A Conversation About Motherhood and Creativity with Jen Abrams

I thought we’d try something a little different for Mother’s Day. While I’d prefer to center my work — rather than me personally — on most occasions, it’s undeniable that there’s a mom at the center of this business. The juggle of motherhood, specifically raising a disabled teenager, and creativity is the daily joyful struggle that is my life, so we thought an interview centered on that topic would be appropriate!

I chose my friend and fellow creative, performance artist Jen Abrams, in particular, not only because she’s one of the most insightful and inspiring women I know, but also because we met when our children were going through similar struggles a few years ago. Since then, she’s someone I turn to both to relish the joys when things go well and for a meter-check when things aren’t going well and I am not able to trust my gut.

For clarity and a bit of background, I have a 15 year old, Louella, who is autistic with a severe nervous system disability which produces a level of anxiety and sensory sensitivities that are off the charts. As a byproduct of that, they are unable to leave the house most days. They have problems with eating, schooling, and communication. They do not, however, have any issues caring dearly for their hamster, Barty, reading voraciously, or binge watching Gilmore Girls and The Pitt, and they are a true creative in their own right!

JEN ABRAMS: All right, cool. You want to get started? So, I had a very different idea of what it would be like to be a creative person and parent at the same time. I imagined it in a particular way, which was not what it looks like. So I was curious whether that was also your experience and how you imagined it and what the reality has been?

MEG MOORHOUSE: Number one, I don't think I had any idea what motherhood would be like, period. I don't think I thought it through very fully. One of my best friends had a baby. I literally held the baby and was like, I want one. And 11 months later, I had a baby. So… the getting pregnant part was the easiest part of motherhood.

But… I think in a lot of ways I've become more creative since having a child. I always worked as a designer, but then I kind of dipped out and was managing a restaurant for a few years including when I was pregnant. I started Love & Victory two years before having a kid and it was a side hustle so it was not my primary focus. I left the restaurant as soon as I had the baby, so I became self-employed concurrently with becoming a mom. 

JA: So then when Lou was born and you left the restaurant business it became your primary focus?

MM: That business [No. 7 Restaurant] was flourishing. We were opening a new concept [No. 7 Sub], so I was doing the branding, web design, and graphics. And I started doing that for a host of other restaurants and bars in the city. I was hustling so hard. There was something about becoming a mother and the way I felt like I was regarded where I really felt like I had something to prove. I felt like people thought my work was a hobby. People would make comments to me like, “Oh, your husband must do really well.” I think some of it was that I worked from home and certainly that I spent a lot of time with my young kid, but it cut me to my core.

JA: At what point did the business become sustainable or sustaining from a capitalism standpoint?

MM: It always was. It had to be. I definitely took a step back and made a fraction of what I was making for that first year of freelancing and full time mothering, but Love & Victory was always profitable. And from that point on, I was always making a living that supported me. I got divorced when Lou was eight and things became even more real, because I had to get a studio that was outside the house and sustain an additional residence. I think the physical studio space legitimized the business in a certain way.

JA: Do you think you would have gone all in on a creative career if you hadn't had a baby?

MM: That's a really good question. I think I always would have had a creative career. I don’t know if I would have been self-employed. I think it happened organically. I wanted to be home with Louella part time when she was a baby, so I just kept building freelance work around that to sustain me. And she has always had a lot of needs, so self-employment has been helpful. I’d be fired from a full time job, so I'm thankful that my work is flexible.

I've been very lucky that there's always been enough work. I started doing the work, and more of it came. I do believe in that. You do a good job at a thing that you love doing and more of it comes. Word of mouth, referrals. I've certainly been lucky in that respect.

JA: You said something a minute ago that sort of dovetails with one of my questions. It sounded like you were saying to me that once you had a baby, you were in the mindset of just running the marathon all the time.

MM: You could say that. (laughs)

JA: And I'm curious – did those two things dovetail? Did you find that you had the energy to start the business in part because you had the baby required you to find such depths of energy and purpose and you were just in that mindset?

MM: I needed work that would be flexible enough for motherhood, and having a child made me think of my time differently, in a more organized fashion. I woke up before the baby to get work done, I worked during naps, in the evenings. I had a rough idea of what my days would look like. Even now with a 15 year old, she has so many very specific and inflexible needs that I really have to plan ahead for all of them, and I've gotten much better at compartmentalizing the work.

I'm never half in it. I'm either at work, and I'm head first submerged in doing the work, or I'm at home putting dinner on the table and recharging. Everything is pretty methodical. I used to let the work bleed into all the areas of my life. I worked nights. I worked weekends. I didn't have boundaries with clients or for myself, and it's just not possible anymore. Both from a practical standpoint and from a mental health standpoint, I just can't be ON all the time.

Also, I now have people who work with me. I believe in them also having work-life balance, so nobody's working nights, but I do have more help, which I feel like I should acknowledge. And when I can't be in the studio, there are people there who can be taking care of things that I can't.

JA: How much of the ability to like hold boundaries and feel confident do you think is your age and how much of that is the fact that you're a parent?

MM: I think a lot of it is that I have extenuating circumstances at home. I have no problem saying “I have a disabled child at home, and I can't make that meeting in person. Or once a client wanted me to stay on a business trip longer than initially planned and pushed pretty hard. And I had to state plainly “I cannot. I've organized X amount of childcare and I can’t do more. It's not flexible.” 

JA: Where do you think, though, you find the clarity to say that without freaking out?

MM: You know. I wish that I could say that it's just age or an innate self-posession that's given me the confidence. But I really think that there's a certain amount of having a kid with a disability that's made me give less shits about what other people think of me.

JA: That's been my experience too. It's like… You can't.

MM: Right. I cannot care. The client is never going to be number one. I have this other human that always needs to be number one. (Which also means that I'm not number one. Ever.)

JA: Oh, yeah, never. But that's a different question. That's a different interview.

I'm curious though — one of the things I heard you say is that you have employees now and you are enforcing work-life balance for them as well. Like you're setting the expectation that they also should not be working until the middle of the night and have no boundaries.

MM: Yeah, absolutely.

JA: And there's I think that that's political in a certain way. And I'm curious — Do you think your employees think that you being a parent makes you actually a better employer?

MM: I mean, I'd like to think so. I think that I’m more in tune with the fact that people have different needs. I don't feel like my employees need to disclose what those needs are, but if they need time off or need to come in late … whatever they need to make the situation work as long as it's tenable for the company on a business level then we're fine.

JA: Yeah. I mean, that's kind of a radical disability justice lens, right? To say, it's not how you get it done. It's that you get it done. So the asking of the question of HOW do we get the thing done not what are we signaling by the way that we're getting the thing done?

MM: Right.

JA: You've said that you've become a lot more driven as a parent and a lot more organized. I'm curious if the quality of the creative work, the creative output itself has changed. And what is the relationship to parenthood there?

MM: I don’t think so. I’ve always cared deeply about the quality of the work and while I'm not a perfectionist by any means, I have intense standards.

In thinking about WHAT is my creative work, all of my work practice is, in theory, creative. But there's a bulk of it that is client-based, right? That kind of creativity I can always find the energy for.

JA: Okay. How come? Because you have to?

MM: Yes, because I have to. Every project has a deadline. I have to find a way through it.

But, and I'm not fully answering the question, I have different boxes of creative work. So the client work is the throughline and the truly creative, more personal work — a pro bono project for a non-profit or a fundraiser for charity — dips in and out. I used to do tons of it. I want to do more of it. I feel like I'm always trying to find the balance, because that's also where I derive the most pride in my work and I get really excited about it. But it's mostly self-generated, and that well dries up pretty quickly these days. 

JA: I want to poke at something for a second. I heard you starting to possibly suggest that the client-based work isn't as creative. The question I was trying to ask was about your creative product. I'm hearing a subtext of a certain kind of freedom that you get in your pro bono work. And I'm curious about that sense of freedom as it relates to the constraints that you've described about being a parent. From a creative output on the client side standpoint, have you found that your creative output has changed in any way – like the kind of work you do for clients as a result of being a parent?

MM: I don't know if the work has changed. The work has changed over the years because the business has grown. Sometimes I think the business has grown in inverse proportion to how much my kid is struggling. Which sort of baffles me because I don't think I dive into work at the expense of my kid. I think I've just gotten better at optimizing.

JA: Well, it also sounds like when your kid is struggling more, you're ramping up in the parenting department. And it sounds like that's also ramping up in your productivity department. Like you're just like, okay, now I'm ramped up and I'm going to DO.

MM: Yeah, I can be a little manic, I think. I derive a lot from work energetically; I need that feeling of being on and producing. And I think that it's a way of coping with some of the lows that I experience with parenting. When my kid is struggling, I need to find the dopamine hit of productivity and output. You know what it's like to have a kid struggling and feeling the criticism from the outside world that you’re not doing it right? Work is an area where I do feel like I'm doing it right.

JA: Do you find that when you're in those ramped up phases you have better ideas. Or do you just find that your throughput goes up?

MM: I don’t think they’re better. Just that I have the steam to push them through to completion. 

A lot of my ideas come very quickly. So they do come in that sort of manic energy state. I also now have a team where we can brainstorm and throw the ball back and forth, which helps a lot. And energetically that really works for me. I think that, instead of the ball bouncing around in my own head we can keep throwing the bad ideas out until a good one comes.

JA: So on the other side of things like when you were talking about the pro bono work that has a certain kind of freedom for you and can feel the most creative, there's going to be a relationship between freedom and creativity.

MM: Right.

JA: Like some people are more creative within constraints. But I'm curious what's the relationship of that freedom to the constraints that you're working within as a parent and specifically as a parent of a disabled child. Because God knows there's like nothing but constraints for us.

MM: Nothing but constraints. I think I find it difficult to tap into the freedom. I make my own constraints where they don’t exist. And I should start by saying that I think I always found work streams that did have constraints. For a large part of my adult life, I worked collaborating with artists. It was very creative, but I was number two. It's the same as working with a client. You're still working within certain bounds of the project needs, the brand standards, the end use. And I do enjoy that.

I went to art school, but I never thought that I would be a practicing artist. I still don't think of myself as a practicing artist, but I feel like I'm the closest I've ever been because I have developed a visual language of sorts. But the uniting factor in the projects that I feel more ownership of is that they serve a cause. They are a vehicle for something else. Creating all the merchandise for a fundraiser, let’s say. The cause is motivating.Then it's not just about me and my ideas.

JA: So there's a way you need to be connected to the world in order to really get in a flow state.

MM: Yup.

JA: New topic. Can you imagine a world that truly supported creative parents? What would it look like?

MM: I think it's become harder and harder to understand how creative people make it work in New York. I think generationally, you and I understand that it would be very different starting now. I made it work 25 years ago on 20K a year and managed to still have an art studio in Williamsburg.

But at the parenting stage of the game, I think adding universal pre-k helped a lot of people. Free after school programs would be huge if NYC would implement that. Attaching creativity to income in a way that feels so pressured is really rough on the creative process.

I should acknowledge that a fair amount of my creative work now is done for corporations. It didn't used to be — I used to work almost exclusively for small businesses — but the growth of my company in a certain direction has afforded me the ability to outsource. In thinking through how I run my work life, I outsource anything I can possibly outsource. With my kid’s specific needs, I can't outsource much. Like I can't outsource childcare. They need most of it to come from me. But if I can have somebody clean my house or I can get takeout, I’ll often choose to do that. If that affords me to be at work for an extra hour and then come home and be really present, fantastic.

I think for too many years I was trying to be a certain kind of mom. I was just reading about the concept of Good Enough Mother. I think my meter for which needs absolutely must be met and how they need to be met has changed substantially.

JA: Yeah. And you're really swimming upstream with regard to that. Like when I think about structural changes that could happen, one of the things that comes up for me is a resetting of expectations and standards by which parents are judged. Because that's what you were just addressing there, right? There is an expectation societally that you cook your child dinner. There's some amount of your mental energy every day that gets used up by batting back that expectation, and you've gotten good at it over time, but it's still not a zero expenditure of effort. And if we didn't have to output that particular energy… that's a structural change that could really support us.

MM: Right, right. And I think that changing the expectations to be equal in terms of what we expect of fathers and mothers would have changed my entire world.

JA: Is there one thing you want people who don't have children to know about the experience of being a creative person with a child? I heard you say something earlier about feeling entitled to work-life balance whether you have a child or not. But I've also heard you talk about assumptions that people make. And how those assumptions impact parents. So those are the two things that have already come up that I was thinking about.

MM: I don’t know that it’s directly connected to being a creative parent, but in terms of what I wish people would come to know in the workplace… I feel like you never know what someone's dealing with. So affording everyone some grace. Not just the benefit of the doubt, but the ability to kind of craft their own story, do things their own way… It's like Ross Green says, “kids do well when they can.”

JA: Everybody does well when they can.

MM: Yeah, it really does apply also to adults in the workplace and giving people the right tools. Some people need more explanation. Some need more leeway. I can't say that this has always come easily to me as an employer. I had a neurodivergent employee, and I had a hard time dealing with some of their needs. So I don't want to paint it like I am a picture of perfection. I’m learning. But I do think that people do their best work when they can do it the way that they need to do it, the way that works for their brain. As a team, finding what roles we all can each thrive in and not forcing people to execute in areas where they don’t thrive.

In terms of projects, having a kid like mine has made me learn that — besides a production timeline which is mostly inflexible — it's never too late to scrap the idea and start over. If it's not working, I think you have to be unafraid to begin again. 

JA: How has becoming a parent changed how you listen to clients and approach their needs?

MM: Having seen how my kid will shut down aurally and can't take in verbal info has made me think differently. We resorted to passing notes with checkboxes when they were younger and didn’t have a cell phone, and now we use a lot of text messaging. I've seen how much they need closed captioning when watching a movie, let’s say. So understanding how valid that difference is has really has made me understand clients differently. And I now understand — this particular client needs a Zoom where we just talk through each item. This one needs an itemized email. This one needs a quick phone call or a text message. It's helped me understand that my way isn't the “right” way. I spent a lot of years wishing people could do it my way.

There's a certain amount of bending that we do. And I think that 's why people like to work with our studio. We can fill the gaps where they are instead of insisting on doing things our way. It’s truly collaborative.

JA: Let's wrap up. I've got to go get my kid to bed. This has been a lot of fun.

I'm glad you were game. Thank you so much.