The Mom Salon | January 2022

Mother-Writer

By Shanthy Milne I recently came across an idyllic-looking writers residency for women — a beautiful countryside cottage complete with log-fire and a courtyard garden. What made it particularly idyllic (but simultaneously inaccessible to me) was the absence of any child-related paraphernalia. This got me thinking about Virginia Woolf’s idea that in order to write, a woman requires both her own money and a “room of one’s own”.

I imagine I’m not the only writer within Motherscope’s community to have put the finishing touches to a piece of writing whilst hiding in the bathroom. I can often be found writing there, leaning my back against the door and trying to ignore the paint chips flaking to the floor with each pounding of little fists on the other side.

I’ve heard stories from other mothers-writers of novels completed in cars, or even inside cupboards where, if you’re lucky, you may be afforded a few minutes of peace before being discovered by your children.

But despite the inherent hurdles and interruptions we face as motherwriters, I’m conscious that my writing owes its greatest debt to motherhood.

I began writing about motherhood several decades before I truly knew anything of it. As a child, I turned to poetry as a means of coming to terms with my complex and often fraught relationship with my mother.

A decade later, I was still writing about motherhood, this time at university where I obsessed over literary deconstructions of the mother, honing in on the ways the maternal body was altered or corrupted in gothic novels.

Yet another decade later, when I finally became a mother myself, I was hit by an intense wave of often ambivalent emotions which opened my eyes to motherhood in ways that had previously evaded me. The sudden rush of extreme love took my breath away, but it was juxtaposed by anxieties and an almost incapacitating loss of identity. As a writer, the process of mother-becoming exposed me to layer upon layer, unchartered feelings 5