There is no shortage of things to fear when you are pregnant. The child might not be healthy. The birth will be agonising and protracted. You won’t be good enough as a mother. You’ll be unable to walk down the road without needing the loo. You might at some point have to resort to those trousers with a large marsupial pouch in place of a waistband.It’s all a strange process of weighing gains against losses. The gains: several cup sizes, numerous pounds, a new vocabulary (fundus, pre-eclampsia, apgar), a balanced diet, new friends (often complete strangers on buses who want to compare bumps and ask you what bra you’re wearing) and the small matter of a child, a person who is going to appear from your own body like a Russian doll. The losses are rather more nebulous: your freedom, your autonomy, your figure, your marbles?
I’m also aware of the threat of another loss looming over me. I’ve always known about the school of thought that says writing plus babies does not go. I’ve heard Cyril Connolly’s famous and loathsome assertion — “She [the artist’s wife] will know that there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway” — and always detested the twisted misogyny of it. But since I got pregnant, several people have clutched my arm and said, in a confiding yet gleeful tone: “Every baby costs you a book, you know!” It astounds me every time. These people are suggesting that it’s asking too much to want children and novels, that it’s impossible to look after a child and to have the time and mental capacity necessary to write. Is it unforgivable chutzpah to think you can do both? For the most part, I think not. But during those 3am moments when the person inside me is entertaining itself with somersaults, the fear creeps back. I begin to imagine it absorbing ideas and words as it does blood sugar and then scrambling them up, like a computer virus, until they are unreadable, unrecognisable. I start tallying up writers who had children and those who didn’t. Sylvia Plath, Mrs Gaskell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley vs Virginia Woolf, the Brontës, Jane Austen and George Eliot.
I don’t know where this baby and book equation comes from, and I have yet to find a male writer who has been confronted by it. But the first rule of pregnancy is, I’ve discovered, if you’re worried Ask Someone in the Know. So I do exactly that. Amanda Craig, who has more novels than children to her name, instantly denounces the baby-costing-a-book theory as “Bosh … I strongly object to babies or children being blamed for lack of productivity.” Poet Ruth Padel goes further: “A baby can be a catalyst. Anything that deepens your experience deepens writing.” Emily Perkins refuses to think of children in terms of their cost. “You may as well say that every love affair costs you a book, or every time you move house, whoops, there goes a chapter — it’s a meaningless equation.” Tracy Chevalier is a little more circumspect. “Do I think that a baby costs you a book? Yeah, maybe. It’s only natural that something that’s going to eat into your time is going to eat into your work. It’s easier for men to compartmentalise, to walk off when the baby’s crying, saying: ‘It’s not my turn.’ Whereas the mother, especially in the first months, is much more bonded. It’s harder to let go.” She thinks for a moment. “There’s something so patronising about the whole pram in the hallway thing,” she says. “I mean, if you went on a trip around the world for six months, everyone would say, ‘Great, how exciting.’ No one would say, ‘Oh, it’ll cost you a book.”’
All this solidarity and defiance is very cheering. Unsurprisingly, though, everyone cites the early years of a child’s life as a difficult period. “The biggest problem is time,” Padel admits, “because babies can’t stand you concentrating on something else.” Perkins, who has two children under three, says: “I miss the thinking time, and the reading time I used to have.” But Craig points out that “all books are written against seemingly impossible odds — the odds just shift. A baby is completely different from, say, clinical depression, bereavement or divorce. You may be slowed by these things but you will not be stopped.” Everyone was emphatic that children sharpen the concentration. Gone are the days when work is punctuated by long tea breaks or dreamy stares out of the window. Instead, people work in 20-minute stints while their miniature dictators nap, or they find themselves with one foot under the desk and one foot on the cradle rocker. One writer told me that she used to type to get her son off to sleep: “He became so used to the noise that he was soothed by it. It was a bit sad, really.” Padel says that her daughter “made me focus like a stiletto on proper use of time”. Craig found that she “flew at the keyboard the moment I had help. I still do. I do far more work now than before.” And Perkins insists that her children “improved my efficiency. And while you’re pregnant you have a lot fewer hangovers, which are very threatening to productivity.” Chevalier says: “There’s a natural rhythm for how long I have to live with a book and, with a child, that time is longer. But what’s so bad about that?”But what about the writing itself? It is inevitable that the work is changed, but is it possible that it improves? “You learn so much about the world,” Perkins points out. “How could that not find its way into your work?” Craig wrote two novels while she was still “off my head from sleep deprivation” and found that each book was charged and informed by that experience. “The single best thing about having a baby and being a novelist is that you are well and truly taken out of yourself. The barriers between you and the rest of humanity are shattered. You’re no longer a private person, but a sort of conduit. If you think how poets have always invoked this state, you can see how remarkable it feels.” “Kids,” Chevalier says, “open up a whole new world of things to write about.” I keep reminding myself that a huge factor in my deciding to have a baby was a letter from my friend Kate, who is both a mother and an editor. In it, she wrote that she believed the books written by women after children seemed “tougher and better, not because of some foolish notion of ‘fulfilment’ but because it is such a huge business that it may supply a stringency that the unpressured life of a purely adult household lacks.” I want to believe this. At the moment, though, six months into my pregnancy, it’s still all in the stars. Ask me again in a few months’ time. — Â