Life Outside the Box: An Interview with Beatrice Scudeler

Leaving Dreams Behind, Being Found by Motherhood, and Falling into Writing

May 09, 2024

Welcome to all new readers! This is the sixth interview in a series where we celebrate the intentional choice to live as whole persons and not just one-dimensional job titles.

The overwhelmingly positive response to my essay, Leaning (In and) Out, (Not) Having it All, suggested to me that there are a lot of women (and men) who are keen to set aside the societal pressure to hustle hard and put all their energies and decades of life exclusively into one single career box.

This series offers interviews with those who have chosen a life outside the box, in a variety of ways. It’s my hope that in getting to peek into the lives of others, we’ll all be inspired to step outside the pressure chambers we may feel stuck in - even if our lives are very different in practice from those shared here.

Encouragement, permission, examples - I hope whatever it is you need to step outside the box, you’ll find it here.

Today I’m welcoming Beatrice Scudeler: wife, mother of two, and writer from Oxford, England.

I first met Beatrice at a local reading group, and then stumbled upon her account of leaving her highly competitive, dream PhD program after a year. Her witness to such a bold, outside-the-box move was striking! I’m delighted to get to share a peek into her life here.

(1) What does your life outside the box currently look like? Tell us about a day/ week in your life.

With a two-year-old and a six-month-old, my life looks different every day, no matter how much structure I try to impose on it. After becoming a mother two years ago, I quickly figured out that strict schedules are inherently incompatible with caring for children, more so the younger they are!

Having said that, here’s what our family routine roughly looks like. My husband works full time Monday to Friday, though fortunately he’s able to do so from home around 2-3 days a week. On Mondays and Tuesdays, I have both kids all day, and we end up going to playgroups and organising playdates whenever possible. We live in a small place, so I’m always trying to find activities to do outside the house (though not always succeeding, I must add!). My toddler just started nursery part-time after turning two, so now he’s at school 9am-3pm Wednesday to Friday, and I’m at home with just my baby girl. While she naps, I use those few precious hours to clean the house, get ahead on cooking, rest (especially if the baby slept badly the night before), and write. I don’t normally get big chunks of work done during the week, but I do manage to respond to emails, edit articles, and do bits of reading here and there. I’m also very fortunate in that my mother and my mother-in-law come and help whenever they can. On a week when they are able to visit, I definitely get a lot more writing done.

When he isn’t working, my husband is incredibly helpful. He wakes up earlier to take our son to nursery so I can get extra rest in the morning, he helps with bathtime and kitchen cleanup after dinner, and get all kinds of tasks done in the house that I don’t have time for while looking after both kids. Most importantly, he gives me his weekends. Once my daughter hit the four-month-mark and started nursing less often, he made a habit of kicking me out of the house for the best part of every Saturday so that I can sit down in a café and focus on reading and writing. I can do what I do because he values my creative and intellectual life, and that’s a wonderful gift.

Of course, our week looks like this during the school term-time, and if none of us are sick. If the kids have a cold, if they start to sleep badly, or when my husband occasionally has to be away for a day or in the evening, we shift everything around. Staying flexible is kind of a requirement when you’re a parent of very small children. It’s chaotic, but it’s just a season in life, and we’re trying to enjoy it in all of its unpredictability.

(2) How did you get there? What intentional choices did you make?

I was speaking to another writerly mother recently who described her journey as ‘falling into writing’. That rang very true for me, too. I’ve described my experience here, but the short version of the story is that, just under a year ago, I left my doctoral studies. I wasn’t sure if I would ever go back to academia, and now I can say that I most likely won’t. I agonised over the decision and was frankly heartbroken about it for months. I was pregnant with my second at the time, and could only see my life in terms of two options: either I was going to be the celebrated literary scholar, or I was going to take the plunge and become a stay-at-home mother.

The first option became increasingly unsustainable, as my husband and I struggled to tag-team parent our son. ‘Academia gives you so much flexibility to look after children’, I thought at first. I was sorely mistaken! In practice, both myself and my husband following our respective ‘academic dreams’ meant two transatlantic moves in under two years, all while starting a family. It meant being very far from anyone who could help us with childcare, and all of this for a career that offers little financial security, and requires so much commitment and devotion! It was painful, but I knew that, for the sake of my health and the good of our family, I had to step away.

But something else happened in the middle of all of this. Close to the end of my one year as a PhD student, I wrote an article recounting my son’s birth. I had no prior experience of public-facing writing whatsoever, but to my surprise, it was published. In the following weeks two amazing women, who have acted as mentors to me, asked me to write for them: I worked with Erika Bachiochi on a piece about Jane Austen for Fairer Disputations, and with Nadya Williams at Current for and essay on Dorothy Sayers. After that, I knew I felt called to devote myself to writing.

Now, a year later, I call myself a stay-at-home-mum-turned-part-time-writer. My husband and I have intentionally moved back to Oxford, close to family on both sides, and he is focusing on taking jobs that, while they may not be his ‘dream’ job, are allowing us to plan to settle and raise our kids here. We’ve both made compromises and left some dreams behind. It’s a part of growing up. But, while having children did influence my decision to leave an academic career, it also opened the door for a more unconventional life, one that I’ve come to be profoundly grateful for. I get to write about so many things that I’m passionate about, from literature to my faith, motherhood, and even recipes for the wonderful Hearth & Field.

(3) What are you intentionally choosing to say “yes” and (maybe more importantly!) “no” to in this season of your life?

Yes to asking for help. No to making career choices that hurt my family. In fact, no to thinking in terms of ‘careers’ to begin with, and yes to speaking about vocations instead.

My husband and I said yes to living closer to our parents for the sake of having their help (and so they can see their grandchildren grow up!). We are now saying no to jobs and opportunities that would disrupt our children’s lives. This is not the ideal of individualistic independence that our secular society has set as the ultimate goal, but it works for us, and it’s made us peaceful. I’m not ashamed to admit that I constantly ask for help looking after my children; I need breaks like every other mother out there. But, on the other hand, I’m also not ashamed to admit that I don’t want to be an exhausted, stressed-out mum and spend most of my time working when my kids are so small. I feel that motherhood is my vocation, but that being a witness to the Christian faith through my writing is a vocation, too. I’ve come to see this dual calling as a blessing.

On a smaller scale, no to pretentiousness. I used to spend so much time reading books that I thought would make me seem impressive – that’s a waste of intellectual energy! With the limited time I do now have as a parent, I read a lot less, but I’m very selective, and intentionally read slowly. I appreciate the books I do get to read a lot more than I used to.

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(4) When you were a child/ younger, what vision did you have for your life? Did you always want to live outside the box, or did it come later? Was it a surprise to you?

As a child, I always had this internal struggle between the creative and the hyper-conscientious/practical parts of me. I remember alternately wanting to become an artist and a human rights lawyer, a novelist and a forensic anthropologist. In all these changes, my love of literature, which I’ve had for as long as I can remember, was the constant. My greatest ambition, probably since I was around six, was to be a writer of some kind or another. I switched to the idea of becoming a professor in secondary school, which I thought was the more sensible, more attainable option. Essentially, I lacked the courage to use the gifts God gave me in the way He wanted me to use them, and more or less abandoned the writing dream.

Funnily enough, it was motherhood that gave me the courage I lacked. Being a mother was never my ‘dream’ as it is for other people. I knew I wanted a family, but I didn’t envision myself finding a spouse and having kids until a little later in life, partly because no-one I knew did these things until their 30s. Rather, the motherhood dream found me. I met my husband when I was twenty-two, got married and got pregnant at twenty-three, and had my kids at twenty-four and twenty-six respectively. My son and daughter turned my ‘life plan’ upside-down, rearranged all my goals, and radically changed my priorities. But it is thanks to them that I rediscovered the older dream of writing and went back to it full force. It’s really providential that I have since met so many wonderful writerly mums. As Jennifer Banks talks about in her recent book Natality, giving birth has a way of fostering creativity in the new mother. That was definitely the case for me.

(5) What dispositions/ attitudes/ skills do you feel like held you back from stepping outside the box sooner, if you wish you had?

I’ve always been such an agreeable person. I’m an only child, and I think I’ve spent my entire life wanting to please my parents and achieve goals that would make them proud of me. That also means that I sometimes go for what feels like the safe option, rather than where I feel a calling from God. I’m trying to change these habits.

For example, I wish I’d given myself permission to acknowledge that something wasn’t working much sooner. I held onto the academic dream for so long, in part because I worried that admitting defeat meant disappointing myself and those I love. I honestly thought my intellectual life would be over once I left academia (I can happily report I could not have been more wrong!). I’m also working on becoming a more hopeful person. I think I could have pursued better dreams earlier if I hadn’t been so terrified of failure and had been more trusting in God’s plan for my life.

(6) What dispositions/ attitudes/ skills helped you cultivate the life you have now?

I cannot overemphasise the importance of letting others help you. I learned this the hard way, after spending years trying to control everything and do everything by myself – which, as you can imagine, doesn’t work out particularly well after you have kids. We live in a society that values independence very highly, and sees asking for help as a weakness. But we’re made to be interdependent beings. My children are dependent on me, just as I depend on my husband, my parents, and my friends to help me be their mother. One day, no doubt, I will depend on my children to look after me in my old age.

I also think practising gratitude helps us grow in virtue. The reason I can write freelance and spend time with my children is that my husband works full time and takes on the majority of the financial burden. Instead of feeling guilty about that (which doesn’t help anyone!) I’m trying to be grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given, and to work hard every day. I also remind myself that it’s normal to go through seasons of life when one is more vulnerable and needs to accept more practical and emotional support. Early motherhood is one of those seasons; I am fully immersed in it for the foreseeable future, and have accepted its joys and challenges alike.

(7) Where can people find you online?

I have a weekly substack newsletter at Literary Convert, and have also written, among others, for The Critic, The Catholic Herald, and Public Discourse about literature, religion, motherhood, and bioethics. I’ve compiled a list of my published work here.

» I appreciate Beatrice’s candour about the realities of life: sometimes you just need someone else to send you to a coffee shop on Saturdays! And isn’t it wonderful to realize that what you thought was an either / or situation is actually both /and?

Now let’s discuss! Have you ever walked away from what you thought was your dream, only to “fall into” something amazing? What kinds of compromises have allowed you to cultivate a life outside the box? How do you practice interdependence instead of just independence?

Cultivating Clarity

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