Care and Feeding: "All I’m hearing is a bunch of excuses."

[jadelennox]

Dear Care and Feeding, How does a parent maintain a creative hobby?

Dear Care and Feeding,

How does a parent maintain a creative hobby? I’m an artist, and although I’m certainly not famous, I was lucky enough to support myself on commissions and selling pieces for most of my adult life. I wasn’t expecting to be able to work nearly as much with a baby, but between general baby/toddler chaos and COVID-19 lockdowns, it seems like there’s never a moment where I have time to be creative. We live far enough north that we’re mostly stuck inside until April/May, and it seems like the only way to see time passing is my beautiful baby outgrowing her clothes or learning new words. I’ve tried to sit down and make something after my daughter goes to bed, but after a full day with a baby (understimulating but somehow still exhausting) my brain is mush, and I just want to be passively entertained by the TV or a podcast. Plus, it feels like I need to spend every second I’m not parenting cleaning, meal prepping, or dealing with something I couldn’t do while she was awake. I’m sure it just takes time management, but it feels like I don’t have enough hours in the day as it is, and all of my brain power goes to taking care of my daughter.

My husband works on remote sites for months at a time, so I’m basically single parenting and can’t ask him to help out with the baby or chores. I love my daughter more than anything, but there’s a part of me that can’t be fulfilled without creative expression, and I’ve been trying to shove it down since she was born. Even just being able to work on a project in stolen moments would be a relief, but I give everything I have to keeping our life together and it’s still not enough.

—Uncreative Parenting

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Dear Uncreative Parenting,

May I offer you some tough love here? All I’m hearing is a bunch of excuses. Millions of parents across America pursue their side hustles in all types of fields—and many make money in the process. If they can do it, why can’t you?

It could require you to work on your passion while your baby is sleeping—even if you want to be sleeping, too. It could mean that your house will be incredibly messy so you can get some stuff done. It could mean that you’ll find a nanny or recruit a family member/friend to babysit so you can focus on your dreams. If you talk to any successful person with young children, they will share similar stories of the sacrifices they made to make it to where they are now.

It truly comes down to how badly you want it. In other words, are you window shopping on your dreams or are you ready to do whatever it takes to achieve them? Best-selling author Brendon Burchard said it best: “Mediocrity begins the precise moment you swap the love for a challenge with the love of comfort.”

Great people do hard things, and I hope you’ll step up and accept the challenge to live your best life.

—Doyin

Comments

[jadelennox]

I'm being unfair, there's non-terrible answers to other letters in the same column. This one's a doozy, though.

[raven]

This answer is horrible, Doyin is horrible. He's always better than you, no matter what your problem, and if he can do it then you should feel bad you can't.

[conuly]

I want to burn this answer.

[lizardjay]

I was considering making this letter my first-ever post to this community because I thought it was so offensive. There's some tiny grains of an okay answer in suggesting to try and get some help around the house, but then there's..... the rest of the letter. Why so aggressive? I think he thinks he's being encouraging?

[jadelennox]

Yeah, like, it could mean that your house will be incredibly messy so you can get some stuff done isn't bad advice, in and of itself. But combined with the rest, the whole is just so cruel.

And it's shortsighted. Like, I can't get over the combo of "It could mean that you’ll find a nanny" with "If you talk to any successful person with young children, they will share similar stories". It's one of those things that makes people repost screenshots with hashtags like #AccidentallySocialist or #AccidentallySmashingThePatriarchy. Yes, Doyin, many successful people with young children have similar stories of being able to afford a nanny.

[xenacryst]

Flames from the side of my face. Fucking flames.

Good grief. Just buckle down and kill yourself, everyone else is. What's wrong with you that you can't be happy folding one paper crane and crying into your wine every night? If you want it so badly, I'm sure 5 minutes of sleep is all you need.

GAAAAAH

[jadelennox]

Also, I have about 7 side hustles, several of which pay, and even I know that "side hustle" and "driven people are successful at side hustles" is an incredibly toxic and dangerous framing.

[purlewe]

I have a friend who is already doing just this and she read this and she told me it made her want to lie down in the middle of the road and just die already.

This is the worst advice. I hope Doyin gets a lot of flak for this bc they should know how bad it is.

[jadelennox]

oh god. I hope your friend also read all the supportive comments for the LW around the internet, with actually good advice.

[tielan]

Yeah, there's a lot of flak for Doyin for their answer.

[minoanmiss]

Jesus Haploid CHRIST, Doyin.

Hey, LW. I don't have a baby, but my warranty expired a few years ago and I'm very tired. But I would die if I lost my creativity. From my experiences and observations of others' experiences:

1) I do small chunks of a project at a time. I write and I draw mostly, and I am used to writing a page or two and stopping or working on a section in color and stopping. The days of doing a whole painting in an afternoon are on hiatus for you.

2) This too shall pass. When your beautiful child is 6, 8, 10, you'll be able to set up your easel and paint again. Children need different kinds of care as they get older so remember that what you can't do today you can resume in five years.

Kiss the baby for me and get a good night's sleep. And ignore Doyin.

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I deserve to be paid whatever he got for that goddamn response.

[sovay]

I deserve to be paid whatever he got for that goddamn response.

Everyone who had to read it deserves hazard pay. Especially the letter writer.

[cynthia1960]

+1000 to both of you

[feldman]

The only thing missing from that answer is the MLM hard sell punchline bringing it home.

[frenzy]

Wowwwwwwww.

[ashbet]

I’m only now getting back into making visual art after a long hiatus, and this advice would have been hazardously and vomitrociously awful and damaging if I’d received it at my lowest point.

Parenting is an IMMENSE TIME AND ENERGY SUCK, and sometimes you just have to wait out the early-childhood years, but there is no part of this advice that actually helps the LW.

[azurelunatic]

Naomi Kritzer went RIGHT OFF and it's a good thread:
https://twitter.com/NaomiKritzer/status/1513916025749880836

[edenfalling]

That is an EXCELLENT thread!

[minoanmiss]

Oh YES and also YES.

[cynthia1960]

Só much wisdom there

[cereta]

I wasn't a single parent, and it was still all I could do to do Yuletide the year my daughter was born, never mind anything else. Doyin can go pound sand, jump in a lake, and then go to hell.

[mommy]

The answer to exhaustion is not to sleep less. The answer to not having a creative outlet is not to hustle to avoid mediocrity. And the answer to struggling with being a parent to a toddler is not to negatively compare oneself to "successful" people. This advice is terrible!

[ioplokon]

This and the previous letter are different situations but... It's normal to have times when you can't make art? The big plus to keeping your day job is that you *can* just hit pause on creative projects when you need to...

Edit: I got the situations mixed up between the 2 letters, but anyway, my point is, if you're not counting on your artistic production to make a living, you don't have to grind always all the time.

[castiron]

Has this columnist ever had butt-wiping responsibility for another person? If not, they need to shove this attitude up their ass.

Yes, mothers in particular often have trouble making their art a priority, and if this were a mother of teens then "buck up and make time for it" might actually be decent advice. This is the mother of a toddler, who's single-parenting much of the time and is in the situation I'm very familiar with of being utterly desperate for time alone but then so drained when that time comes that she can't do anything with it but veg. (And you can only let housework slide so far before you're in an environment that's so depressing you can't do art because you feel like shit when you look at the filth.)

I'm seeing some of myself in the LW. I've been trying to reboot my writing since my first child was a year old, and I've finally accepted that it's not going to happen any time soon, whether it's because of family obligations, depression, outside circumstances like Covid, or not wanting it enough. ("Not wanting it enough" looks one way if you've been socialized all your life to put other people's needs and wants above your wants and often needs; it looks very different if you've been told and shown all your life that you're entitled to pursue your dreams and to expect support from your loved ones.) I have other creative outlets that are more compatible with my life as it is and that keep my brain from frying, but if I had been a successful writer before I had kids, I'd be really unhappy now.

[lemonsharks]

I can think of some options, such as:

When husband IS home, husband is in charge of 80-100% of the household and baby management and LW works on her work.

Include a solo maker's retreat when husband is home.

If kiddo is old enough to be babysat by the tv, let the tv babysit. Measure screen time allowances in hours per day, not minutes per week. Let them watch encanto 73 times in a row. They're not going to be scarred for life or academically stunted over it.

If competent and interested friends and relatives are available, let them take the baby for a long weekend per month and create freely in that space. Lean on whichever set of adults has been pushiest about seeing more of the baby. Relax your parenting standards for your long weekend sitters: if baby comes back in the same condition you dropped her off, it does not matter if they (LW's parenting bugaboo). This is not the time to throw a first time mom tantrum over baby getting a conventionally grown produce or a cup of fruit juice or an entire 3 musketeers bar.

Lower your standards for housekeeping and meal prep.

Reduce the amount of baby stuff you have so there's less to keep tidy.

And, well, a year's amnesty from creating things (this is a creativity break, no guilt allowed) does wonders.

[ekaterinn]

JFC, did Doyin wander in from the Bad Advice column?