I Was Worried Having Kids Would Kill My Creativity. Instead It Gave Me A Kaleidoscope

On a particularly echo-filled video call with his grandfather, my four-year-old son turns to me and says, “Look, I can hear my reflection.”

Something like this happens several times a week – a bit of fresh syntax, conjured by accident, that glistens and lodges in my brain. After recovering from a bad tumble, he might announce that his “tears have gone home”, or that the best way to make it through a thunderstorm is to “hold on to your brave”.

As a writer, I had a lot of anxiety about having children. I was worried there would be a new divide between me and creativity. But slowly I’m learning to ditch this false dichotomy and start seeing parenting as a creative practice in itself.

From a squinted distance the principles are similar. Parenting is an ongoing act of interpretation and response. It requires improvisation. It’s world-building, literally. Success is impossible to measure. Perhaps most importantly, your attention is the medium.

“Dada, look,” my son says, and keeps saying, at a dandelion growing through a crack in the concrete, at a dog wearing a harness with its name stitched on to the strap, at the moon visible in the daytime sky.

The author Ben Lerner talks about parenting as a bonsai tree – a thing that seems both massive and miniaturised. You exist on two scales at once. You’re looking down at your child, yes, but you also remember what it’s like to be looking up at your parents. Seeing and being seen: what great work strives to do.

There are days when nothing beautiful happens. When you’re screamed at, thrown-up on. When your brain carbonates to a low fizz cutting the crust off toast and stepping on Lego. And then there are those moments when in a desperate bid to find a toilet in the city, you might enter the National Gallery of Victoria, and after changing your daughter’s nappy, find yourself lying down on the carpeted floors of the Great Hall, staring up at the stained-glass ceiling together. In the beginning, babies are mostly on their backs. And so then you are too, seeing the world from a different angle: falling in love with treetops, cross-sections of power lines, cooling vents and ducts.

Moments like this aren’t art, exactly, but they’re not nothing, either. It’s transcendence on a tiny scale, what author Rivka Galchen writes about in Little Labours as “the small as opposed to the minor”.

Invented language, a kaleidoscopic view of the self, new ways of perceiving the world. Kids give you this with the same casual indifference they give you the seed of a date they’ve finished by spitting it into your palm. Because yes, you’re technically closer to the bin, but in many ways, you are the bin.

Whether or not you consider yourself creative, I do think there’s something meaningful about shifting from a model of management to a model of making. I don’t mean treating your kids like an art project, but rather as collaborators and co-conspirators in the larger project of being alive.

Things that feel like art:

When my son wants to tell a story and asks me to pick from a list of genres: snail, slug, rainbow or jail.
When my daughter ignores her crinkly, fluorescent stuffed animals to instead hyperfixate on the small white tags attached to their hindquarters.
The fact that every game starts with giving something a name, a friend and a location. (After stripping kale to make pesto, my son grabs two of the skinny stalks and says, “Look, these giraffes are going to Bunnings.”)

Things that don’t:

The sound of small, hard footsteps thumping towards our bedroom door at 11pm, 2:45am, 5:59am.
When my daughter is crying and I can hear it both coming through the wall and through the slight delay of the baby monitor next to me, creating a tantrum in-stereo.
A single strand of illness body-jumping between us for weeks.

A funny truth: I couldn’t have written this piece without my children; I had to wait for a weekend when they were with their grandparents to write it. Creativity and caretaking, at odds, and yet somehow, impossibly, in service of one another.

Art isn’t advice, and neither is this. Parenting is work, sometimes hard, often fruitless. But there’s an astronomical bent to it. An understanding you won’t see meteors every time, maybe even most of the time. But you have to practise putting out a folding chair on the cool grass of your attention span, and look up. Night after night, you have to keep looking.

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