Motherhood Quote by Jim Bishop

Creative work is the only offspring you can’t stop judging. Bishop’s line lands because it flips the cozy metaphor of “my baby” into something messier: if you’re both father and mother to a text, you’re not just proud-you’re exhausted, implicated, and a little resentful. The phrase “born in such travail” drags writing out of the romantic realm and into labor: not inspiration, but strain. That’s a journalist’s truth telling on itself, the craft as deadline-driven childbirth.

The subtext is a confession about authorship as a trap. To “read for pleasure” requires distance, the ability to encounter something as an object rather than a mirror. Bishop argues that writers are denied that luxury. The work “enslaved him” first-through research, revision, self-doubt, the tyranny of getting it right-then keeps its shackles on afterward because the author can’t stop seeing the seams. What readers experience as flow, the writer remembers as struggle. Pleasure is replaced by postmortem: the sentence you fought over, the paragraph you patched, the fact you didn’t quite say what you meant.

Context matters: mid-20th-century journalism prized production and authority, often at personal cost. Bishop, known for narrative history, worked in a world where bylines were brands and output was currency. The line isn’t self-pity so much as a hard-eyed rebuttal to the fantasy that writers luxuriate in their own prose. It’s the dark joke of the trade: you make the thing, the thing makes demands, and afterward you’re too close to love it like a stranger can.