The Expectations Artists Set for Themselves, Realistic and Otherwise

As we awaited the arrival of our second child, my wife and I decided that it was time to look for a house. We were renting a small, two-bedroom house that felt close to bursting at the seams with toys, clothes, and the equipment one accumulates when caring for a small child, so the prospect of squeezing in another baby felt a bit too much like a circus act. Plus our lease was running out and we really didn’t like our landlord (a story for another time).

My wife and I originally took different approaches. As any rational person would, my wife took to Zillow. I, on the other hand, felt like the productive thing to do was look at interior design photographs of very expensive homes. Immaculate kitchens, built-in bookshelves, in-law suites. And it’s not entirely like I wanted to live in houses such as these, but something about these images presented an unreality that owning a house would somehow make life cleaner, more leisurely, easier.

🏡 Home is where the art is

Whatever was going on inside my head as I wasted precious time looking at pictures of clawfoot soaking tubs and Eames chairs reminded me a little bit of my struggles as a writer.

As I cradle two small children, figuratively and sometimes literally, through the beginning of their life’s journey, I’ve mostly done so without a pen in my hand. I often think about a return to writing, but what does that even look like? When I’m not with the kids, I’m working to help pay our mortgage. When I’m not working and the kids are asleep, I’m recovering from a long day of childcare and work and aiming to hit the hay so I'll be ready for the next day of childcare and work. And that doesn’t even take into account quality time with my wife—you know, the love of my life?

So where does the time to write fit in? And not only that, how can I be in the right headspace to write, what with all that is going on? Conditions felt like they needed to be perfect for me to pick my pen back up. Visions of uninterrupted time in a quiet home office filled with natural light and clean sheets of paper surreptitiously filled my head and just as quickly filed away in the “not attainable” drawer.

But what I started to realize was that “not attainable” was actually translating to “not realistic.” It wasn’t that I was ill-equipped to attain this vision, but that the vision itself was not realistic. Not only that, but I was clouded with that vision, and all that fog kept me from seeing what was actually in front of me, what was actually realistic.

🪵 A would-shed full of shoulds

The truth is, I’ve always struggled with this, even before kids. When I was a twenty-something living in New York City, trying to balance a rigorous day job in retail while pursuing some sort of career that involved writing, I was oftentimes crippled with an expectation of how my creative practice should look like. There was this expectation that I should be working on my craft every day, if not for long stretches every day, no matter how tired I was from work. If I chose to see a friend and enjoy genuine human connection, I was choosing something over my art, which made me feel unserious, not a real artist. The real kicker: when I did have a moment to do some writing, I felt so hampered by the pressure of not squandering that moment—that it must result in nothing but hours of productive churn—that I wouldn’t feel up to the challenge and succumb to pretty abject creative paralysis. That’s what writing had become. Not a passion, not something to do for fun, enjoyment, or fulfillment. It had become an impossible challenge.

Call it what you will: horrible work-life balance, suffering artist syndrome, even just plain old procrastination. However you choose to call it, you’ve probably seen it before, experienced it before. Maybe you are even experiencing it now.

Here’s where together we might be able to sidestep the hole in the yard. I’m not about to tell you that it’s all bullshit (even though fundamentally it is in a lot of ways), that all you need to do is ignore these horrible feelings and create to your heart’s content, because it’s all that simple. If I said that, you might very well end up in the same place asking yourself, “why can’t I do this if it’s all that simple?” That’d be like telling someone to stop smoking because it’s unhealthy, expecting them to quit because of that fact, and then thinking negatively about them because they are not able to quit. I also don’t want to invalidate this very real struggle that many working artists deal with. These are real feelings, and sometimes real feelings hurt.

🌱 Where we are now

When our second child was born, we toted him along to see houses on the market. Many of them appeared very different—and not in a good way—from the pictures we initially saw; again, expectations set us up for disappointment. And while sometimes we felt discouraged on good days and dreadful on bad days, we kept looking, hopeful that we would find our new home eventually.

The more we visited actual houses, trying to envision our young family growing inside them, our children growing up within their walls and running around in their yards, a more realistic vision began to take shape. I began to ask more realistic questions (“Could this room be a playroom?”, “Could we put the desk in this room and make it feel like an actual work-from-home office?”) that projected a hopeful future rooted in the reality of our daily lives.

Our earnest search led us to the doorstep of what would be our first home. In our case, the cliche applied: we knew that it was the one as soon as we saw it. The kids have a playroom, and I have an actual work-from-home office (where I was able to take the time to write this article). My wife and I felt lucky, grateful, and of course overwhelmed about the next chapter of our lives. But the next chapter was being written, pen in hand.