Taylor Swift recently addressed rumors that when she and Travis Kelce marry, she’s going to quit making music and stay home and make babies. She called the idea “shockingly offensive.” She refuses to equate marriage and family with disappearance. “That is not why people get married, so they can quit their job,” she added.
I’m a wife, artist and mother of four. I worked through their childhoods. I believe they’re the best work I’ve ever done, but I also don’t regret working.
That doesn’t mean it was easy. When my twins were infants, a newspaper reporter wanted to interview me for a story on “having it all.” My husband was in grad school and we were both surviving on almost no sleep. Our house was a tip. “There’s no ‘having it all,’” I snapped.
Writer Nora Roberts said “the key to juggling is to know that some of the balls you have in the air are made of plastic and some are made of glass. And if you drop a plastic ball, it bounces, no harm done. If you drop a glass ball, it shatters, so you have to know which balls are glass and which are plastic and prioritize catching the glass ones.”
That’s true, but as Debby Lee responded, “there is one other type of ball which cannot be ignored… This third ball type is made of lead: when you drop these types of balls, they do not bounce back.” Nor should they. In the book I’m never going to write—100 Best Things About Having Cancer—the first thing will be ‘getting out of things you no longer want to be doing.” It took being seriously ill for me to learn to say no.
The romanticized woman artist
When Käthe Kollwitz married in Berlin in 1891, she was an outlier: a woman who did not quit working to keep house and raise her family. “There are three things that have been of importance in my life – having had children, a faithful life-long companion and my work,” she wrote. Her husband never expected her to be a homemaker, and according to Taylor Swift, neither does Travis Kelce.
Our culture loves to romanticize the struggling artist and the dedicated amateur who isn’t in it for the money. It’s far less comfortable with the man or woman who makes a living in the arts and approaches it as serious work. That problem is magnified for women artists since they average less money than their male counterparts. In response, many of us try to cover more household tasks to try to balance the financial scale. That puts us in the position of treating creativity as optional, something we can reclaim “when things calm down.” But I’m old and things haven’t calmed down yet. If you don’t do it now, when will you?
I’d still like to know how to balance everything. But I do know that personal balance is not about symmetry; it’s about priority. And our priorities shift over time.
Taylor Swift said that Travis Kelce loves her because she’s fulfilled by her art. Isn’t that the kind of love we owe ourselves too?