Why I Write

A Feminists Approach to being a Stay-at-Home-Mom

So, firstly, the only two things about me that you need to know to read this piece is this:

1. I have a master degree in History of Literature , specialized in feminist and ecological studies, and consider myself a feminist

2. I am a stay-at-home-mom to my two year old.

Now this might seem contrary or outright wrong. How can a feminist be a stay-at-home-mom with all that it entails? With no way to contribute to economically, and having to rely on a husbands income? With spending most of her time, if not all, alone in her house with a two year old and little to no academic challenges or peers? With taking on the majority of child caring and house work - how could that be feminist?

Well, I have asked myself the very same questions time and time again. It would seem that I am torn between wanting to defend my position as something I choose myself and therefore is an act of a free woman’s will, and on the other side: having to agree, that yes, in many ways I conform to the female stereotype that patriarchy has put in place.

So it is a very strange position I have found myself in, and being Danish, the irony is not lost on me.

However, the one thing, that I do have, that I insists on having is my writing. I will happily let my child watch a morning show every morning when she wakes up to ensure that I, at the least, get in some writing that day. It does not have to be any good, or any much, but I have to write. That much I know of myself.

My desk in our living room, where I write my morning pages.

I have not always been so persistent on my writing, and throughout the years that I have studied for my degree I have gone months without writing in order to catch up with social endeavors and the never-ending reading lists, but not without a loss. Whenever I have gone too long without writing, that’s when I feel it. I start fraying at the edges. I will bathe in the shower one day and find a big club of hair by the drain afterwards. I will numb myself with sitcom shows and live my life through the character’s 25 minute arcs.

In short, I loose my sense of self.

It might seem contrary, because I know how many new mothers struggle with loosing their sense of self when first coming into their motherhood, and I struggled as well. But it was also through my motherhood, through the time and care of a little one, that I came to the very conclusion, that I, at my core, am a storyteller and a writer. Writing is what keeps me feeling whole. An identity that is not only mother, caretaker, friend, girlfriend or any other relational identity, but something in and of myself.

I stand in a long line of motherly storytellers: The mothers that sing their babies to sleep, the mothers that read for their child, the mothers that tell their young ones stories of the world and everything in it.

Astrid Lindgren, Tove Jansson, Tove Ditlevsen, Toni Morrison, Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler are some of the my own most favorite women storytellers, but women have been storytellers since the beginning of time, though their tales and names might not be written down anywhere, but exist in our shared cultural knowledge and legends.

I will not say that I stand on their shoulders, and perhaps it is even wrong to say that I stand in the same long line as these storytellers. Instead, what I will say, is that I sit by their feet, my cheek against their knees, listening and interpreting their every line. I take on what I can use from the stories of old, and let go of the rest.

That is why staying-at-home is so precarious to me. It is because it allows me to tell stories, to you, my reader, but also to my child, soon to be children. It puts me in the place of many women before me, for better or for worse. And doing the dishes, hanging up laundry outside in the warm breeze, and carrying my child with me through the woods, makes me feel strong for all those women and mothers that have done the exact same thing before me.

Telling my story, is, for me, also a way to tell their stories. A story that has been kept private, and deemed “women’s business”, nothing to really care much about, to study or to value. For sure not really worth writing down, let alone reading. But by writing my story, my everyday life, I feel that I am insisting on its worth.

This is me telling the world, my work, my “womanly” work, in the home and caring for my child, matters.

That is why I write.