Mary Cassatt's 1901 painting The Reading Lesson.Picasa/Dallas Museum of Art/Public Domain
Nadine Sander-Green is the author of the novel Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit.
Last year, I launched my debut novel to a crowd of beaming friends and family. My second child arrived a month later. If I could get through the decade-long process of writing and publishing a book on my own, surely I could raise two kids.
I decided to pull my two-and-a-half-year-old from daycare when I started my maternity leave. Isn’t that what a good mother does – spend every possible hour with their young children in order to shape them into good humans?
I read a book about setting up your home like a Montessori classroom. I would install hooks low on the wall so my toddler could hang his own coat! I would write while they napped! I would be such a hands-on, engaged parent! My own mother raised kids without help, why couldn’t I?
By week two of having both children at home alone, my partner working full time, life became an endless tunnel of scraping scrambled eggs from the floor – crouched on my hands and knees with my newborn strapped to my chest – or counting down from three to convince my toddler to get in the car seat, my voice on the edge of explosion.
One day, my newborn would not stop nursing and, when not nursing, wailing. My naked toddler pooed on the Turkish carpet inherited from my grandmother. As I went outside to bring out the garbage, I got stung by a wasp. I didn’t even have time to go to the bathroom, or tend to the insect sting – thinking about making space for myself was laughable. When my partner got home, I collapsed into his arms in tears.
I’m not a good mother, I told him.
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When my son returned to daycare the following week, he was met with sloppy toddler hugs and professional caretakers cooing, Welcome back, in his ear. I walked home with my newborn sleeping in the stroller, feeling both humiliated and relieved. Yes, I still had one fragile human to tend to all day, but she could not yet run away from me. Now I had time to heal and rest and – dare I say it – daydream about my next book.
Many artists have made painful and controversial choices to protect their time to make art. The Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović had three abortions, claiming having children would be a “disaster” for her work.
“One only has limited energy in the body, and I would have had to divide it,” Ms. Abramović said in an interview with the German newspaper Tagesspiegel in 2016.
In 1949, the British novelist Doris Lessing infamously left behind two children when she moved from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to England, where her first novel was published to great acclaim. Though often vilified for this decision, Ms. Lessing felt deeply conflicted about where to put her focus: being a mother, or writing.
“I can’t think which is more satisfactory, having a baby, or writing a novel. Unfortunately they are quite incompatible,” she wrote in a series of letters to two male friends in the 1940s, before leaving for England. She noted that her own British grandmother had a nanny to help and suspected that affordable childcare would be available by the time her grandchildren had their own children.
“I haven’t yet met a woman who isn’t bitterly rebellious,” she wrote, “Wanting children, but resenting them because of the way we are cribbed, cabined and confined.”
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The conundrum of how to be both a good mother and a good artist is not new. How can an artist sustain a creative life while having small children? What are the effects of leaving our careers for five or more years, especially when most men are not doing the same? Will we ever be able to return to the practice? There is no maternity leave for artists. Nobody is pushing our projects forward, holding our positions until we are ready to return to our work.
It was truly unaffordable for women to get space from their children in the past. As recently as 2016, daycare costs, on average, in Calgary (where I live) are about $1050 per month for one child. In Toronto during the same time period, daycare for infants cost $1,649 a month or $19,788 a year. Mothers had to consider if their salaries would cover more than their daycare fees and if it even made sense for them to go to work. Their decisions were often purely financial, not based on what they actually wanted to do.
Ms. Lessing’s prediction about affordable childcare was right, in Canada at least. Thanks to our country’s subsidized model, childcare fees have plummeted. In Alberta, daycare now costs $326 per month, roughly $15 per day. The federal government has promised to lower that to an average of $10 per day across the country by 2026.
Although paying hundreds versus thousands of dollars on childcare offers relief for many families, this model still presents problems. In Alberta we have the lowest minimum wage in the country at $15 an hour, and $326 a month remains out of reach for many families. In early 2025, the province also threw out its subsidy program, where fees were scaled to income and some low-income families were already paying as little as $10 a day. Under the new model of a flat fee, an affluent family is paying a drop in the bucket of their household income while a low-income family is stretched even thinner than before.
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Although the federal government’s model to bring down fees to an average of $10 a day is hopeful, the word “average” allows for much more wiggle room than an actual capped fee. It begs the question: just who will be paying $10 a day come next year?
Canada’s subsidized childcare model signals women and primary caregivers do have more choices. Daycare, it seems, is the village women have long been looking for. Many use childcare hours to go to their nine-to-five job for financial reasons or to further their careers. But some, who work less traditional jobs, can use these hours to make a meal or take a shower or simply rest. Others send their older child to care while they take bond with their newborn. Or some, like me, work to make ends meet and find a few hours to create art.
We have come to terms with handing our children to other caregivers to pay our bills. But what about making art in exchange for spending the time with our children? For a woman to explore her own imagination instead of hovering over her child as she learns to put on her shoes is seen as self-absorbed – greedy, even. Making art represents the exact opposite of the selfless, altruistic mother figure our culture can’t seem to shake.
When I pulled my son from daycare, I romanticized becoming this selfless mother. I even brought cupcakes to the daycare staff and a long, handwritten note. The subtext of my smug words: Thanks for raising my son, I’ll take it from here!
Why, I wonder now, did I see childcare as a form of abandonment; a failing of sorts? Why did I equate self-sacrifice with being a “good mother?” In the spectrum of the selflessness of a stay-at-home mom, preparing every meal and snack and tending to every cry, to the seemingly self-centred act of leaving your children behind and eventually winning a Nobel Prize, where does the elusive good mother live?
I think there still exists an unspoken rule that every hour our children are away from us must be used for efficiency: for making money, making appointments, or making dinner. Mothers simply aren’t allowed the space to be unhurried.
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Making art requires an unhurried state. It is sowing seeds in the spring and not knowing if there will be a harvest come fall. I could spend a month writing a short story, only to delete all but one sentence and use that for the idea of a novel I’d like to write, which may or may not ever be published. If there are no tangible yields in my work, is it worth spending the day away from my young children, who are still attached to me with an invisible string that I can feel pulling at my heart?
Writer Maria Bowler believes that creative action is a “very different animal” than productivity-bound action. In Making Time: A New Vision for Crafting a Life Beyond Productivity, she writes: “The results of creative action always draw out more life. The result of productivity is simply more doing. Compare an oak tree growing acorns that it surrenders to the ground, which creates more trees, to sending more emails from your inbox, which makes more replies you have to answer in return.”
It is no wonder so many women feel like they are running on a treadmill. Mothers are constantly expending energy, stuck in the deep grooves of productivity. But what is feeding them?
Making art. Listening to music and staring out the window. Resting on the couch with a good book. These may be considered luxuries, a reward for accomplishments. But what if we shifted our mindset and these tasks became a requirement for raising healthy families? What if we truly understood that a content mother is a better mother?
South of our border, motherhood truly is in crisis. Not only are the choices of whether to become a mother, or reproductive and health care options being taken away, U.S. President Donald Trump wants to eliminate Head Start, a free childcare program for low-income children.
It is no secret that Alberta has been mirroring the politics of our neighbours down south. Now, the province has yet to renew its childcare funding agreement with Canada. Alberta claims Ottawa isn’t giving the province enough money to fund its subsidized programing. With the federal agreement set to expire on March 31, 2026, daycares, childcare workers and families with young children in Alberta are left wondering what’s next.
For now, I will keep walking my now-18-month-old and three-year old to daycare in the morning. I will make sure their water bottles are filled and help them change from their outdoor to indoor shoes. I will watch them stroll into their daycare, holding hands, and then I will go home. For two hours, before I start my “real” job, I will write my next book. Like a photographer who delights in the early morning light, these are my golden hours. I am not earning an hourly wage. I am not taking care of anything or anyone. I am simply breathing life into myself. And for this, I am a better mother.