On books and babies
Or why writing a book during maternity leave wasn't a wholly terrible idea
I wrote my first book, The Spirituality Gap, shortly after the birth of my daughter Jasmine in November 2022. Although the book had been permeating in my mind for years, the actual writing process took place around a tiny baby. This hadn’t exactly been my intention – the proposal had been out on spec for a good 18 months and by the time I fell pregnant, I had given up hope of a publishing deal. As fate would have it, though, I did get that publishing deal. The call came when my daughter was three weeks old.
I didn’t think I could do it at first – turn around 80,000 words within the subsequent eight months. That was only 300ish words a day. But I would need to produce those words in snatched intervals of time, all the while in a postpartum haze I can only describe as a fugue state. I re-read my proposal and barely understood the words I’d written – a bunch of nonsense syllable strings that swum around meaninglessly on the screen.
For a couple of days, I toyed with the idea of saying no. However, I’d been dreaming of this moment for years, and wasn’t going to renege on the dream just because of having had a baby. “Sure, I’ll do it,” I told my agent, and committed myself to an undertaking that felt thrilling and absurd in equal measure.
To begin with the absurd part. Jasmine was a terrible sleeper, even among a demographic that are known for being terrible sleepers. Minus a brief period when she was young enough to be swaddled, she woke up every hour during the night for her first year. The sleep I did get, in between wakeups, was instant and thick and deep. But often, my tiredness bordered on delirium.
I also felt shellshocked by the demands of new motherhood. It’s a subject I have yet to write about because the feelings around it are so mercurial and hard to pin down. For that, I defer to Lucy Jones’ brilliant book Matrescence. Let’s just say it felt a bit like I’d been sucked up and dismembered by a tornado. All the pieces of me were swirling inside it, yet to settle.
As for the thrilling part – it turned out that my addled state was surprisingly conducive to creativity. My usual analytical, left-brain-dominant mind simply wasn’t online in the same way. That probably made it harder to parse complex intellectual argument. But it also made it harder to succumb to my inner critic. Pre-baby, my inner critic had me in such a stranglehold, I often failed to write anything at all. Post-baby, I wrote quickly, readily, drinking up my allocated writing time in avid gulps. My inner critic would have had a lot to say about my output, but he (he is definitely a he) simply wasn’t allowed into the sanctum.
By the time Jasmine started nursery and I went back to my paid work, I’d managed to piece together my first draft. The first draft needed a lot of work still, and the editing process was laborious and a bit confronting. It was necessary though, and I was proud of what eventually came out of it. It’s a bit like the old saying, ‘write drunk and edit sober’ – ‘write while on high as a kite on postpartum hormones and edit while in possession of your rational faculties with the help of some very smart professionals’.
The book was eventually published in January this year, by which point I was pregnant again. My son Dylan was born in April. You could say that babies have bookended the book – which is a testament to how long the publishing process takes. This time round, I am on maternity leave proper. So far, I’m having a great time swanning round aimlessly with a little baby strapped to me, listening to podcasts and not writing any books. But I do find myself back in a similar place in some ways – a sense of becoming unspooled from my left brain, with creative energy at my disposal.
I have started playing round with ideas for what may become a follow-up book. It’s very early days, and I don’t know what’s a total non-starter and what’s likely to stick. I do know, though, that it’s only by being very open that anything of value will arise. If I rush to label a rubbish idea as a rubbish idea, I’ll never notice the glints of gold that are hidden in the pile of rubbish. If I reflexively dismiss my wilder trains of thought, I’ll never discover where they lead.
All this is to say, I think books and babies actually pair nicely. Babies make you more present. They plug you into something primal. They make a mockery of perfectionism (it’s hard to take yourself too seriously when you’re covered in projectile vomit). Toddlers, I am learning, might be a different story – I am too frazzled to write so much as my name after a day of wrangling my 2.5 year-old But if I can snatch a few moments during this time when I do feel creative, and when the toddler is at nursery and the baby is napping, I am sure as hell going to take advantage of them.
In the interests of flipping the bird to my inner critic, I am going to press publish on this now.