Writing Like A Mother

A Guest Post by Dr. Emily Taylor

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Most of my academic writing happened before I became a mom eight years ago. Our son arrived in 2016 right before I got tenure, and because I teach at a small liberal arts college, I haven’t had much pressure to publish anything at all. I’ve presented at conferences every year, and thanks to some fabulous mentors and dear friends who’ve encouraged and supported me, I’ve written a few other articles and book chapters (including one I deliriously wrote in the months after having our daughter in 2018). I’ve been engaged and active in my field (Caribbean literary scholarship), but my first book project is moving along so slowly sometimes I forget what I’m doing.

Trying to publish academic writing as a caregiver in the United States, in this political and economic climate, means there are many headwinds, including increasing anxiety about the survival of the humanities and institutions of higher education themselves. We might find ourselves paralyzed by hypothetical existential crises: why write if my institution may close? Why write if it feels like no one reads my work (aside from stern reviewers and an editor or two)? Why write when it is often uncompensated or even unacknowledged?

If you don’t have requirements to publish, or if you reach a stage in your career when it’s no longer absolutely necessary, facing these headwinds can make it easy to just close the figurative book on academic writing and publishing. And post-tenure, when service demands increase, when advising and mentoring become a larger part of our jobs, or when, to fight inflation, you have to teach overloads, there is often literally no time to write, and barely any time at all to think.

Caregiving in the Academy 

Becoming a primary caregiver to my children and an auxiliary caregiver within my immediate and extended family has transformed my relationship to writing. I had read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in college, but I didn’t fully understand it until we had babies and small children. I was too tired to think, even when I had childcare. My brain was consumed with their survival and my own healing, and at first I felt like a failure and mourned the loss of the life of the mind.

I’m fortunate to work at an institution that provides generous (for the U.S.) family leave for tenure-track faculty, and extremely lucky to have a department that fully supported my journey into parenthood. Many colleagues around the country were not so lucky when they had children, and the tenure process remains mired in its patriarchal design that rewards non-caregivers. Even with a paid semester of leave, when our children were babies and toddlers, it felt like it took all I had to commute to campus (an hour away), teach, meet with students, and fulfill my service obligations. Writing wasn’t on a backburner—it wasn’t even in the kitchen.

The pandemic hit when our second child was still a toddler, and like the rest of the country, I was suddenly trying to do my job with very little childcare. And then my father died, and it all felt automatic as I tried to navigate life through a cloud of grief. All I could do was what was absolutely necessary.

Academic Research as Intergenerational Legacy 

The isolation of the pandemic gave me a new perspective on my identity as an academic, something that has been slowly transforming as I learned how to be a mother. I realized I wanted my children to be proud of me, that my identity as a professor could help them see what they could become. As a first-generation college student, my work in higher education will most likely give my children advantages I never had. I also want them to see me doing difficult work, so instead of turning away from writing, I’ve leaned into it since motherhood in a way I never have before.

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Understanding my own mortality and what is necessary to raise the next generation has shifted my thinking about academic research and writing. I’m less interested in how doing this work will advance my own career (with the security of tenure) and more interested in how writing up our findings is so important because without it, my children’s generation and subsequent humans will lose the knowledge we currently have. Academic writing may have less immediate rewards, but it is vital for the future, in ways we probably can’t begin to imagine.

But the conditions on the ground are still not ideal. I work at a teaching-focused institution, where my course load ranges from 7-10 courses a year. My commute takes 6-10 hours a week. I live in South Carolina, where the legislature is targeting academic freedom (thankful to work at a private institution) and our state superintendent of education is actively working to ban books. I started my Substack newsletter after the fall of Roe and the triggering of South Carolina abortion bans to translate my training in Women’s and Gender Studies into public scholarship and bring a feminist lens to local and state issues.

It is mentally taxing, to say the least, on top of entering perimenopause and finding sleep cycles disrupted (again). When I was in graduate school, my dissertation advisor Karen McPherson taught me that we all have hot and cold times for writing, and that we should avoid doing things like housework during a hot writing time. But now I have no luxury of time—my writing is squeezed into the moments when I have childcare, and am not teaching, driving, or in a meeting.

Rest as Resistance 

I started planning the childcare for this summer in November of last year, determined to find a way to etch out more time for my book project (on how the Cuban cultural institute Casa de las Américas translated Caribbean Anglophone writers and became an important decolonial hub in the 20^th century). The summer plan was a thing of beauty: I planned three family vacations, eight weeks of camp, and declined in-person summer teaching.

And then the summer began and I realized, in between writing my newsletter, that I needed something I hadn’t planned for: down time. And so, I took it. I have napped, read for fun, watched television during the day. I was at an impasse with my book project and so I avoided it. We start the fall semester in a few days, and aside from a conference abstract, I wrote nothing for the book.

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But at this stage, I resolutely refuse to internalize this as an indication of my worth as a scholar or writer. I tell my students in all levels of my writing classes: do not internalize a writing problem as a character flaw. On a more macro level, I am now rejecting any association of self worth with labor, paid or unpaid. My value is not determined by how much parenting I do, or how much teaching, or how much writing. I chose that work, but taking a summer off to recharge was a wise decision, not further evidence that I’m an imposter that should be run out of the academy. And I solved the impasse, in a lovely meeting with my therapist, and it opened a path back into the book. I’ll put that time into my fall schedule, and it will maybe come together in little bits. Maybe my next sabbatical (coming up) will see the project fully realized. Whatever the process, I’ll approach it with the same care I extend to my students and children.

Now I’m writing like a mother.

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Emily Taylor is associate professor of World Literature and director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon and has published essays in Caribbean-Irish Connections, The Journal of West Indian Literature, The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, The Southern Quarterly, Caribbean Literature in Transition, and Ms. Magazine. She writes Hot Feminism: Letters from South Carolina on Substack.