Like Being a Good-Enough Mother, Being a Good-Enough Writer Is Enough

I love and care for my child unconditionally. Maybe I can do that for my writing too.

I saw another vampire today. This one was on Instagram, nestled into an ostensibly inspirational set of slides: If you can be anything other than a writer, be that. If you can’t do anything else, write.

We’ve seen this enough times to know they’re not talking about skills, right? They’re talking about passion, about drive, about the kind of artistry that if thwarted chews you up from the inside.

This claim has many cousins: I’m a writer because I have to be. I’ve always known I would be a writer. If I don’t write every day, I go crazy. Writing is like breathing, or like air. (More distant relatives, and bloodsuckers too, include Write every day and You’re a writer if you write.) In essence: What it means to be a writer is to Be A Writer.

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I could be many other things than a writer, and I spent many years of my life thinking I would. (I’ve hopefully also got many years ahead to change course, if I decide to.) In college, adults came from the professional world to visit a class of us senior theater majors and they said, If you can do anything else, do it. The martyrdom was manifold: This line of work sucks, so save yourself if you can; in order to do this, you must have singular, consuming drive; we would choose anything else, anything easier, if we could, but woe is us, we must be artists.

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“A vampire is any person or thought or feeling that stands between you and your creative self-expression.”

—“Die, Vampire, Die” [title of show]

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A friend casually mentioned that she was spending her Saturday working on an essay, or a book proposal, or writing poetry in the park, or reading some challenging midcentury novel, or reading craft essays, or taking a class. Maybe she did this with her evenings or time off. Maybe it was fun; maybe it was work. I saw her Instagram posts of these mild adventures while I briefly ignored my toddler to look at my phone. I would not be writing that weekend.

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Ironically, what I learned from acting that best translates to writing and pursuing any kind of artistic life is that everything is a choice. The emotional valence you give to a moment onstage, your essay’s structure, whether and how you make art. Set aside how lucky we are to have the space and time to follow our creative inspirations. (Set aside the paucity of choice in careers and livelihood in a capitalist society.) To pursue work—paid or not—as an artist is a choice, and it should be a joyful one, not the tyranny of the muse.

But now that I’d made that joyful choice, subtler vampires still plagued me.

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Are these fragments the best, most beautiful and perfect way I could structure this essay? No, it’s probably something of a cop-out. But it’s making it easier to write. And I like it.

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The Good-Enough Mother. A phrase coined by pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in 1953. An injunction against perfectionism, initially. Children, Winnicott believed, needed to see their parents fail. Fail and recover—vital lessons. “Perfect” is impossible, anyway, so if we aim for it, we add that inevitable failure to our list. But there is much more to extrapolate from “good enough.” Acceptance, ease, maybe even wholesale divorce from appraisal. It’s not about settling or insufficiency. It’s the reality of scarce resources. There is no one to compare yourself to. There is only enough.

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When I was pregnant, people told me parenthood would do great things to my writing. Not the words so much as the act, the ethic. When you have so much less time, you’re suddenly motivated to use the time you have better. As a lifelong procrastinator, I saw the appeal. Nothing lights a fire under me so well as the flint and spark of a looming deadline. Once my son was born, every moment would be crunch time. Never mind the unsustainability of a permanent sprint. I hoped that the switch of focused diligence might suddenly, finally flip, the same way that pregnancy forever rendered me three degrees overheated, instead of the always-too-cold person I’d been for the thirty-six years before.

Of course that didn’t happen. Pandemic aside! I am still who I’ve always been. A dawdler, a procrastinator, lazy, last-minute. Sufficient.

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How can I tell myself “I’m doing my best” if I can see all the ways I could be doing better?

The therapist said,

Whatever you’re doing now is the best you can, with the resources and skills you have available. You can build your skills, change your resources. Situations change. Your best tomorrow may be different.

Good enough.

There is no one to compare yourself to. There is only enough.

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The perfect writer I can envision myself being has a calm, steady routine. She does morning pages every day and writes before she checks her email. She blocks out her time rationally, balancing freelance projects and creative work. And her creative work, of course, is lovely. But the quality of her work is incidental to her perfection. She makes a perfect picture in the ways that can be seen, beyond the private channel of thoughts to fingers to keyboard to screen.

She reads to enrich herself, to expand her horizons, to cultivate ideas. When she reads other writers in her genre, she annotates and analyzes and learns from their work. She also reads widely beyond her own field, with curiosity and with the attention span to sate it. She did all her homework in college.

Is she any different from the other perfect mes I’ve imagined throughout my life? The thin and (thus) happy ones, the ones who don’t bite their nails? The ones who volunteer regularly and put things away instead of into piles, or who got to spend spring 2020 learning a new language on Duolingo rather than having a monthlong panic attack while taking care of a ten-month-old baby?

The image of the perfect writer I could be exists in tunnel vision, nothing beyond the edges of the desk.

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The vision of the perfect writer is a vampire, to be clear. Whether she’s you or someone else.

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The Good-Enough Mother was easy for me to accept because a baby cannot wait for you to wait to be perfect. He’s in front of you, taking whatever you have to offer, and he’ll be awake painfully early to do it all again the next day. You do it because you have to. Whether or not you compare yourself to others, you still have to keep the kid alive. You can’t put him in a drawer like a novel. Maybe that’s what those martyr-teachers were getting at—if they put their art in a drawer, they’d hear it wailing in protest, banging its fat fists on the walls.

My art has never been as insistent as a baby. But still, I wrote my book. I wrote it by telling myself “shitty first drafts,” by setting deadlines, by panicking a little (about the book instead of and alongside the world). It’s not the best book, but it’s the best book I could write.

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If I learn to love my writing as unconditionally as I love my child, it will be a triumph of good-enough. It will be because I see my writing’s specialness and magic, utterly itself whether it’s frail or robust, mild or stormy, eloquent or nearly silent, compared to no one and nothing. It will be because I learn to love my writing process as mine, the weird path I’ve found to a part of my brain that invents from whole cloth. A prayer: May I look at my writing as my own mother sometimes looks at me and whisper as she does in wonder, I made you.

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If I were the best possible writer that I could be, I would not be a good-enough partner, or friend, or person. Or mother. (You can swap any of those nouns around.)

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Winnicott has pervaded much of the parenting discourse. We are blessedly in a moment—or I’ve found a corner of the internet, a circle of friends—where we’re constantly reminded not to compare ourselves to what we see of others’ mothering, not to fall for Instagram’s lure to extrapolate perfection from one composed shot. Not everyone is a crafts mom, not everyone is a messy-play mom, not everyone is an adventure mom, we’re (thankfully) told. I’m a validating-emotions and reading-books-and-making-up-silly-songs-together mom. You will not find a single finger paint in my home.

So what kind of writer will I be?

I’m not a reading-craft-books-after-the-workday writer, not a bleed-onto-the-page writer. I’m not a singular-focus writer nor a quitting-Twitter writer. Because I went and had a kid, I’m not a weekend writer either. But I’m a fast writer, a flow-state shitty-first-draft writer. I’m a deep-revision, curious-research, happy-with-my-weird-turns-of-phrase writer. A writer who is also a mother and a TV watcher and early bedtime haver. A writer who loves writing and loves doing other things too. And that’s going to have to be good enough.