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‘I do feel I’ve wasted my life, really, living in a world of fictional characters,” said Ian Rankin – multi-award-winning author (more than 35m copies of his Rebus novels sold), knighthood for services to literature and charity, a man who achieves more in one year than I have in 51 – on a recent podcast. If you’ve wasted your life, Sir Ian, what about the rest of us?

There was levity in Rankin’s delivery, but real feeling, too – an ambivalence about what his creative drive had cost him. “There’s big moments, big beats in my life that I just don’t have any memory of: holidays taken, first days at school for my kids and that sort of stuff, because in my head I was somewhere else,” he continued.

You don’t often hear these feelings expressed so baldly, but they’re surely not rare: lots of men wish they’d had, or could have, more time with their families. In a survey of 5,000 fathers from the Working Families charity last year, 74% expressed a desire to parent equally, but 60% said they felt “consistently judged for prioritising family”; low take-up rates for paternity leave and shared parental leave seem to reflect persistent stigma rather than fathers wanting to spend more time with Microsoft Office.

Whenever combining caring and working comes up, I blame the crunch on capitalism (it makes me feel clever, and capitalism deserves to be dumped on). But there’s something else at work here, and that’s what I found so interesting in Rankin’s words. Daniel Radcliffe articulated a related thought recently, in a Q&A in which he was pretty candid about the fact that he didn’t actually need to work, but chose to anyway. “I love the jobs I get to do, so I don’t want to stop working,” he said. “But I’m sure I could just retire and hang out with my kid every day now, which I will want to do at some point.” At some point, I imagine, Rankin could have done that, too. But a compulsion, ambition, whatever, draws them in the other direction.

For mothers with creative aspirations, this conflict, the two-way pull, is even more familiar territory. We make it easy for men to be art monsters, and almost impossible for women – I always think of Barbara Hepworth, vilified for trying to reconcile her art with caring for her triplets – but there are myriad examples. Women doing the majority of caring and child-rearing comes at an obvious creative cost. The graphic artist Liana Finck wrote recently about the tension between wanting to make, and needing (and wanting!) to parent, and not seeing her current experience reflected in culture. “People who are immersed in this are not generally writing books or making art,” she wrote. “Definitely not art that reflects the tedious muchness of taking care of people’s bodily needs.”

You can, actually, make good art from the “tedious muchness”. Film-maker Mary Bronstein did recently in her lacerating film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You; she has explicitly said it draws on her experience of the “full-time job” of caring for her sick daughter. The painter Caroline Walker’s recent work evokes the messy mundanity of early motherhood with tender precision: bottles and breast pumps, wriggling toddlers, the hot slump of a sleeping baby on your shoulder. When I saw her exhibition at (funnily enough) the Hepworth Gallery last year, a security guard was staring intently at one of Walker’s paintings of her mother and daughter; it took him back, he said, to when his own girl was little.

But not every creative’s practice is informed or enriched, and certainly not facilitated, by the quotidian work of caring. In a way, it’s refreshing – comforting, even – to see this bind divorced from gender and even from financial imperatives. Because basically it’s an expression of the simple fact that time is finite and we want contradictory things from it (that, plus the feeling you didn’t parent right, somehow, being inevitable and universal). I spent slow, fallow years with my sons, not even really formulating any creative dreams; I sometimes get wistful about paths not taken. But Rankin’s regrets – if they are regrets? – make me feel better about my own.

• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

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