Emily Smith on Parenting
It’s hard to choose a starting point for this blog as during my seven years of parenthood so far there have been many different approaches to the way my musician husband Jamie McClennan and I juggle our work and family life balance. Hopefully the following will offer some glimmers of insight and helpful pointers for fellow artists and musicians embarking on a similar path.
Our son was born in 2013. Until that point we had been full time touring and recording musicians. Before starting a family we wanted to try and achieve some level of financial security and also have enough of a presence in our genre that if we were to disappear for a while it wouldn’t be completely detrimental to everything we had built up during the ten years we’d worked together. Having been self-employed for my entire career I knew there would be a gap in our income if I were to have a child so we worked hard at saving and making plans for work that could happen as close to home as possible to allow me to step back and enjoy the life change that was about to happen.
While I was pregnant with my son we created two albums, the first a compilation of tracks to mark the first decade of my career. We also recorded the bulk of my ‘Echoes’ album which was released the following year in 2014. Pregnancy was the easiest part for me, I kept well and was able to work until relatively late on before I ran out of puff to sing.
Becoming a mother was the biggest life change I have ever experienced, a complete shock initially and gradually through the fog of exhaustion, a realisation of hefty responsibility. Having been a freelance musician for my whole working life I suddenly had a tiny human to answer to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! My entire perspective changed. Things that had previously seemed so important and stressful no longer bothered me in the slightest. It was actually quite liberating knowing that my decisions, especially professionally, weren’t all about me anymore.
Motherhood made me focus and the time that I got to spend on music became very streamlined. Practise for pure enjoyment disappeared entirely in those early years. I remember getting the baby to sleep, running downstairs to our recording studio in the cellar of the house and doing a maximum of three vocal takes, then running back upstairs before he would wake for the next feed. I would take care of my son through the day and once he was down for the first chunk of night sleep I would sit down with my laptop and begin my working day of admin. I achieved a lot and managed to keep my career ticking over during this time but it was exhausting and looking back now I don’t know how I did it.
The launch tour for Echoes happened when my son was ten months old, it was a two week long UK tour and kicked off with a launch show at Celtic Connections in the Old Fruitmarket. That was our first taste of touring with a baby. A lot of thinking and planning went into the prep for the tour and thankfully due to very easy going band mates and a friend coming along as a nanny, we made it work and it was a great experience. Touring with one child is challenging but entirely possible for our set up (both parents being on tour). In his first two years we toured the UK, Germany, Denmark and New Zealand with our son. Our parents have been a huge help along the way and we paid friends to be tour nannies too.
In 2016 our daughter arrived and during that pregnancy we recorded a Christmas album. Her arrival came at a very stressful point in our lives; we moved house five days before she was born, Jamie was in bed with the flu and it was the middle of winter. But, thankfully I had discovered hypnobirthing and I can honestly say it kept me calm throughout what could have been a complete nightmare of a week. (I can’t recommend hypnobirthing enough, the comparison of my two birth experiences couldn’t be more different).
Going from one child to two is a game changer. Not the full force blow of first time parenting but a challenge where you wish you could split yourself in two. Thankfully this was where for us as a couple, both being self employed worked in our favour. Jamie was at home, and could help keep our busy two year old entertained when I needed to sit and feed the baby.
We toured in the UK with our daughter as a baby and left our son at home with my parents but only for short stretches, four nights maximum. It was again possible to do but didn’t sit comfortably with me being away from my children for too long. So far we have only toured with two children in tow once. It was actually more like a working holiday around England where we filled the days with visits to farm parks and garden centres and played shows at night. Even taking my dad on tour as free childcare, it was a whole lot of work (bearing in mind the planning that goes into a tour in the months and sometimes years before the shows take place).
Now that our son is in school we are touring less and less. We considered lots of scenarios that might enable us to keep an active touring schedule but gradually came to the realisation that our children would be the ones who would bear the brunt of a lot of upheaval combined with tired, absent parents. That was a major shift for me to process internally, to give up the life we’d had, but the more I was away, the more guilt I felt being away from my kids.
After a year of adjustment I’m now much happier with the balance between being present for my children and the need to make money to pay the bills. Yes I could tour with other musicians and leave Jamie at home, likewise so could he and that scenario works well for several families we know. But we enjoy touring together, we enjoy making music together and so made the decision that we would rather diversify how we earn our living than work apart for much of our time. We also both have other interests and having been musicians for almost twenty years we’re now enjoying adding other avenues of work to our life.
Before lockdown I had been working with Fèis Rois for the last 18 months teaching traditional music to children in primary schools throughout our home region of Dumfries & Galloway. For the last two years I have run a music class for pre-schoolers in my local village. My daughter came with me from when she was nine months old until recently at age four she decided she’s too old for it now! I have various ideas for more musical groups and local projects for post lockdown but more so for once my children are both at school. My musical focus is now much more on what I can offer to my community than touring away from home. So I’m a different musician to the kind I was pre-motherhood. I still love performing and Jamie and I released a duo album under the name Smith & McClennan in November 2019. The shows we play tend to be within Scotland or if further afield need to be weighed up and mulled over as to how worthwhile they will be. We ran a series of Facebook live shows in the run up to our album release so we are already set up for sharing performances online during lockdown as many artists now are. The nature of our working lives has meant we’re used to having no safety net so the jolt of lockdown was perhaps not too much of shock to us, all of our live work for the year has been cancelled of course which is a loss, but thankfully due to our son being in school we had already started to move our financial reliance away from live shows. Prior to that we would have been dramatically affected by cancelled tours and I feel for those who are in this situation.
I think ultimately my advice, so far, is that it’s important to keep perspective. Children, especially the baby years have so many different phases and stages and bumps in the road that need to be worked through. And likewise us self employed musicians tend to go from one project to the next. We become used to change. If you can combine a busy working period with a relatively straight forward stage of parenting then well done, chances are it’ll all kick off at the same time!
My experience is that things will get tough, but know that all things come to an end point, good and bad. Looking back on those early years now I cherish those times and though there were points where I was so tired I couldn’t face going on to entertain an audience, it was often the easiest part of the day to just stand on stage with no one asking anything of me other than to sing. But a word of caution too, being present for small people from the early hours onwards takes its toll, if you then face going on stage until late at night, driving after a show and sleeping in a bed that’s not your own, then pace yourself. Say yes to help when it’s offered, connect with others in a similar situation, but keep in mind that the life you had previously isn’t sustainable once children come along. Be open to new things, adapt what you do or how you work for the period of life that you’re in. I know that in the years ahead when our children are less dependant on us then Jamie and I could potentially return to more of a performance based approach to being a musician, if we want to. But for now my priority is my children and being around for them. Sharing our gift and passion for music with them is one of the most rewarding experiences I can give them right now, especially in these unsettled times.
