Rufi Thorpe & Making the Most of Myself

I'm finally myself. What if motherhood ruins it?

The irony of this entire inquiry is that I spent most of my twenties trying and failing to throw my self away. 

I hungered desperately after a pre-made role to fit myself to, a readymade life I could take down off a shelf. I tried on careers and relationships with an eye toward finding the one that was the most complex, the most intricate and detailed. I assumed, I realize now, that becoming a person was like choosing a house—and I’ve always believed that built-to-order ones were gauche. 

No, I thought, the best thing to do was to find a beautiful place that already existed, preferably something historic and strong, with traditional bones and magnificent mouldings, the older the better. Of course, there’d always be the requisite renovation, but at least you’d have a framework to start with: a scheme for making sense of all the options.  

The empty lot or open space is, I suppose, as daunting as the blank page: there’s nothing there to work with. 

I felt oppressed by the idea of having to invent myself from scratch. I did not want to wake up every day to the renewed existential demand that I make it all up as I go along. I believed that if only I could find the right persona, I could finally be free. It’s something that’s always appealed to me about motherhood, actually: its all-encompassingness; the way that “mother” is a container into which a woman may unload her self, irreproachably. 

As exhausting as it is to be a caretaker, to keep another living being alive, there is something seemingly restful about the built-in imperatives, the way that mothering’s immediacy eliminates a universe of unknown, innumerable options. As Jenny Offill puts it in Dept. of Speculation, that seminal Mother-or-Monster text: “For once, I didn’t have to think. The animal was ascendant.”

But I have also never been able to offer myself up entirely. Looking back now, I can see that when it came right down to it, I always pulled back from the ledge. I was chaotic and unfinished, but I was jealous of my potential, all the things I might turn out to be. When it came time to go all-in or bail, I usually bailed. 

I used to think this tendency to jump ship was a sort of allegiance to freedom—that I was protecting the possibility of trying something new. But now I see in my hesitancy the seed of a survival instinct: I suspected that if only I could tolerate the discomfort of becoming for long enough, I might eventually coalesce.  

And, miraculously, I did. Today I have a past and a purpose, a passion and a partner, and all of these things feel earned, organically mine. Written on a blank page rather than borrowed from someone else’s script. 

What would having children do to that hard-won balance?

*

Writer Rufi Thorpe, who has two kids and whose recent novel The Knockout Queen was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award, considers this question in her essay “Writer, Mother, Monster, Maid” at Vela. It is one of the most measured, humane entries in the entire mother-or-writer debate. 

Responding to some of the other entries, especially Lauren Sandler’s piece in The Atlantic and Kim Brooks’s essay in New York Magazine, Thorpe suggests that the central tension at the heart of the issue is neither logistical—it’s not purely a matter of hours in the day—nor mythical—it’s not that the soul of the writer is fundamentally at odds with the soul of the artist—but existential. At the heart of the mother-or-monster debate, for Thorpe, is the question of how to make the most of oneself. 

And she frames the effort to do so as a matter of ebb and flow: what’s required is not only aggrandizement or assertion, but accommodation too. Of the conflict between mothering and art-making, she writes: 

“For me, the problem . . . is not in some platonic incompatibility between art and motherhood, a conflict between the mundane and the celestial, the safe and the unsettling. The conflict is between the selfishness of the artist and the selflessness of a mother.” 

As a mother, she suggests,

“My job when I am with my children is to have as few needs as possible so that I can meet theirs. It is my job to let my three-year-old dawdle on the potty of a Starbucks until he is sure he is done, even if I think I might shit my pants.” 

While such selflessness might seem like anathema to art-making, Thorpe frames it as expansive, as a conduit for experiencing reality in all of its quotidian detail. Of her life before becoming a mother, Thorpe writes:

“My life before children was selfish and bland, all feelings and no grit, just a drifting miasma of mood. To go back to living like that seems like hell.”

Indeed, she offers, perhaps our male models of greatness, those exemplars who make caretaking the enemy of art, actually have it wrong. Provocatively, she asks us to consider what they might have missed about the human experience by forsaking the duties of parenting: 

“[W]ho knows what further greatness those men might have achieved if they had allowed their hearts to be broadened and deepened by their children? Who knows what interesting fissures in their worldview the humility of housework could have caused?”

At the end of the piece, Thorpe concludes that the answer lies not on either side of a false dichotomy but instead somewhere in the messy, individual middle. To be a mother and an artist is to learn, after all, how to make the most of oneself: 

“To make the most of oneself is not to forsake one’s identity as a woman or as a mother. It is not to become an art monster if the monster in question is nothing but a drunk asshole. But it is also not to bend entirely, to flap hinge open to your children and your husband . . . and give up the terrible, wonderful, furtive dream that is the self. To come second entirely, to be only mother, maid, cook, wife, is also not to make the most of oneself. One must learn how and when not to bend.”

When I read these words, I wonder whether now might be the time. Perhaps I am finally as ready to have a baby as I will ever be. After all, I no longer want to throw my self away. 

And now that I know who she is, perhaps I will be better able to keep her.