Of Mothers, Writers, and the Need to Create

"'I have led a toothless life,' he thought. 'A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on- and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.'" -Jean Paul Sartre, The Condemned of Altona

I had the most amazing day yesterday. I was listening to Oliver Burkeman and he made a compelling case for just doing it anyway. Life is never going to be ideal. You will never be fully prepared. You will never feel fully qualified. There will always be a million reasons not to do a thing. But sometimes, you just have to do it anyway.

So I did. I ended my walk. I sat at the computer, and I started a website for my writing. It was like I was running upstairs to do the laundry. I just sat down with a kind of confident stroke of the keys, found the best option for me, and carried forth as though I had planned to do it all week. One step after the other, I answered questions, filled out forms, swapped out photos, and chose a design all like I was simply picking up groceries from a list. It was as if that thing had been there all along, just waiting for me to get around to it. I didn't sit and wonder what I would do. I just carried on.

I started writing regularly in August of 2024. But I have been writing my whole life. I did so after explaining how much better it made me feel to write. My friend said, "then this is the thing you need to make a priority." She was right. I had no real idea what I would write about but chose to commit to doing it every day. It's something you hear a lot of writers talk about. Just doing it every day. It wasn't something I shared. And for a while, that was enough. The reason I write is to understand myself and what I think about things. It's a form of expression that needs an outlet. But when you just randomly doodle all your thoughts and never prepare them for public viewing, they stay in that kind of unprocessed state. You stay in that kind of unprocessed state. The raw material is there, but you haven't actually cleaned it up and drilled down into the heart of what you actually want to say. You meander because you can. You never get to the point, because you don't have to. To edit, to make sense to another, requires a totally different approach. And what it does is create a deeper sense of knowing for yourself. Salman Rushdie said, "A lot of your skill as a writer comes from knowing who you are and what you have to say to the world." This is the essence of why I am choosing to put my writing on a public platform. Unless I tell anyone about this little website, it will most likely be lost to the vast sea of data that flows on the world wide web. But it might not. It's the might not that forces me to decide exactly what I have to say to the world.

Resistance always shows up for me in the way of self-doubt. Well, that and laundry.

I have zero credentials.

I will only ever be deriving my ideas from others.

It won't even always be "the greats". Too often, it will be people who have studied the greats and can explain them much more clearly to me, the idiot.

Living or dead, there are already too many writers who are far better than me.

What could I possibly have to add?

But that makes no sense. Nothing speaks to me like a living writer. The dead ones have so much wisdom. They said it first. Perhaps they even said it best. But they didn't say it during my time. They didn't say it within my world and the current zeitgeist. Even if I don't hit the mark, we will always need contemporary voices to revisit old ideas.

And you really don't know what's going to hit you. Of the hundreds of authors I have read, some of the most unknown ones who have had the greatest impact on me. There is no rule that writing means anyone must like it, much less everyone. But I have my very own unique point of view and it just might be one that someone somewhere finds useful.

If I had a PhD and worked in a university, my wrestling with the big questions, (aka navel-gazing) would be scholarly and necessary - an answer to the questions on behalf of all of humanity.

However - I'm just a mom. My husband works a lot and my role has been essential - if unremarkable. I clean house. I wash clothes. I make meals and coordinate schedules. The labor that takes up the most time and intensity is invisible.

But, if not mothers, then who really is most qualified to ponder the complexities of everyday life? Who feels the weight of societal expectations more? If love and touch are the difference between life and death for a child, then who grapples more deeply with what makes us human than a mother? Who can speak to the paradoxes that exist in love if not a wife and a mother? Who better to ponder life than those most actively engaged with as many aspects of it as mothers are?

But the real reason I do this? Because I have to. Because there are really very few people I know who actually want to discuss these things. No one wants to read what I read and chat about it. Just like a racehorse needs to run, my brain needs to seek and find. When I don't, all that unused mental energy turns back in on itself inside of me like a kind of disease. On some level, we all have to create. We all have to find that thing that makes us feel alive. Unspent creativity seeps from us—onto those around us, back into ourselves—like radioactive waste.

Sometimes creativity earns us money. Sometimes it’s practical. Sometimes we’re good at it. But often, we’re not. And still—we must. You have to do the thing that feeds you, even when you’re terrible at it. Even when others do it better. Even when no one sees, hears, or reads it. Because self-expression is the only way to do what Sartre described so simply: prove yourself to yourself. It is the gift you give yourself—offered to the world not for acceptance, but as an act of self-acceptance.