Can Ambition and Motherhood Co-Exist?

I was at a party recently with some novelists I had never met but wanted badly to impress. They sat on a rooftop in Hollywood, sipping wine and eating pizza and talking about art and life. I mostly listened. At one point, their conversation drifted to another writer, who hadn’t shown up. Her kid was sick and her babysitter had bailed. I nodded. I had been there. Sucked.

“It’s very hard to be friends with parents,” our host said. “They’re flaky.” She caught herself. “Wait. Do any of you have kids?”

I raised a hand sheepishly, like I was confessing to something terrible.

“I do,” I said. “Two boys. Four and one.”

The host nodded, sipped her drink, fell silent.

I tried to save myself. “But my friends who are just now having kids drive me crazy sometimes.”

Her eyes lit up. “Really? How so?”

I continued. Judas. “Oh, you know…obsessing over their babies like they’re a project. Asking me what wearable heart rate monitor we use. Tracking poops.”

Everyone laughed. “Why would you need to track poop?”

I shrugged. I knew why, but I didn’t say.

The host began again. “It’s like—no offense—no one asked you to have kids. You chose this.”

I kept my mouth shut until the group moved on and began talking again about books and films. It was, genuinely, a fun night. But I was relieved when two more writers with kids showed up so that I wouldn’t be alone, left to defend the choices that had gotten me here.

Later, at home, I wondered why I couldn’t get the comments out of my head. It wasn’t the first time I had witnessed such a conversation amidst a group of writers. When I was 23, in grad school, not even thinking about kids, a professor sat me down in his office to warn me that I needed to write two books before I had one kid. Otherwise, I’d never publish. I nodded, and thanked him for his advice. It didn’t seem all that strange to me. By that time, I had already memorized Cyril Connolly’s oft-quoted warning against “the pram in the hall.” I had noted Alice Walker’s warning that ambitious women could have children—“but only one.”  

So it wasn’t that I was surprised or insulted by the topic, when it came up at the party. But it was the first time I was participating in the conversation as both a mother and a published writer, and something was sticking in my craw.

Before I had kids, I bristled at comparisons between the labor of birth and the labor of birthing a book into the world. But after, I thought: okay, pretty accurate. At least more accurate than comparing having a kid with getting a dog.

When I was pregnant with my first son, I cried every day for three months, because the pregnancy presented a binary: either I would miscarry or I would have a baby. I wanted him so badly. To lose him would be too terrible to imagine. To have him would be asking for too much.

The only time I’ve felt similarly since was when my book Rabbit Hole was out on submission. At that point, I was hugely pregnant with my second son, sick as a dog, and I woke every day feeling that the holding period I was in would last forever. To publish a book would be too good—the manifestation of a lifelong dream. What kind of person gets to be the thing they wanted to be when they were seven? But to fail would be devastating—my beloved characters, five years of work, late nights and time away from my baby—all down the drain.

At a different writers’ dinner a few days after the first, a woman asked me how I knew I wanted kids. She was asking everyone, because she was working on a novel about the question, in an attempt to figure out her own answer.

I choked on my words, stammered something out about loving babies as a young person and wanting a big family.

But the truth is: I just wanted them. The same way I wanted to write a book. You can try to intellectualize both choices, but they are fundamentally labors of love.

With my second birth, everything went wrong. I was weeks away from my due date and still on submission, in that Schrödinger’s cat state of not-published and published. I had contracted Norovirus from my older son, who was home sick puking and defecating on everything. The week earlier, when I was trying to rush him to the toilet, I had fallen flat onto my belly, and I was still somewhat convinced I had damaged the baby. 

Once I started vomiting, the contractions started. It was too much for my body to handle. I was going to eject the baby early, covered in bruises from my fall, feverish and delirious. I was going to have another child before I knew if I would ever publish. I was ignoring the sage advice from my MFA professor, Alice Walker, Cyril Connolly, and countless others. 

In the hospital, they covered my body in ice packs and threaded a needle up my spine that delivered fentanyl to my bloodstream. I itched all over, an opiate itch that I couldn’t scratch, try as I might to take the skin on my chest and thighs off with my nails. I vomited over and over, and the force of it, along with the baby squishing my organs together, collapsed one of my lungs. My oxygen started to drop. The baby’s heart rate plummeted. They wrapped me in a web of wires and catheters and hooked me up to a thousand beeping machines. 

For 24 hours, I lived like that, throwing up and sweating and forcing my husband to sneak me forbidden ice chips. I was rolled from side to side every twenty minutes, and I was popped, like a water balloon, with a single long knitting needle until an endless river of clear liquid gushed from between my legs. 

I started to feel as I had during my first pregnancy—that I would be stuck in this no man’s land forever, thrashing endlessly on my soiled puppy pads with my butt out for all to see. 

Desperate, I checked my phone for news of the world, and I saw that my agent had emailed me—twice. An offer had come in on the book. Then: a second, better offer.

I’m so happy!!! CONGRATS!!! Let me know when you’re free???

I emailed her back right away. 

I’m currently in labor, but maybe we can talk tomorrow?

She emailed back: I’m DYING laughing.

The timing of it was nothing I would ever write into a book, the book/baby metaphor becoming absurdly concrete.

My nurse came back, pleased to see I was looking less despondent. “You can do this,” she said.

“I just sold my book,” I told her.

We celebrated together, as much as you can celebrate when you’re blanketed in ice and paralyzed from the waist down. I thought about how in life, more so than in fiction, things happen at all once, in a bewildering, nonsensical order. Then, I started to push. 

My next email to my agent was a picture of my sweet Henry Robin, wrapped in his little striped blanket. I added it to our thread about the novel. Two things no one had asked for that I forced into the world on the same day.

Can any of us have it all? Sure! Of course not. Maybe? To me it’s like when my kid asks if he can have two desserts. No. Not tonight. But you can want them. You should want them. To hunger is to be human.

My secret is: I wrote a whole book—110,000 words that I loved, that I still love—and I failed to publish it. That was before Rabbit Hole. That was before my first baby was born. 

My secret is: I lost a baby, between Brody and Henry. A baby I wanted very much. 

Two failures that hurt. But I kept going, because I don’t know how to stop wanting the things I want—experience, connection, intensity, love.

There’s a cliché with writing, where some writers say “if you can do anything other than write, do it.” Meaning, they had no choice. They were driven to this work. I always roll my eyes when I hear it. After all, no one asked you to write a book. 

You could probably say the same about parenting. It’s hard. It’s time-consuming. It pays like garbage. If you can do anything else, do it.

But the question is rarely can you have it all. The question is: could you even turn off all that wanting? And why would you want to anyway?