July 22, 2021
Lara Ehrlich
Hi everybody, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest today is Margaret Adams. Before I introduce Margaret, thank you all for tuning in, and please chat with us during the interview. We’ll weave your comments into our conversation. If you enjoy the episode, please also consider becoming a patron or patroness on Patreon to help keep the podcast going. You can look up details on writermothermon-ster.com. Now, I’m excited to introduce Margaret. Margaret Adams writes short fiction, creative nonfiction, and essays. She’s a fiction editor for JMWW, and she was a Best American Essays 2019 Notable, the winner of the Blue Mesa Review 2018 Nonfiction Contest, and the winner of the Pacifica Literary Review 2017 Fiction Contest. She has also been published in a number of places that you can check out on the website. Originally from Maine, Margaret currently lives in the Navajo Nation where she works as a family nurse practitioner. She has one child who is 11 months old, born during the pandemic. She describes writer motherhood in three words as “still very new.” Pease join me in welcoming Margaret.
Margaret Adams
Hi, thank you for having me on the podcast.
Lara Ehrlich
Thank you so much for joining me. Tell me first about those three words, “still very new.” I mean, it’s kind of obvious. You had your little one during the pandemic.
Margaret Adams
Yeah, I was thinking about it, and I don’t feel like I have the authority to speak on this as much as I would like to. I also don’t know what it is like for me yet, because it’s been such a weird year. I have a feeling that I’m going to keep saying that. Like, “Oh, he’s only 8. I’m sure I’ll be figuring this out.” Like, “Oh, golly, he’s only 15. I’m sure I’ll be figuring this out.” It still feels new, and I have a feeling that it’s not going to go away.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, it’s funny how I hear that from so many other women on the show. You guys who are listening know that. People like you said with 15-year-olds, 25-year-olds, they’re still learning how to be a mother, so I think your experience is just as valid as anyone else’s. Tell me what it was like to be pregnant and to have a child and then to have a newborn during the pandemic?
Margaret Adams
I live and work at a hospital. In 2018, I moved from Seattle, where I had been working as a primary care provider part-time and writing part-time, to the Arizona/New Mexico border, to a hospital in the middle of the Navajo Nation, which is where I live right now. I live in hospital housing, as a nonnative person. I live in housing that’s for hospital employees, because they can’t live anywhere else on the reservation, so it was a really unique place to be when the pandemic started. There’s this hospital compound with the emergency room and the clinics, and the clinics shut down by the end of March. We had checkpoints set up and temperature checks, and the Navajo Nation went on lockdown. I know the pandemic has been a very different experience for many people, region to region, and the the nation that I’m in has took it very seriously with good reason, because it was a particularly hard-hit area. There were curfews, you couldn’t drive after 5 p.m. and before 8 a.m. or on the weekends, and I have to drive, like, seven miles to get my mail. When I first moved here, I was like, “I am a cyclist!” Because I had been living in the city and bike-commuting for a decade. I was like, “I’m keeping my identity as a cyclist,” and I tried to bike to the post office and totally wiped out on cattle guards. And it just was like, “Okay, no, I’m living rurally again.” When you have a curfew system like that, it was very isolating. It was an interesting time to be pregnant. I’d never been pregnant before, and I’d never lived through a pandemic before either. There was a lot of weird overlap. I really can’t pull those two experiences apart. Like today I was anxious and lonely and ate weird things that were at the back of my pantry. It’s like, pregnancy or pandemic? That could go either way.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah. I wasn’t pregnant during the pandemic, and that is exactly what I did, too. Something that I know you wanted to talk about, which kind of fits in here, is the anxiety of having kids, the anxiety that if we were to become mothers that we would then no longer be writers. Tell me a little bit about the pressure not to have kids, if we’re going to be a serious writer.
Margaret Adams
I remember when you first started tweeting about wanting to do this interview series. I got out my pen and paper, because I had been keeping a list. I think you had mentioned that you’d had a list like this, too, of women writers you knew who were also mothers. I found the more outwardly serious about writing I became, the more I started encountering an overly implicit pressure not to have kids if you’re going to be serious about it. I think with writing—and maybe other arts are like this, maybe other jobs are like this, other pursuits are like this—there’s this kind of feeling that if you’re going to do it, you need to sacrifice everything on the altar of that. I have always felt a little bit like something of an outsider, because I don’t work in publishing, I don’t have an MFA, and I don’t work in academia. I already have that feeling that maybe I was spread a little too thin in some ways. I think that having a job where I can work part-time that supports my writing, I feel like I’m kind of constantly under writing my own residency in that way. That’s how that math works for me. But that was a math that I had to come to with a decent amount of self-doubt and decision-making and talking to a lot of people on deciding, yes, I’ve started on this path in this way, and I’m okay with sticking with it. I had cut down to part-time work in medicine, and that was a really good balance for me. Then I was at this crossroads, thinking of throwing in being a mother. I really leaned on that list, like, okay, well, look at these people; they’re making it work—because so many more people in my life were saying, “Oh, well, obviously, if you’re going to be serious about being a writer, you’re not also going to have kids.” I was at a writing residency, and I’d been kind of feeling it out for a year and a half and talking about it, too, and I was like, “Yeah, baby, I’m gonna have a kid. I might do that soon.” And one of the residency directors was like, “Well, I thought you were serious about this.” And I was like, that’s it. I’m going out and getting pregnant. Like right now, as my giant act of rebellion, which is so funny to see the framing on that, because I feel like outside of the writing community, most women I know talk about the opposite thing, where they have pressure to have kids, and having a kid could be, for them, an unexamined or more conventional choice. For me, it was my rebellion. I don’t know how rebellious it really was or wasn’t.
Lara Ehrlich
All of that resonates with me, obviously, and I remember you shared your list with me, and some of those women on the list have since been on the show or are going to be on the show. Having those examples was really vital to me. Yes, you can do it. You can be a serious writer and a good mother and layer in a challenging day job as well. You and I share the fact that I don’t have an MFA or a job in publishing or in academia either. And you’re right, now that you mentioned that. I had the same feeling of already being an outsider, not having those things that are signposts of being serious in the industry. If you don’t have that, and then you also have a child, it’s like the last straw of being a serious writer. Have you found since that you’ve been able to continue writing?
Margaret Adams
A funny thing happened. When I first started telling other writers that I was expecting a child, and I was mostly sharing that with other writers who had children, I got a lot of advice to not even try to do that much in the first year. They were like, just let yourself off the hook now and and don’t do it. You talked to plenty of people who were like, okay, I’m expecting a child, so I’m going to write that thing in the next few months, and I was trying not to do that. It may have been a role in this, but once I found out I was pregnant, I finally completed a first draft of a novel, my first full draft of any novel, and this was something I had been trying to do for a few years. It felt like deciding to have a baby and committing to that was the facial tattoo of life decisions. After that, all of these things that I had been wary of committing to, like plot choices, were just, like, nothing. Like, I can just churn plot out, because who cares? That was such a lower pressure thing. So, I got a lot done during my pregnancy, and then I was still working on that project and continued to get a decent amount done in the first six, seven months of being a mother. Part of that was I had a really long maternity leave, which was really helpful. I’m starting to slow down a little, and I can’t tell if it’s going back to work or that natural pause in projects that happens where you get stuck for a bit. I’m still trying to feel out where I need to go with it now.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, that’s exciting. Well, Congratulations on finishing the draft. That is huge.
Margaret Adams
It’s hard to find somebody who doesn’t say that you have to write a novel and throw it out to write another one. So, I’m like, listen, worst case scenario, if I throw this out, at least I will have done that.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah. Well, you also had someone tell you you shouldn’t have kids, so maybe people are wrong with these all-encompassing pieces of advice. Just out of curiosity, and I have thoughts about which one it was, was the person who said that to you at a residency a man or a woman instructor?
Margaret Adams
It was a woman.
Lara Ehrlich
That’s what I would have said.
Margaret Adams
I think women are more familiar with the pressures and expectations. I’m just going to generalize a lot here about gender and parenthood, and there are exceptions to all of this, but I think there’s more pressure put on women in their role as mothers than there is pressure for men, at least as far as what society throws at you. Three years before I was ready to become a mother, I was like, I could totally become a dad right now. I am ready for that. I can handle that. It took a little bit longer for me to feel like I was ready to be a mother, because there’s so much expectation attached to that. I’ve actually found it really useful to spend time with writer dads, because maybe less is expected of them. They also have less internalized bullshit going on, like unnecessary expectations. Many of them seem so much more able to be like, “And today, I made time for my writing, and I am still a good parent,” and not have a complex over that. Sometimes that’s fun energy to be around and attempt to appropriate for my own.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah. As a listener and participant on the podcast, almost every woman here has talked about shame and guilt and the shame of closing the door and leaving your child on the other side. Again, not to generalize, but the fact that now almost 30, 35 women have said the same thing, there’s something there. This angst, that is possibly unique to writer mother monsters, so tell me a little bit more about that.
Margaret Adams
I listen to a lot of podcasts that are interviews with writers—part of the whole DIY MFA effort that I’ve been trying to do for a decade now—and initially, I listened to almost exclusively women, because women’s lives were more interesting to me, I’m sure in a very self-absorbed way, but whatever. At one point, I listened to an interview with a male writer for the first time in, like, three years, and it was because it was somebody’s spouse I was interested in, and the questions that the interviewer asked them were so different. It was really startling to me. There was no “what did your family think of that?” and “how do you balance your creative life with your family?” Those are questions that get asked a lot of women writers and they’re questions that a lot of us want the answers to. I’m here for that question, but those questions don’t get asked of male writers in the same way. I know that’s the whole reason why you have this space, to talk about this sort of thing, but sometimes it’s been fun for me to tab over and listen to those interviews and try to appropriate a little and see how that feels, to be a little more unapologetic and not have to be asked to account for leading a creative life and also having family and balancing that
Lara Ehrlich
How does it feel?
Margaret Adams
It’s kind of fun, sometimes. It’s like a costume sometimes, like I’m pretending this isn’t a thing. This feels very similar to a phenomenon that I started in Seattle. I started lying sometimes when I had to. When I wanted to go take writing time, I would tell my housemates that I was picking up an extra shift at the urgent care. It didn’t make a difference to them. It was one of those things like explaining to a non-writer why on a Friday night, you’re going to go to the public library to work on a book that they’re not going to see in the next two weeks. Non-writers find that very confusing. At some point, someone in my life was like, “Wow, this seems like a lot of work for a hobby.” And I was like, “Oh, God, don’t even start on that road with me.” There’s a lot that I could say about that, too. I wish that I had the full gumption and confidence to just say, “I am going writing and taking this time.” But I have a limited store of energy, and at a certain point, I just embraced “I picked up an extra shift,” in a way that people understand and then thinking, I wish that I had the competence and energy to not say that right now. But it sure does work. It’s one less thing to have to think about.
Lara Ehrlich
And it is work, right? I mean, it is work. It’s not the urgent care, but it is an extra shift, essentially, so that is maybe not quite a lie. Sort of a tangent from motherhood, tell me a little bit more about being a writer and a health practitioner and what that looks like, because I think that’s such a unique combination. As you mentioned, so many people who are serious writers are also in academia or publishing. Tell me about this dual career that you have.
Margaret Adams
I started writing in my early 20s. I started writing sooner than that, but I knew I wanted to take it seriously then. I got a BA, straight out of high school, and after I did that, I did a series of seasonal jobs for a while. For my first job out of college, I went to Antarctica, and I worked at South Pole Station as a heavy equipment operator and general assistant in a mechanic’s shop. That was really fun, and I was able to do a lot of writing around that. It fed a need that I had to be doing something that was very concrete and immediate and tactile. I did that for a few years. I was realizing that I wanted to write more, but I also needed something to anchor me. I went to nursing school because I was interested in nursing, but honestly, just as much because I was interested in having a job that I could do that would be concrete and pragmatic and could be turned towards social justice purposes and would pay me enough that I could do it part-time so I could write. Then, the longer I have stuck with that—I went from RN to nurse practitioner—it’s been very helpful for me, constitutionally. I’m actually not as much of an introvert as I think many writers are. I like getting out of the house and talking to a lot of people. I’m very prone to getting very into my head, like way too into my head, so working in healthcare means that it’s not just navel gazing. I have to literally look at other people’s belly buttons multiple times a day when I go into work. It helps me get into a different space, and it keeps me balanced.
Lara Ehrlich
That was amazing. Just the belly button trajectory there. I was stunned by that. It’s interesting to hear that the writing came first and the medical career was in support of the writing. I feel like often, at least those I’ve heard who are writers and in medicine, it’s sort of the opposite, that people have a medical career, and then they were like, “Oh, now I have something to write about. Now I want to write.
Margaret Adams
Yeah, I hear that a lot, too. And I will run into other medical writer people, and I do this weird dance where I’m always like, “Oh, no, no, I’m a writer medical person, not a medical writer person.” I appreciate you articulating it the way you did, because I had not been able to articulate that as well in the moment, when I’m trying to do this weird distinction—because there is a sub-genre of people who write about medicine, and it’s a place that can be pretty fraught. I think Kendra was talking about, on one of your recent interviews, having worked teaching in prisons, and not wanting to write about that and was talking about the witness hood writing. I find a lot of medical writing can be witnessed, heard writing. And that makes sense, because so much of medicine involves a lot of secondary trauma and a lot of these vicarious experiences that people can write about. I find that to be something that I frequently want to do and don’t want to do, and it’s compelling and fraught. I have two ways where I can swing this for myself, as much as for anyone else. One is I made this really pragmatic decision on how I was going to support myself as a writer, and the other one is that I didn’t have the courage or the confidence to just be like, “I want to be a writer, so I’m going to do writing full-time. I’m very happy that I picked the way that I have, but I also have moments, like, Ooo, an MFA, that looks like so much fun.
Lara Ehrlich
I hear you on that. Let’s talk about writing full-time, because it’s such a dream, right? I think every writer starts writing, and you have that book or the project and you’re like, okay, now I’m going to write full-time. And then the more you learn about the industry, the more you’re like, okay, that’s sort of a pipe dream for most people. We do need a secondary job, whether it’s teaching or whatever else. I think it’s pragmatic but also very smart to think so early on, “I want to be a writer; how can I support that?” Because it will probably take a while to be able to write full-time.
Margaret Adams
Yeah. It’s hard to figure out what works for you, too. I think different things work at different times. I’ve told myself a lot of stories about how I’m best able to write. I lived in cities for 10, 15 years—I lived in Baltimore and Seattle and Madrid—and I would write almost exclusively at coffee shops or libraries. Then I moved out to the Navajo Reservation in 2018, and I don’t have coffee shops or libraries that are very accessible. I can drive 45 minutes to New Mexico, and there’s a coffee shop there that I can go to, but that’s a tough sell for a writing session, when you’re looking at how much time you have locked in. After that, it’s a three-hour drive for a bookstore. So, I was learning how to write from home. And now, I am a morning person, and I’ve always told myself I can only really write in the mornings, and—surprise!—I created another little morning person. And my little morning person is always up by 5. I talked to other writer moms who were like, “Yeah, I just get up before them.” I can’t get up at 3. That’s not a thing I can do. So, I’m trying to learn how to write in the evenings. Before I got pregnant, I went and did two residences back-to-back, and I was able to write full-time for eight weeks, and it did not work for me. And I wrote full-time for a year in my early 20s, too, and I thought, that didn’t work for me then, but I’ll try it again. In my mid-30s, it also didn’t work. I can’t say it totally didn’t work, because I did get stuff done, but I was miserable. Like, really miserable. I think if I had some writing days and some non-writing days, that would be a good balance for me, but full-time writing, that’s a struggle.
Lara Ehrlich
Is it sort of what you were saying before about being somebody who needs to be out among people?
Margaret Adams
Yeah, I get too in my head. I mean, I haven’t done an experiment where I see how far I go and see if I can eventually get out of my head. I don’t know if I want to know what that looks like.
Lara Ehrlich
Tell me more about the logistics of writing, because, again, what you’re saying here resonates with me. I used to get up early before work, right before I had a child, and I’d write in coffee shops. I had a routine, like, this is when I write. And then of course, when you have a child, my daughter was up during my writing time, and then once she actually started sleeping during that time, she became an evening child. And then I was like, okay, so now my evening routine doesn’t work anymore. It’s kind of that shifting and the need to become a flexible writer. I never would have thought that for myself, early on, when I was so regimented, because you hear that philosophy to write at the same time every day and write for two hours or whatever. Tell me a little bit more about the kind of writer you’ve become since you’ve become a mother.
Margaret Adams
I have access to really wonderful, affordable childcare, so I’ve been giving myself these three-hour blocks a couple times a week to write, and there’s a lot of pressure on those blocks, and I haven’t yet figured out how how to use them as well as I would like to. Talking to a lot of other people who don’t have a ton of time to write, they do a lot of thinking and preparation for it, and then they sit down and get done what they need to get done. It’s still a work in progress for me. I’m still trying to figure it out. I’m also trying to take a lot of notes, when I don’t have time to sit down and do anything else, and that is really helpful. That’s something I did a lot when I first started working as a nurse practitioner. I worked full-time as a nurse practitioner for two years, which I think was important then, to kind of gain clinical experience and get good at that job. But it was a very hectic time for me as a writer, and I took a lot of notes. Now, early in parenthood, I have no routine. I also work in an emergency department, so I don’t have weekdays or weekends. I never know what day of the week it is. My husband is also working in an emergency department, so he also has a weird schedule. We work evenings, mornings, nights—there’s no real routine. In some ways, having a baby has been almost grounding, which is kind of hilarious, right? You’re like, “Oh, yeah, the baby is the only one with a schedule in the house that’s regular. That’s not great.
Lara Ehrlich
That’s interesting to hear. I’ve sort of found the opposite, actually, like I used to have a schedule, and yes, having child is grounding, but also, weekends don’t really exist anymore. When you have a child, even if you have a weekend, it’s caretaking. It’s not restful. You don’t really have vacations anymore. That’s interesting that having a baby grounded you and your husband.
Margaret Adams
I mean, it’s been chaos, I will say that. It’s just chaos, when one person in the house is supposed to be sleeping at certain times. That does not mean that my child is sleeping at those times. But there’s at least the aspiration there.
Lara Ehrlich
That’s all we can do is have aspirations. We have a question from Anna, and this is a good time to bring this up. She’s interested in the intersection of writing and medicine. Does one impact the other more?
Margaret Adams
It’s a good question. I was a writer before I was in medicine, and so I definitely feel more strongly in that role—not as competent in that role; I feel like being a writer is pretty amorphous. Everyone’s like, “Once I get one piece published, I’ll feel like a real writer,” “Once I get a book published, I’ll feel like a real writer,” and, “Once I get that review, I’ll feel like a real writer.” This many years, and I don’t feel like a real writer, because the bar is always moving. I do feel like a real nurse practitioner. But I feel more grounded in being a writer. Being a writer working in medicine, it’s a lot of making narratives and talking to people about their narratives. I think it’s a little helpful. It certainly makes it extremely enjoyable, and enjoying it is definitely helpful. It’s impossible not to get material from medicine for the writing. For a long time, I really resisted being a medical writer, because that is a sub-genre. But I can’t not write about it, because there’s so much there, and it is very interesting to me. I pull a lot from this and put it into my writing, content wise, and I’m not talking about specific patient stories, but it’s such a weird place of human interaction, where you’re strangers, but it’s also very intimate. And it’s very high stakes. That lends itself to material for writing very easily and very quickly. I find it to be a really productive intersection for both. I don’t know if being a writer makes me better at medicine, but it makes me enjoy it a lot more.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, I can understand that. How has motherhood changed your writing? Has it changed the content or the form of your writing?
Margaret Adams
I don’t know yet. And that’s a question I’ve been asking myself. I did notice that when I decided I wanted to become a mother, suddenly I got a lot nicer to my mother characters. A lot nicer to them. But that was before I even was a mother. That was in that pregnancy period, when I noticed that change. And I became much more confident about making choices. And a lot of times, it’s short stories and short form, not wanting to take the risk of moving forward with something like a novel, thinking, if I do this, and I get this far on this project, and it doesn’t work out, how’s that going to feel? And then after I decided to make a human, this feels like way less pressure, so that got a lot easier. Those are all changes that happened before I even met my kid, though. I’m hoping to have a clear answer for that in another year. I don’t know if I will or not.
Lara Ehrlich
Go back to the conversation at the beginning, where you always feel like a new parent, no matter how old your kid is. I’m still waiting to find out how motherhood is impacting my writing. Maybe 20 years from now, we can look back and find out. I love what you’re saying about the stakes of writing, of making decisions in writing, feeling less fraught, having made that big decision of having a child. That really resonates with me. I will share that I angsted over the decision to have a child or not for all the reasons that we’ve been talking about. Tell me about your decision process, if you’re comfortable doing that. You hinted at why you finally decided yes.
Margaret Adams
It wasn’t just because of that one personal [experience]. It had been brewing for a little while. I had started talking to non-writers about the pressure that I was perceiving not to have children from within the writing world. Again, I don’t know how much of this is perceived or not. I have some doubts on that, because it was something I was nervous about, and I tend to take, like many of us do, the thing that I am nervous about and project on other people. If I have this dream of pursuing writing in a certain way to a certain point, and I’m nervous that becoming a parent will be a problem for that, and then I talk to other writers about that and say I’m nervous about it, it’s natural that they’ll be like, “Yeah, maybe that’s something to think about.” I can take that and interpret it as they told me it was a bad idea, and actually it was just me wondering out loud if it was a bad idea. So: huge grain of salt with all of that. But I was talking to non-writers about it, and they were like, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” It was really interesting to see that perspective. I think we’re socially at a point where it’s much more acceptable to choose not to have kids, but there’s still plenty of people who choose not to have kids who get a lot of shade for it from people in their lives. I just had a really hard time pulling apart what I really wanted and what various social pressures were coming at me. It’s tough to figure that one out sometimes. I knew that I was getting pressures and different directions, and I knew that that was going to affect me, and I was trying to make decisions and figure out what I wanted, knowing that that was also there—and knowing that I was, you know, I’m somebody who feels those things and internalizes it. So, trying to figure out what I really wanted was hard. I had this really kind of dumb moment. It’s almost an embarrassing story, because my life was in no way in danger, but I was running during what turned into a big thunderstorm, and there was a lot of lightning near me, and I perceived that my life was in danger at that moment, even though, retrospectively, it totally wasn’t. I had one of those really melodramatic moments where I was like, “Oh, no. But I haven’t written a book or had a baby yet.” And I was like, well, that’s clarifying. Those seem to be two things that you would really like to do, so you may as well try to do both of them.
Lara Ehrlich
You know, take the flash of clarity where you find it, right? Were you always trying to figure out what you wanted from the time you were young? Or did you want one thing when you were growing up and then you sort of switched gears and wanted something else? What did young Meg want?
Margaret Adams
I think I assumed that I was going to have kids, but I didn’t think about it that hard. Then I started making less conventional choices, and once I made one less conventional choice that went into another one, and my whole community changed. By my mid-20s, most of my world was comprised of seasonal workers, who definitely were not assuming that they were going to have kids. It was less that I had a conscious thought process with it and more that it stopped being an assumption. Then I went from that circle to medicine, where there was an acceptance no matter what I was going to do there. And then the writing world, which we’ve talked about.
Lara Ehrlich
That’s interesting, the shifts in communities and how that impacts what you perceive you want for yourself, or what you should wish for yourself, or what you can’t hope for.
Margaret Adams
In my early 30s, I had started thinking about it more. I said to a friend, like, “Oh, maybe I’ll have a kid,” without missing a beat. This particular friend was like, “Don’t kowtow to social pressures.” And I was like, “Yep, that’s my current community.” I had a lot of support for not having kids as much as pressure in any direction. There’s something to be said for having tons of choices in life. There’s a lot of privilege that comes out of that whole decision.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about living in the Navajo Nation and what it’s like to mother and to write there, especially in an isolated community that you’re, in some ways, an outsider in.
Margaret Adams
It’s another country, and I have a very particular place in it. It’s a little bit like being an expat, in some ways. One thing is, I always want to write about it, and I do not want to write about it, because I feel like writing about living on the Navajo reservation as a nonnative is like writing about the country that you study abroad in. I don’t really have any authority to talk about it. That one’s tricky for me. For me, it’s a little isolated. I live very far from my family. My family is in the Northeast, in Maine, and for many other people who live here, this is the exact opposite of that, and they’re surrounded by their family. It’s a much more concentrated version of what I already experienced with medicine, where I feel inspired to write about things that I observe or learn about, from seeing other people’s lives, but it’s also not my life to write about, so I have to constantly figure out where I fit into that and what I do feel comfortable doing with art.
Lara Ehrlich
I want to dig into that a little bit more because although I don’t have that same situation or frame of reference, I wonder sometimes about being a white, privileged, essentially middle-class woman, and whether my stories have a place.
Margaret Adams
Yeah, I mean, white women are what? Like 70 percent of publishing or something like that. Like, my voice is out there. Not necessarily me personally, but yes, me. It’s definitely something to think about. This is a bit of a tangent, but it’s also something I’ve thought about with wanting to write about the experience of being a mother. It is this crazy experience, and I want to write about it, and everything I want to write about is just so cliche. I don’t know if this has happened for you. I was 35 when I got pregnant, and I had been taking care of pregnant people, I had taken care of new moms, and I wanted to get out a megaphone and be like, “No, they really kick you! It’s wild!” Like, I had nothing new to say. But everything that wasn’t new that I wanted to say felt huge to me. It’s been a project of mine—which has so far been wholly unsuccessful—in my note taking of the last 11 months, to try to get down these details and articulate what has been so world-shattering about this experience, because it’s really shattering. And all of the words are words that I have heard before, that did not strike me as world-shattering before I experienced them. What a fun project for a writer, right? Even if I never crack that one. At a certain point, writing about parenthood is going to be writing about my childhood, and that’s definitely not going to be my story. That’s their story. Right now, it feels like my story, and so there’s that confusion over whose story it is. I see that confusion in wanting to write about medicine, I see that confusion when I wanted to write about living on the Navajo Nation for three years. And then it gets as personal as how much do I write about my kid? And my answer is to write about all of these things but, you know, in my journal.
Lara Ehrlich
Exactly. But it’s such a catch 22, isn’t it? I feel like in literature, motherhood is disparaged. Women writing about motherhood or womanhood is not serious literature. And yet, at the same time, it’s like, what could be more dramatic or serious than those things? But then how do you write it in a way that’s not cliche, even though there isn’t actually a place for it in the literary canon? It’s such a laden thing to write about motherhood from a white, privileged perspective, which is such a valid perspective, but it’s like, so why add my voice? It’s very fraught.
Margaret Adams
It’s like the one thing that’s been done. You’re like, no one’s done this, except for people just like you. Have you ever seen the movie “Fargo”?
Lara Ehrlich
No, I’ve seen the show, but not the movie.
Margaret Adams
I think it’s “Fargo.” It features a chief of police, I think, who’s super pregnant the entire movie, and it is not about her being pregnant at all. She just happens to be pregnant, and there’s no weird running gags about her forgetting things or throwing up. It was kind of groundbreaking, in a way—a movie that featured a pregnant woman that wasn’t about pregnancy. I don’t really know how much of that we’ve seen since then. If people have other great examples, email them to me, because I’m super curious. I’ve been thinking that it would be really fun to write a novel that did that for the postpartum period, and started taking notes where the book has nothing to do with postpartum—totally separate plot points, but the heroine is just walking around in a nice diaper for the first week.
Lara Ehrlich
I love that. You have to write that. How can you do it in a new way that feels revelatory and groundbreaking? I love that.
Margaret Adams
I think the problem might be in the question of how it is that something that feels so big is also kind of so cliche. And I think when you make it the full topic, when motherhood is the focus, it’s hard to find something that feels like it gets at it, so I’m trying to come at it indirectly.
Lara Ehrlich
Tell it slant, right? Yeah, I love that.
Margaret Adams
Yeah. Do you have some favorite books that are concerned with motherhood that you think do it well?
Lara Ehrlich
Oh, my gosh. See, now you put me on the spot, where it’s like, I’m thinking of every woman who’s been on the show. But I’ll give an example somebody who’s not on the show, whose name I can never pronounce. Elena Ferrante wrote this book [“Days of Abandonment”] about a woman who is a mother, and she has two kids, and she’s going through some kind of crisis where she can’t get out of her apartment with them. Things keep happening that prevent her from leaving the apartment. Like, she’ll be walking towards the door and notice that there are dishes in the sink that she has to do. And so she’ll do the dishes, and then a glass will break in the sink, and she’ll cut herself and she needs a band aid, and on the way to get the band aid, something else happens. And the dog gets poisoned somehow, and then her son is throwing up, and then the door won’t open. It’s unclear as to whether there’s a problem with the doorknob or she’s forgotten how to open the door. And it’s not about motherhood. She’s a mother, but she’s not a new mother. It’s just the sense that I think all who are listening can relate to, where you just can’t reach the thing you need to do because there are all these other things in the way, and sometimes it feels like you’re trapped within this never-ending cycle of trying to keep your life together.
Margaret Adams
Have you read Lydia Kiesling’s book [“The Golden State”]? That’s a road trip novel with a small child.
Lara Ehrlich
No, tell me more about that one.
Margaret Adams
It is an experience. It doesn’t have a lot of breaks in each page, which just feels so perfect. Every chapter is a single day, so you start a chapter like a day, and then you just go through it, and then at the end, you’re like, “Ahhh, God.” Like, that’s such the experience of a day, right? From first waking up to that time, once it happens.
Lara Ehrlich
And then there’s that “you can finally sit down for 10 minutes.”
Margaret Adams
Yeah. I think she did a really good job at writing that. I read it before I decided to have a kid, and I still decided to have a kid. It does a good job at capturing both the exhaustion of that and also the joy.
Lara Ehrlich
Yes. I think you you hit the nail on the head with it’s less telling the story of motherhood and more settling you in a very disquieting way into the experience of motherhood, where motherhood isn’t the story, but you feel what it feels like to be in this car with a child for a road trip or in this apartment where you can’t get things done you need to get done.
Margaret Adams
Yeah, I’m seeing people do that with form in a way that I really appreciate.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, tell me more about that.
Margaret Adams
Just what I was saying with the line breaks in the chapters, the structure of that. That’s interesting, too, because when I have talked to women about how their writing has been changed by parenthood, one of the things that several people have said is they started writing in fragments and stitching fragments together, because that was what they were able to do. On the production end of things and the writing of things, this is the opposite. It is not a fragment. It is a long experience of a chapter, and yet, as a reader, it replicates the experience of being a parent for a day so well. I don’t know how she managed that. That worked really well.
Lara Ehrlich
I think form is something I’ve heard a lot of women say on the show, too, is the thing that has changed the most—and exactly what you’re saying, with fragmentation. It’s like the way we think has changed. Yeah, you can’t really follow through with a full thought when you have a child, or a conversation.
Margaret Adams
Yeah, or at least not one that is your own. You certainly have full, long-sentence days, but they are so consumed with another person.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, that’ll be interesting, as you said, to look back later, when we can see how motherhood impacted form or content. It’s interesting to hear, and it’s not universal, but that motherhood seems to impact form, possibly more than content.
Margaret Adams
Yeah, which is interesting. I’m definitely leaning more towards fragments out of necessity. I started looking back at this notebook I’ve been keeping and doing observations throughout the first 11 months now of my son’s life, and I found an entry from Sept. 1, where I was just beating myself up for not working more on my novel. And he was eight days old. I read that and just threw it. Like, I really thought that that was a reasonable thing for me to be putting down on paper at that moment. “Oh, my God, I haven’t worked on my novel for a week.” I was like, no.
Lara Ehrlich
It’s crazy. When I went to the hospital, you know, you pack your bag and everything. I had the Pushcart Anthology to go to the hospital and give birth.
Margaret Adams
That’s funny. That is really funny.
Lara Ehrlich
Why do we do this? Like, oh, yes, I’ll have time to sit here and read the best literature from the last year. No. If anything, I should have read a magazine, and I did not even have the brain space to read a magazine, much less the Pushcart.
Margaret Adams
I had my son at the hospital right here where I work, so I didn’t really have to go that far. I went 200 yards. And because it was during the pandemic, I am fixated on something to worry about because there’s so many things that I was worrying about. One of the things about working in medicine is you have a lot of the worst-case scenarios very vividly in your head because you’ve seen them, but of course you have, because you see the outliers. I was obsessed with the fear that my partner would have an asymptomatic positive COVID test and wouldn’t be allowed to be with me during labor. Labor is such an out-of-time-and-space experience that I was very glad that he was able to be there for him, but honestly, I was on a different plane. It’s funny because women who had had children were like, “Honey, it’s not gonna matter that much.” Like, it matters, but how much is it gonna matter? And they’re right.
Lara Ehrlich
Yes. Not, of course, to disparage the partners, but it’s very in your own body.
Margaret Adams
I mean, like any other human, you’re very focused on your own experience at that time. For good reason.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, pushing out another human being out of you.
Margaret Adams
Thank God you had your Pushcart.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah! It sat next to me in my bag for however many days. But why do we have the expectations? Why did I expect myself to read great literature while giving birth? And why did you, eight days after having a child, expect yourself to work on a novel? Where does this come from?
Margaret Adams
I was really thinking I was being very reasonable when I wrote that down, which also makes me wonder what other unreasonable things I’m expecting of myself right now.
Lara Ehrlich
Well, you’re in the thick of it now, too. I mean, you’re 11 months in, and that’s, like, all the big milestones. And then, you know, he changes.
Margaret Adams
Thank you very much for talking to me.
Lara Ehrlich
Oh, my gosh, thank you for coming on and for sharing all of your thoughts and your experiences as a new mother and as a nurse practitioner during a really incredible year. And thank you, also, for all of your work over the last year keeping people safe.
Margaret Adams
Thank you for having this podcast. I really appreciate it.