We are a neurodiverse family. So much of the way I structured our lives—our communities, our learning environments—was to create and inhabit neuro-affirming spaces. I took that job seriously, studying and learning and tending and reading so many books that—as a recent friend said—it’s worthy of a graduate degree. Mothers of neurodiverse kids know: this work is a full-time job.

To support one aspect of that wiring—her spelling—we tried all the things: In-person tutoring. Outschool tutoring. Orton-Gillingham. Structured Word Inquiry. We tried every online program that existed. Nothing helped. It was all too boring to stick out, or we’d slog through them and they still wouldn’t be effective. As a former educator with a particular proclivity for literacy curriculums, I’d found her the tutors and programs I knew would move the needle conceptually. But no matter how much she conceptually grokked what was happening, she had an impossible time remembering the words after the fact, and an even more impossible time getting them right on paper.

“We should just make our own,” my daughter and I said for years, scheming of the magical adventure we’d create: magical worlds with mythical creatures who we’d awaken from a deep slumber. But I never had the time or space to actually make our dreams real.

That is, until I broke up with the nuclear family, when for the first time in over a decade, I had time and space protected: a schedule that guaranteed equitable drop-offs and pickups and two and a half-days a week protected for my own work no matter what illnesses or surprises arose. With my youngest starting kindergarten, I had both my children in full-time care, and assured time to work on things that mattered to me.

What did I do with my newfound time? I set to work building the tool my kid so desperately needed.

Just a few weeks into the school year, exasperated at yet another diagnostic assessment that showed my kid’s spelling stagnation, I called a friend and said, “okay, I need to finally just build this thing.”

He was the right friend to call, because he’d been in a research rabbit hole for over a decade on memory science, spaced-repetition systems (SRS), and how to build learning tools to most effectively transfer knowledge to long-term memory. This friend—a whip-smart engineer and fellow parent—started filling me in on what he knew about spaced repetition. For those unfamiliar like I was, spaced repetition schedules learning at exactly the right intervals so that your brain most efficiently builds long-term memory.

After I grilled him with questions for a good while and built an understanding of the mechanism of SRS, I hung up, opened a Replit account, and started building.

What ensued was a frenzied, invigorating, delightfully gleeful late-night build with a tech tool I’d never used before that resulted in an actual, working spelling app that my daughter could play that very night.

I’d been constrained on time for so long, that to finally unleash myself at a project for days and weeks and months on end felt exhilarating. But the coolest part was actually co-creating the magical world with my kid.

here's what we're building

I’d build the basic spelling architecture. She’d test it. Give me feedback. Then, we’d get to work co-creating the magical world we’ve long dreamed of that this game would be immersed in. Her imagination birthed the creatures and realms, characteristics and features, design elements that made the game one she’d actually want to keep playing.

It felt like the ultimate win: a tool that she could co-create with me that would actually commit words to her long-term memory in a way no other tool and tutor had been able to support her in doing. Not only were we creating something good, but she was learning the most empowering lesson along the way: that when she’s struggling, she has the capacity to work with others to build a tool that helps.

I’d like to just credit my newfound time in making the start of this journey possible. But I think the recipe to creativity is more akin to time + an acute annoyance or need that desperately needs solving. In ‘s recent post on experiments with taking a sabbatical, she wrote, “creativity, at least for me, runs less on open hours and more on contact with something real.”

This is motherhood’s unfair advantage when it comes to creativity: we are bumping up against something real all the damn time. Our cognitive load is so disproportionately spent caring for everyone’s acute needs. But if we reclaim our time, we could actually start channeling ourselves toward building solutions. What would it look like if more mothers reclaimed their time to build solutions to the everyday real we face? What would we build?

In my case, the cosmically small but painfully real thing I was bumping up against was my daughter’s acute need for committing words to her memory. Why did we care so much about this need? Because the cognitive load of it was getting in her way—something I know we mothers can deeply relate to.

Educator wrote about this recently in her post about building math automaticity, saying, “as automaticity develops, cognitive load decreases, freeing students to focus on problem solving, reasoning, and conceptual understanding.” My daughter was spending so much of her cognitive load deciphering the spelling of words in her reading and in her writing—cognitive space she could instead have freed up for her prolific storytelling or immersing in and conceptually understanding her book.

With my newfound time from breaking up with the nuclear family, I wanted to create the most efficient spelling tool possible to free her cognitive capacity up for creativity, imagination, and higher-order thinking. That freed-up cognitive load for creative capacity is something I want for all kids. And, it’s something I want for all mothers, too.

My kid can feel the difference. She wrote a 30-page fantasy novel for school. She went from misspelling “how” and “was” to spelling “international” and “division” correctly while playing in the car this morning. She’s asking to play bananagrams together—stepping into her newfound knowledge with glee. And, most importantly, she’s knows she can build a tool to learn things she initially struggled with. The relief I feel in my own body watching her step into her brilliance is actually not describable.

If you’re a mother contending with how to reclaim space for making, or unsure what you’d even spend newfound time on, I know in my bones that good things come when care-centered, liberation-centered mothers reclaim the time and space to create. We are closest to the acute needs of our children, and when we have the time, I know we channel our energy into making beautiful things that support them, each other, and our communities. The way my creativity is taking form right now is the ultimate expression of my motherhood.

And that friend I called? We’re now co-founding the next chapter of this journey together—evolving the tool my child and I dreamed up into something other kids can use too. Together, we’re creating a spelling app designed for how our kids’ minds actually work, and we’re setting it in the magically-immersive realm my daughter and I co-created, called Wyla.

We’re building this thing with the deepest respect for how children actually learn, and it feels so good to get to share with you all a glimpse of what we’ve been dreaming up. If you’re parenting a kid like mine—whose imagination runs faster than their spelling can keep up—we’d love to have you join the waitlist so we can let you know when it’s ready.

Check out Wyla

Maybe your kid struggles with reading, writing, or spelling. Maybe you’re curious if they’ll love this magical realm we co-created. Or maybe you’d simply love to help them lessen the cognitive load so their creativity can soar unencumbered. Whatever sparks your curiosity, we’re just getting Wyla started, and we can’t wait to share more with you soon.

In creative possibility,

Sara

P.S. As always, would love to hear what this stirs up in you. drop a note in the comments!

So glad to finally share this recap of and my conversation together about creative practice and motherhood. Thank you , , and many others for tuning into our chat. Thank you, Gemma, for the rich conversation and for the labor of making these highlights shareable!

Before we begin, I want to say that there’s so much change happening in my life right now—life appears to be happening faster than my words—and I’ve been embarrassingly behind on catching you all up. But I promise the shifts are good and freeing and I can’t wait to share more in this space in the coming months.

Thanks for being in my corner, cheering this journey on. You know I’m doing the same for you.

As I move into this next phase, I want to ask you whether we should change the name of this writing space to reflect the shift.

Let’s get to it!

HIGHLIGHT #1

The idea that motherhood and creativity aren’t compatible is a myth.

Gemma: One of the big misconceptions is that motherhood hampers the ability to live a creative life. I don’t really see that as being true. I think motherhood can be a real well of creativity for people. And I think what we confuse motherhood with the responsibilities and lack of systemic support that we have. It’s not actually motherhood that gets in the way of creativity.

Sara: The way we do mothering in this time is so bizarre, right? We are expected to be the social safety net for our kids and our community. We’re expected to be the band-aids to a crumbling infrastructure of care. And that is actually the part that makes us feel really torn as opposed to the motherhood itself.

Oftentimes in motherhood discourse (I completely understand why it goes here), it feels like this zero-sum game or this scarcity game between us and our kids. But there are ways we can actually rethink it from a place of abundance and reimagine what it looks like to feed creative practice with our children.

HIGHLIGHT #2

Motherhood awakened our creatives practices and grounded us in our identities as artists.

Sara: I had to do so much undoing of my programming to learn how to show up as a mother from a place of this burgeoning consciousness, of how to be in attunement, how to see her fully, how to grant her the liberation that she deserves, right?

In learning how to do that for her, I was realizing all the places I was negating that same way of existing fully as a human for myself. And that was such an unlock for my creative practice, right? All of a sudden I felt like the creativity that I was diminishing or dismissing or pushing to the side was like no longer able to be kept really small. In that unlearning, I was allowing myself to reclaim my creative practice. Really by learning to parent her, I was reparenting myself in my own creative process.

Gemma: My experience was very different. Young motherhood was a very isolating experience. And so I felt like I really needed to lean on my creativity in order to feel some sort of fullness in my personhood because it really, really shifted my identity to become a mom. It felt like I was an entirely different person on the other side of motherhood.

Writing was the through line that was able to carry me. It was really important for me to carve out that space so that I recognized myself as an individual rather than just as a role, because I was subsumed by the role of motherhood.

Sara: I relate to that so deeply, that piece of like writing yourself into existence, right?

For me, it really came to a head during this postpartum-COVID-wildfire trifecta that I was living through. I was seven months pregnant with my youngest when COVID started. And I was also working. I couldn’t keep it all together anymore and hit a point where I crashed and burned with my burnout.

The way that I started to reclaim myself was through showing up on Substack and writing an essay a week. Word after word, I was writing myself back into my own personhood. And really it was like coming home to the person that I am. I used writing and creative practice as a way to express that out into the world and to build some solidity around: this is who I am, this is who I care about, this is what I believe in, this is how I express.

HIGHLIGHT #3

How we build space for our creative lives is highly individual, but always requires intention.

Gemma: My creative practice is constantly evolving and changing, because motherhood is constantly evolving and changing. I currently have kids in three different school schedules (elementary, middle, and high school). There’s extracurricular activities. Kids get sick.

As a writing coach, I primarily work with mothers, one of the big things that people come to me with is this idea that if they don’t have a set schedule every day, they’re not a “real writer.” Because we’re used to looking at these examples of famous men with wives who are supporting their creative work. So they basically have someone doing all of the work of life for them so that they have protected time.

I don’t write every day. I might journal. I might do some like creative work with watercolor or painting. So there’s always creativity. But it varies a lot from day to day. And it varies depending on whether or not I’ve got a sick kid home, what the activities are that day, if there are other things vying for my attention. The only thing I know is that I am attuned to myself enough to know when I’m not getting enough creative space. And I’m really good at speaking up to negotiate that space with Rob when necessary.

Sara: So you’re able to protect it because of your attunement and still be flexible to the family dynamic, and I think that’s really skillful. I don’t think that I have that.

For me, I do need some regimented structure around my creative practice to make sure that I show up, because I think my tendency is to give my time and energy away so readily until I’m so in the red that like I’m resentful. So I preempt that by like creating a schedule for myself that feels like I will get the time that I need and it will be protected.

My co-parent and I shifted from a 14-year marriage to a platonic co-parenting set up, for me in large part to make sure that I had some guaranteed protected time. Because as the primary caregiver, I never really felt like my time was mine. And this shift for us has been really healthy for me in that I know two days a week my co-parent is the person on duty if the kids get sick. So having that structure has allowed me to say: okay, these are my dedicated blocks for writing or for building.

I feel relief in my body knowing that there is going to be some time in the week that I know is protected for me. And I know that that’s a privilege, but it also like took some pretty big shifts energetically in my life and also in my co-parenting relationship to actually like be able to be strong enough to say like, no, I deserve some time that’s mine.

Gemma: I love that. Right now, I’m not in such a regimented space, but I’m also not at work on a big project. I finished No One Loves an Angry Woman last year. That project took a lot of negotiating throughout the process to make sure I was getting enough space, not only to work on the book, but also to recover from writing the book.

Not only did I need protected time to write, I needed time to come down from writing in really dark and difficult places. I think it takes a lot of self-attunement to understand what you need. I’m also a yoga teacher, so I do a lot of checking in with my body and my emotional state, which helped me stay aware of what my needs were throughout. And a lot of the times my needs were: I’m writing for this amount of time, and then I’m laying down and like having a long cry for this amount of time. Both things were necessary and important.

One of the things I also notice when I am talking to mother creatives is that a lot of the time there’s this hesitation to express the need for space. There’s a sense that their work isn’t “important enough” so how do I ask for that space? And I want to be really clear: when I was writing short stories that would never see the light of day, it was still very important for me to claim that space. I think that when you have like that well of creativity that you need to pull from for your own well-being, that is important. Your creative expression is important enough to create time for. It doesn’t need to be for public consumption in order for your work to be valuable and protected.

HIGHLIGHT #4

Kids can create a positive feedback loop for our familial creative practices.

Sara: There’s this beautiful positive feedback loop that I can get into around creative practice with my children in a way that totally surprised me. I was not expecting that my children would feed my creative life so deeply and that I in turn would feed their creative life and that we would create this environment in which we were consistently feeding each other’s ideas.

This weekend, I was playing Bananagrams with my eldest and Bananagrams turn into arranging cool phrases. And then that turned into my daughter pulling out a little kitten and starting to create a stop motion animation with the kitten like rearranging the phrases. And like and then that turned into me and her reimagining a character for the spelling app we’re working on. That flow back and forth is so fun. It’s so fun. And it can also feed our meaningful work and livelihood, right?

Gemma: Right. I love how you describe it as a feedback loop where your creativity feeds their creativity and their creativity feeds your creativity. I think that’s so true.

I really enjoy being in creative pursuit in front of my children. Like, I am not a closed door kind of creative. My kids know that they are like welcome to come in and out. And if there is time where I need really focused work, I’ll let them know and they’ll respect that. But they also know that like the general rule is that they can come be near me while I am doing creative work. And often they’ll come near me and do their own creative work.

I have one kid who is a prolific writer and her passion reminds me that I am living my dream by getting to do this work. I have another kid who does more visual and sculptural art, and he doesn’t care to be imitative with his work. Watching that kind of free creativity happen just lights me up and really reminds me that it’s okay to take risks with my own art.

Sara: Both of those examples are so beautiful because what I hear is how much space you’ve allowed for both of your kids to show up in their own creative practice in the ways that their temperament and their skills and their passions and curiosities take them, right? Both of them are really unfurling their creative process. That can feed your creative process too because when someone has access to creative space, their joy is pretty contagious. And to be able to create that culture for within your family unit is so beautiful.

HIGHLIGHT #5

Creativity might be a solitary pursuit, but it is fed and supported in community.

Sara: Sometimes (with my creative life) I’m like, wow, this is a really delusional choice, right? Like, I’m betting on myself. I’m betting on community to show up. I’m betting on a different way of being in the world together. And I think so many more of us need to just be like taking these bets to build the world we dream together, right?

None of this is done in isolation. Like I can’t actually reconfigure my family structure if I don’t have really strong chosen family and community around me to allow for that. I don’t actually have space to do the things I want to do if I don’t have friends who are fiercely showing up for me and who I am fiercely showing up for. And the more we share those loads, the like more we free up each other’s capacity.

Gemma: I love that you bring that up because I think one of the things that is going to make a creative life possible is a communal life. The nuclear family is not a safety net that we can fall back on. It was never designed to work for most people, least of all creative mothers. That is not what this system was set up for.

My first book, Fed Up was about the mental load and labor, a lot of women who don’t see divorce as an option but don’t have support and buy-in from their partner will ask: “what do I do now?” My answer is always: divest from marriage and put your energy into your friends, put it in your communal network, because that is who is going to catch you. That is what makes it possible for you to leave that situation when you need to. You know, otherwise you’re trapped. You need to live in community with other people and have a broader safety net.

And not just if your relationship is bad. I think that is important for anyone. I love my husband and have a really wonderful relationship with him, and he is not the center of my life.

Sara: I think that that’s so powerful, especially for women creatives to start to elevate the place platonic relationships and friendships and chosen family take in our energetic space. Because when we weave that web of care, we’re not so single threaded, right? That’s too vulnerable place to be.

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