by Phoebe Odingo

Created on: May 13, 2008   Last Updated: February 07, 2009

When that little one is clinging to you. When at one year he is curious and wants to share the keyboard with you, it's next to impossible to get any writing done.Don't get me wrong, motherhood is one of the most enjoyable and fulfilling events that can occur in a woman's life. However once in a while one does reminisce and long for those times when the only hindrance to creativity was your motivation. There are many reasons why it's more difficult to write. For one the child/children need the mother's attention, secondly apart from looking after the children's needs, other aspects of one's life need to be fulfilled too. Finally most mothers are married, so their husbands also take the time that they need to write.

Children's needs are never satisfied. In the morning, if you're a working mother, you have to get up and prepare breakfast. The very young ones need to be changed and fed. If you happen to have older ones as well, you have to supervise their preparation for the school day. There's always that one child who hates to be woken up to go to school. They drag themselves out of bed and you end up having to help them dress up. This takes time away from your own preparation and you have to squeeze in time to have breakfast yourself. You need it because you have to express milk for the baby. Your husband comes to the kitchen table expecting to have breakfast waiting and you have to ask him to prepare some for himself. You look at the clock and oops you're running late for work. That's just the morning preparation. The writing you were planning to start on will have to wait.

Your work requires one hundred and ten percent effort from you. You have goals to meet and a boss to please. Your workmates are not pulling their weight and you are totally demoralized. As if that's not enough your husband feels like you're not paying enough attention to him.

As you juggle all that it demands to be a mother and more often a wife, your writing suffers. Even when the creative juices are raging, you're too fatigued to put anything in writing. There's always a sacrifice one has to make. This doesn't mean you can't put together some interesting writing. However to be at the pinnacle of your writing you need less stress than what you carry as a mother.

I would not go so far as to say it's the end of writing but motherhood puts such a strain on one's ability to produce good work that mothers might as well give up on writing.

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