Against balance
And Mother/Maker is here!
Introducing a new offer:
Mother/Maker
A six-week catalyst for those who know the conflict between mothering and making isn’t going away — and are ready to work with it instead of negotiating with it.
When people talk about balance, especially in the spiritual or self-help worlds, they usually mean dial something down. Adjust the various energy knobs of your life so they all pretty much match. Do you work too much when you’re supposed to be with your family? Get thyself in a hammock. Are you a people-pleaser? Set those boundaries so you’re the right amount of empowered.
Balance, as it’s practiced culturally, is just a more polite way of saying, “Don’t do or be too much of any one thing.” It promises itself as the solution to avoid feeling conflicted, which is considered evidence that you’re doing your life wrong. We’re offered an emotional management strategy disguised as a lifestyle aspiration.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been able to pull this off consistently, and the attempt has never left me more alive.
Not to mention the unbalanceable conflicts in our lives that aren’t going away — not because we’re doing something wrong, but because we don’t actually want them to go away. We are in the middle of two necessities pulling in different directions. My sister Kate called them “competing loves.”
Your health (which just won’t let itself be ignored) and your cherished dreams.
Your parenting and your creating.
Your political convictions and your religious tradition.
They’re realities that stake claims on us, beyond a calendaring issue. And when you have two realities like that at the same time, our culture gives us basically two choices:
Option one: keep adjusting the knobs. Keep trying to get the proportions “right” with a bad compromise. Keep tweaking your efforts like a soundboard until there’s no feedback. (There is never no feedback.)
Option two: give up. Resign yourself to the idea that this is just going to suck. Carry the tension with as much dignity as possible and seek some comfort.
That’s usually the moment people start talking about “balance.”
Now, some people say “I don’t balance,” and what they mean is: I made sacrifices. I took things off my plate. Which… yes, obviously. That can be a great idea. But it’s a shame we keep framing the issue as listing our tasks correctly rather than asking the realer, more interesting question:
What new third thing wants to emerge from the conflict between these parts of my life?
The tension itself is generative, even when it’s painful or it doesn’t make sense. Sometimes especially when it’s painful and it doesn’t make sense.
We are porous, contradictory, and shaped by whatever forces are pressing most insistently on us. And when two of those forces have strong cultural scripts — say, “Mother” and “Artist/Maker” — the collision has so much potential for liberation if we let it.
The last five years of my life made the Mother/Maker conflict impossible to ignore, because having a child will do that. But 2025 specifically — releasing a book while navigating a chronic health crisis with my daughter — forced my hand. I was at my book launch while my kid was home sick with her Nana, after weeks of anticipation. I drastically cut my working days to drive my kid to a specialist ninety minutes away, two appointments a day, three times a week, for six months. There’s no “balancing” that. But there’s an opportunity to let the truth of it rearrange how I interact with the world.
Most of what we call “a balance problem” is actually a truth problem. We’ve been carrying around these neat, separate boxes — Mother, Maker, Work Self, Spiritual Self — each with things inside that we actually care about, values we don’t want to abandon. But each box also contains less-true items that just got thrown in: our parents’ style of working, generalized shame, weird rules that were silently handed to us over time.
In the Mother box, there might be deep tenderness and a curiosity to actually know your child, right alongside a version of gentle-parenting language that sounds nothing like your real voice and a demand for perfectly nutritionally balanced lunchbox meals every day.
In the Maker box, there might be the insistent call to tell a story that keeps haunting your dreams, sitting beside your professor’s aesthetic preferences or the idea that a real artist doesn’t make real money.
When the boxes violently jostle each other, it looks as if something essential has to give, but usually what has to give is not the essential thing at all. It’s the false pieces, like the pressure to impersonate a concept of a good mother or a real creative person. The friction between parts of our life forces those pieces to the surface, shaking them loose.
And the “third thing,” the thing people imagine is on the other side of balance, is just what remains when the truth stays and the false parts fall away. And honesty tends to change the shape of things more than balance ever could.
ASK: What truths are making your life inconvenient right now?
Mother/Maker is a six-week space where we’re going to take the raw material of your actual life — the collisions, the tenderness, the constraints, the longing — and let it inform who you are becoming next.
We’ll work with the tension directly, not as something to fix but as something that’s already shaping you. By the end, the false pieces will have less power, the true ones will be clearer, and you’ll have language for the third thing that’s been forming under the surface.
This is VERY tempting. I’m thinking about it!
So much great stuff in this post. I was at the Ursula K. LeGuin biography show at Oregon Contemporary yesterday. She was such a pioneer as a prolific sci-fi writer and mother of three kids. https://tinhouse.com/podcast/crafting-with-ursula-julie-phillips-on-the-writing-mother/