Again, I was struck by how relevant Olsen’s writing continues to be. She gave a talk to the institute called “Death of the Creative Process,” and it was adapted into an article for Harper’s Magazine in 1965. This passage resonates:
More than in any human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible. Children need one now (and remember, in our society, the family must often be the center for love and health the outside world is not). The very fact that these are needs of love, not duty, that one feels them as one’s self; that there is no one else to be responsible for these needs, gives them primacy. It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil. The rest has been said here. Work interrupted, deferred, postponed, makes blockage — at best, lesser accomplishment. Unused capacities atrophy, cease to be.
Olsen’s conflict, as she described it, was “to reconcile work with life.” As Doherty writes, “Olsen argued that life was not like a calendar: it could not be divvied up and parceled out.” The fellowship (and the fact that she had older children — her youngest was a teenager when she moved to Cambridge) made sustained work possible for Olsen. She finally reached a point where she didn’t need to have a day job, and the work she was able to finish at the institute permanently changed her life. But it didn’t erase all her inner conflict. Olsen “longed for an impossible life, one in which she could devote adequate time” to both her work and her children, Doherty writes.
As I read Olsen’s words, I thought about all of the mothers I’ve spoken to over the years — both as a journalist and as a friend — who acutely feel the conflict between mothering and all other aspects of life. They often take that feeling of tension as a signal that they’re doing something wrong — working too much or not hard enough. They don’t always think about the financial or structural issues holding them back. They’ll often see hurdles as personal failures and feel guilty about whatever they think they are giving the short shrift.
But what if they accepted the tension as eternal? What if there will always be some feelings of frustration and exhaustion bumping up against the feelings of joy and everlasting love? I don’t think this feeling is exclusive to mothers, or to mothers who work for pay. Involved fathers feel the push-pull of life and family the same way mothers do; they just have fewer social expectations around their parenting and more social expectations around their paid work.
Olsen left behind not only a body of wonderful writing — I still remember cracking the slim volume of “Tell Me a Riddle” that I found on my mother’s office shelf when I was home from college one summer — but also a legacy of care. And not just for her own daughters, on whom she doted, making their birthdays special and their rooms filled with books, even when the family was broke.
When her daughter Julie was in high school, Olsen took in “a young man from a troubled family” for several months. That man once warmly recalled the Olsen dinner table. “They were talking, laughing, joking, teasing, telling their stories of the day, being listened to with respect, being responded to with love. They discussed literature, music, film and politics. They wanted to know what I thought, what I believed, what authors I was reading.” I don’t know if Olsen ever felt that she succeeded in achieving that “impossible life.” But to this reader, she did.