking at my creativity through a telescope the wrong way around so that it looked very far away. The distance between myself and my creativity seemed so vast, and my obligations to my baby so all-consuming, I couldn’t see any practical way to get back to it.
What Truitt helped me understand is that artist and mother are not two separate categories, but rather, that the physicality of life must always be reckoned with. That physicality can express itself as making a bed or as making a poem. Both have practical value and both require energy. The question therefore of whether my creativity was worth “going the distance for” gradually became moot. My writing needed making as much as my daughter’s bed.
I recently watched the documentary, Artist and Mother by Joanna Sokolowski and Kate Trumbull-LaValle. In the opening scene one of the curators says, “In Western civilisation we have this idea of the artist. It’s about a 600 year old idea. This person is almost always considered a white man. He is a genius, and he will do anything for his art. A mother, on the other hand, also gives up everything, but she does so in the guise of selflessness. The child is supposed to be the centre of her universe. When you put these two terms together, mother and artist, then you’ve got a problem because you can’t give up everything for two different things.”
The next challenge I faced in those early motherhood years was practical. How can I write and look after my daughter? Now I’ve become a mom, has what I need to write changed? How can I make space for that change? How can I build the relationships I need to support my work?
Actually, some of those questions are ones I still ask myself today. If I could give advice to my younger self, perched on the edge of a child sized table, Ann Truitt’s Daybook splayed open next to my young daughter’s tea party, I would not insult her by saying “be patient”. Rather, I’d encourage her to get help. I’d tell her to find people who can support her as she journeys toward a new artistic identity. I’d also ask her to lower the bar to success. Rather than drooling over the latest titles at Barnes & Nobel, I’d ask her to give herself the space she deserves to uncover new ways of working.
If there’s one word I associate with being a mother-artist it is “adaptability”. The reason I keep revisiting Anne Truitt’s words is because as my children grow up — my son was born several months after I picked up Daybook at Community Bookstore, my local bookstore in Brooklyn — I adapt how I work again. As I revisit what is possible for me I encounter new challenges. For example, I can become tempted to raise the bar to success as the children get older. But if I keep doing that then I will never enjoy success. It will always be out of reach. At the same time, the desire to expand is ever-present and I feel called to be discerning. Yes I want to expand and grow my practice, but I also want to savour the work I’m doing now.
But isn’t that the conundrum of parenthood itself? There is always so much to get done, and there is always the next thing to prepare for. And at the same time we want to drink deep of whatever stage our children are in. We are aware of how fleeting our days are with them, and at the same time we feel we need to get ready for school, pack lunches, wash uniforms, etc.
If you feel called to make vital connections between your creative work and your work as a parent and caregiver, I urge you to read Daybook.
