As the pandemic rages on and mothers across the world are forced back home and renounce their creative projects en masse (yours truly included), reading seems like the best possible alternative to writing for mothers in lockdown with small children. 2 recent novels explore the tension between women’s creative endeavours and their roles as mothers: Night Waking by Sarah Moss (2011) and The Group by Lara Feigel (2020). What the two novels have in common is that they both give the relationships mothers have with their children the same weight and intensity that are usually reserved for women’s relationships with men. When children are portrayed in fiction, they are very often the symbol of the female character’s choices (of family over career, for example) – an encumbrance or a source of untarnished joy, they are the reminder of women’s relationship to heterosexuality. But very rarely are mothers’ relationship with their children described for themselves as worthy objects of narrative depiction, and more particularly the fraught and ambivalent bond which unites a mother and her small children. Both novels also explore how the women’s creative endeavour are constantly threatened by the demands of children and how mothers need to clear their own path in order to balance their duties to their children with their duties to their own artistic vocation.