Losing (and Finding) Desire: Motherhood, Creativity, and the Suppression of Self
The Unexpected Cost of Motherhood for Creative Women
When I became a mother, I didn’t expect that one of the hardest adjustments would be learning how to handle my own desires. Motherhood isn’t just sleepless nights and endless laundry - it’s a retraining of your entire will.
Suddenly, what you want no longer exists on your own timeline. Everything is filtered through another person’s needs. If I wanted to do something, it wasn’t just a matter of carving out time - it was dependent on whether my child was calm, content, and settled. My own wants became secondary, postponed, or quietly erased.
From Freedom to Fragmented Time
I don’t think it was always this way. My own mom, for instance, seemed to just do what she wanted, even with kids around. If she wanted a cigarette, she’d smoke one -even if she was babysitting. We’d simply exist alongside her desires. But for me, it’s been different. I find myself making sure my children are perfectly at ease before I even consider doing something for myself.
That shift brought anxiety with it. After my first child was born, I felt constantly needed - every cry, every feeding, sent my heart racing. It was overwhelming. As a freelancer, I’d been used to long stretches of solitude, time to draw or just be. Suddenly, solitude was gone. Starting anything creative felt pointless, because I’d probably be interrupted anyway.
Going from zero to one child broke me open. But interestingly, going from one to two has felt easier. Maybe because I’d already been “trained” to suppress my desires - or maybe because once you’re in the rhythm, you stop expecting life to bend around you.
Still, after almost three years, I can feel the cost. Suppressing your wishes day after day erodes your sense of self. And if you’re an artist, this loss runs even deeper. Creativity depends on knowing what you like, what you think, and what you want to say. But it also depends on having the time to ‘waste’: to wander from those starting points into the unknown, to follow tangents, to explore. That’s how you bring something back in the form of art. Without that space, making feels disorienting, like trying to grasp something you no longer recognise.
Why “Monothematic” Moms Aren’t Doing Anything Wrong
And to make things trickier, society often doesn’t make room for this reality. I recently read a Thread where someone was asking for advice on how to talk to her friend who’d just had a baby - because, she complained, the friend wouldn’t “talk about anything else.” The question was framed as if that was a failing.
It hit a nerve for me, because I’ve heard that before. A couple of years ago, my own brother made a dig at a family dinner: “So, when are you going back to talking about normal stuff on Instagram? You’re becoming monothematic with all this mum content.”
The thing is, it’s not that new mums don’t want to talk about other things. It’s that… what else is there? In the first months, especially, you stop watching films, you fall asleep three pages into a book, and you barely go out. The baby is your life. So when you ask about the baby, you are asking about her life. Pretending otherwise is like pretending half of her doesn’t exist. And honestly, it’s a little rude. If someone has just given birth, the kindest thing you can do is let her talk about it as much as she needs.
Turning Loss into Art
For me, being “mono-thematic” has actually become the only way I’ve been able to keep creating. Which is why my motherhood comics feel like a lifeline. They give me something concrete to make, something worth saying, rooted in the reality I live 24/7. And that feels grounding.
I think this struggle isn’t unique to me. It’s the invisible cost of care, especially for mothers. We talk about losing ourselves in parenthood, but what really gets lost are the small daily desires, the wishes and habits that make us who we are. Without them, it’s hard to know yourself. Without them, it’s hard to make art.
But maybe that’s also where new creativity begins: in the act of turning even the suppression, even the loss, into something worth expressing.
