Careers begin at 40. Or 35. Or whenever you can make it happen.

Unrealistically assuming the baby in her belly wouldn't inhibit the grand plans in the head behind that large tam.

When you have young children and feel like you can’t get anything done, that any attempt at creative industriousness is thwarted by the cries of babes, it is good to remind yourself that many successful women got very little done when their children were small. For writers, musicians, artists, and scholars, it’s often impossible to even think about such things until the children are older.

A few weeks ago, my friend, known online as @chirpingnorton, and who is also going through the thankless struggle of establishing an academic career with two small children in tow, tagged me into a tweet: “Look girls - Claire Tomalin only started her career at 35 after having kids and is still writing at 79” [Anthony Gardner, "Claire Tomalin: An encounter with the acclaimed biographer of Samuel Pepys" (2003)]

Claire Tomalin. The great biographer of our age. She was once “crying into a washbasin of baby clothes,” despairing that her ambitions and capabilities “were going down the plughole with the soapsuds.”

See, there’s time, my bluestockinged sisters!

In that vein of mutual encouragement, I will quote two paragraphs from The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. For those, who don’t know Kate Chopin, she is best known for her fin-de-siècle New Orleans novel The Awakening (1899). You should look her up, she’s really interesting.

Anyway, this is a little lesson in not always believing the outward performance. Successful artists who say they just write, perform, create spontaneously are usually fudging the truth.

She also created a public image for herself, long before women routinely did that. Her friend Sue V. Moore called Chopin ‘the exact opposite of the typical bluestocking’, without ‘literary affectations’, ‘fads’, or ‘serious purpose in life’. Chopin herself claimed to be entirely spontaneous, ‘completely at the mercy of unconscious selection’ and without much self-discipline. She had no writing studio, she said, and preferred to write in the common living room, her children swarming around her. She portrayed herself as a mother who wrote as an unserious hobby. 

But her surviving manuscripts show that Chopin was a meticulous reviser who made many changes before sending a story out. Moreover, she did have her own writing room, with a Morris chair and a naked Venus on  the shelf, and her children were young adults, much too large to be swarming rug rats. When Bayou Folk appeared, her daughter Lélia was nearly fifteen and her eldest son Jean was twenty-three.

                                    

Emily Toth, "What we do and don’t know about Kate Chopin’s life," The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin, ed. Janet Beer (Cambridge UP, 2008) 21.

Kate Chopin didn't even start writing until her children were well on the way to being grown up. Her household may well have been chaotic, but she, like women before her and after, was bound by social convention to over-emphasis the performance of motherhood, at the expense of the work that really mattered to her. Even as she was writing about that social bind in her own fiction.

Few people can write successfully with small children pulling at their apron strings/laptop cord, and those that say they can aren’t giving the full story.

Hint: someone is paying handsomely for childcare.

Fortunately, if you haven’t achieved what you’re trying to do by your fortieth birthday, there are decades ahead of you with older children who will gladly leave you alone to get it done.