Balancing work with motherhood isn’t easy. Kim Dismont Robinson was thrilled when she was offered a spot at CaribLit, a fiction-editing workshop in Guyana. She’d been selected from 40 applicants based on her work editing several anthologies published by the Department of Community and Cultural Affairs.

More than anything else, the four-day event offered the struggling writer a chance to meet some of the top editors in the Caribbean.

But once she got there, her excitement dimmed.

“It might have seemed like a break from my children, but it really wasn’t,” said the 41-year-old. “I kept thinking about them the whole time.”

The work-life balance is something Dr Robinson thinks many females grapple with.

“It is hard to find the time to write,” she said. “When I do find it, I’m often not in the right mind space. I miss the specific rush you get from that kind of creation.

“And, of course, there’s the fear and self-doubt that when you finally are in a position to return to it your creativity will have dried up and died — somewhere between the 2am and 5am feedings. It bothers me and I worry.

“As important as parenting is, for artists of any kind it’s incredibly vital to your sense of wellbeing and personhood to still remain engaged with your creative life.

“When I can’t, I feel off-kilter. But then I get inspired by other friends of mine like Andrea Ottley, who has four children and still finds time to write.”

Renowned author Toni Morrison is another inspiration. She regularly woke at 4am to write her first novel, The Bluest Eye, while her two young sons slept.

The idea of regular creative time is still laughable for Dr Robinson, who put off writing a novel after her daughter Eva was born last April.

The now ten-month-old suffered from reflux, and cried constantly for the first five weeks of her life.

“You have to really honour the creative part of you, once you get past the initial sleepless nights,” she said.

“It’s good for children to realise their parents have lives and interests beyond them.”

Ironically, what excited Dr Robinson most about the Guyana workshop was that one of the facilitators published Go The F*ck to Sleep.

The humorous, bestselling book is about parents struggling to get their children to sleep.

“It was so funny, I almost wet myself when I read it,” she said.

Dr Robinson also has a ten-year-old daughter, Jasmine, and two stepdaughters, Ashlee Douglas, 23 and Giselle Soares, 9. She said it was both easier and harder having a baby at 40.

“The adjustments you have to make with the first child in terms of major changes in lifestyle, sleep schedule, and ‘me’ time is so mind-blowing,” she said. “[There’s a] commercial which says at the end, ‘Having a baby changes everything’. You don’t know how true that is until you have one! And there’s no way you can really describe it to someone who hasn’t experienced it.

“As an older mother, you’re more aware of all the things that can go terribly wrong, both in terms of genetics as well as how scary it is to have a little person you love more than your own life just bopping around in the big, nasty world.

“It was Alice Walker that described having a child as being the equivalent of having your heart walk around outside of your body — terrifying.”

Despite the challenges, she’s confident she’ll get back to writing her novel, soon.

She’s also confident that last month’s CaribLit workshop will benefit other Bermudian writers.

“A lot of Bermudians struggle to find an avenue for their writing,” Dr Robinson said. “Sometimes it’s a bit unclear where we fit in.

“Do we count as Caribbean literature even though we aren’t technically in the Caribbean? Talking to the other participants, such as a lady from Belize, it was interesting that some of them had also had these kind of identity questions.”

She said she learnt important editing skills, but more important were the networks forged.

“For example, I met Richard Georges, editor of Moko, an online journal of Caribbean literature,” she said. “That might be a great avenue for a Bermudian looking to publish. He publishes all kinds of things.”