Parenting Roundtable With Bekka Palmer, Matt Buccelli, and Toya Gavin

The logistics of juggling parenting with creative and professional lives

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TW Creative Director John Vogel interviews Bekka Palmer, Matt Buccelli, and Toya Gavin. Each guest is a respected artist in their fields and has been creating art while raising their kids. In this week’s episode, the group discusses how they juggle their creative careers and parenting. 

Bekka is a painter, fiber artist, and writer who has worked as an independent artist for the past 10 years. Previously, she worked as an event producer, a freelance photographer, and a basket maker. She sells her current work at Closed Mondays. Her Substack, Studio Sundays, is a record of her research on creative professionals and log of her own circuitous practice. She believes in tearing down the barriers between one’s self and the creative career desired and aims to be transparent in her challenges.

Matt writes and curates ParentSounds, a newsletter dedicated to helping parents discover, support, and become inspired by other parents pursuing creative passions amidst the day-to-day rollercoaster of family life.

Toya is a coach, a consultant, a writer, and an attorney. She specializes in working with women of color to help them transition from the jobs in which they were trained into the careers for which they were built. Toya publishes the weekly Substack newsletter Wake Up Worthy with Toya. She writes to her audience to remind them that every challenge doesn’t stem from thoughts holding them back—some limitations are just straight up oppression. She believes everyone has the power to navigate both, and her blog provides the tools to help. 

In this episode, the group dive into the daily schedules and logistics of parenting while having a creative career. A normal, uninterrupted 9–5 work day is a thing of the past. Bekka and Matt admit that they work around their kids’ schedules. While Matt can sometimes carve out six hours of work during any given day, Bekka works sporadically throughout the day. They tend to grab their moments while they can. 

This type of sporadic work day has been something they needed to accept as they became parents. Before they had kids, they believed that they could bring their kids to the studio or their study and let them play while they worked. In reality, that’s rarely the case. Bekka says her kids are constantly interested in whatever she’s working on, but it’s not necessarily safe to have kids around her artistic materials. Matt has found that his kids take up his entire attention and that he finds it impossible to split his attention between himself and his kids. Toya shared that working from home is like a double-edged sword because as she is the one home, much of the load falls on her. As an example, she relays a day when her child was sick, and she had to stop everything and be the default caretaker because she could due to her working from home. 

Tune in to hear more about the creative ways these artists balance parenting and pursuing their artistic careers.

Podcast production for this episode was provided by Sarah Tulloch and her podcast production company, CCST.