Living With a Divided Heart

Rachel Power's 2008 book, The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood, is essential reading for any woman trying to combine an artist life with motherhood, be she a writer, painter, musician or any other sort of artist.

This book takes interviews with a selection of Australian artists, from singer/song writer Clare Bowditch to actor Rachel Griffiths to author Nikki Gemmel, and integrates them into a story of what it is to be an artist and a mother in Western-Anglo society (particularly Australia, but I think the conclusions will mostly hold true in a wider context), in the current age.

In fact, the divided heart probably applies to all mothers, be they artists, stay-at-home-mums or working-for-pay mothers.

An essential difference for the artist is that their work is often seen more as play by society, and sometimes even by their family and indeed themselves. But for any woman who is also a mother, finding the balance between self-fulfilment and maternal demands is a challenging job. And, for most women who are also mothers, the other side of the coin is that they get taken less seriously in their chosen field, simply because of their other role as mother.

In fact, in 2010 we are still reading reports that 'head hunting companies say women should forgo maternity leave if they want their careers to flourish.' (Jane Hansen, The Sunday Telegraph, 19 September 2010)

One of the delightful moments of Power's book is in her introduction where she writes that 'Beyond giving birth, however, the stuff of mother's lives becomes worse than taboo - it becomes merely mundane. Mothering is such a prosaic term in our culture that it functions as a disguise for the true intensity of the experience, blocking any insight into the way this singular knowledge could be translated into good art' - which ties in so nicely with the book's epigraph from Alice Ostriker: 'If the woman artist has been trained to believe that the activities of motherhood are trivial, tangential to main issues of life, irrelevant to the great themes of literature, she should untrain herself.'

In fact, as many of the interviews attest, becoming a mother can not only provide infinite inspiration for art, but can feed and shape the passion a woman begins with - if only we can learn to value it as one of the most important and profound roles in our society.

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