Dear Pepper: What a Way to Make a Livin’

Dear Pepper is an advice-column comic by Liana Finck. If you have questions for Pepper about how to act in difficult situations, please direct them to [email protected]. Questions may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Dear Pepper,

All of my adult life, I’ve been flitting between art jobs. At times I’ve wanted a stable gig, but I could never get hired. Now I am on the precipice of getting one, and I desperately need it—I just had a baby and I need health insurance for her. But the idea of a fixed schedule also makes me want to tear my hair out.

How do I keep from losing all my chill?

Sincerely,
Wishy-Washy

Dear WW,

I’m with you. There’s a lot of talk about balancing a nine-to-five job with parenthood, and clearly it’s not easy—but balancing an art career with parenthood isn’t easy, either, and is less frequently spoken about, especially among artist-parent-dogs, but that’s another story.

Children crave stability. This includes a regular bedtime and regular meals, but it also extends to having reliable care that doesn’t evaporate at the last minute when a parent is invited to fly to L.A. to draw caricatures as a publicity stunt for a shoe startup. It also ideally includes a parent with a reliable income that increases by a nice increment each year to keep up with inflation and to pay for all the stuff kids need: food, clothes, child care, swim lessons, doctor’s visits, a toy from every twenty-five-cent machine you pass, ice cream from the ice-cream truck, birthday presents for all seventeen of the toddlers in your child’s day care who don’t have the decency to specify “no presents” on their birthday-party invitations, and space, lots and lots of space. Health insurance is also a plus. (This is a huge understatement.)

For the most part, artists don’t have that kind of stability. We also don’t have that kind of constriction. The people we work for are usually clients or patrons, not employers. Whereas an employer is someone who offers you certain protections in exchange for, well, owning your body and/or brain for most of your waking hours, a client or patron is someone who compensates you for a service when they need it, and when you’re available to provide it. And it’s possible that this is the way we artists like it. Maybe it’s even the way everyone would like to live, if offered the chance. But stable it is not. And sometimes, being put in a box—safe, but suffocating—isn’t the worst alternative.

Juggling life and work as an artist feels like trying to juggle a live, squirming human child and Schrödinger’s theoretical cat. You’re not really juggling at all—you hold the living, needing child. You never put him down. After a few years, the cat is even more likely to be dead than it was before. You hope and pray that it will suddenly come back to life the year your youngest starts school. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. The artist is well acquainted with Schrödinger’s uncertain future. Maybe I’m just describing what it’s like to make a living as an artist, regardless of children. Maybe I’m just describing life in general. I️ don’t know. I’m very tired.

Many artist-parents opt, if they can, for more regular jobs—in academia, in advertising, in publishing. I ️particularly envy academics, who, at least in my imagination, have long stretches of time when they’re not working, an elegant community, and good benefits. Of course academics and other people with more regular artist jobs can get harried, but then again so can artists trying to string together work on quicksand! It’s a tough choice.

So what is the right choice for you? My opinion about rare opportunities is that they should be taken. (This is also how I feel about cheese, chicken, and other treats.) You’ve wanted a solid job, even though you’ve always known it might not be perfect for you, and it’s finally fallen in your lap. It will be difficult in many ways, but you can always make another change in a year or two if your circumstances and options change. So for now, congratulations!

Pepper