MOTHERHOOD: WITCHCRAFT OR THE DEATH OF CREATIVITY?
WHILE most mums-to-be fret over labour pains and sleepless nights, Lily Cole worried about ‘creative death’.
In the run-up to the birth of her and Kwame Ferreira’s daughter Wylde in 2015, Lily also presented a BBC arts programme to debate a critic’s warning that ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’.
When Wylde arrived, it was three months before Lily made an announcement, with a closeup picture on social media of her baby’s hand tugging at her hair — and a poem on her website that read: ‘Born on the hottest day. Ordinary. Extraordinary. Witchcraft. Wilderness. Love beyond doubt. Love, a fact of life.’
Lily later posted a snap of her daughter pushing one of her intellectual books in her buggy. She wrote: ‘When your daughter goes to your bookshelf and pulls off [a book called] Alchemy And Mysticism and puts it in her pram and pushes it around, that’s alchemy and mysticism’.