From Deep Inside
This article first appeared in Organica Magazine Fall 2005, Vol. 23m No. 69
This morning it was clear my three boys (ages 4, 4, & 3) were in no mood to get ready for pre-school.
They were playing mousy. In the short time they had been awake the mice had built a mouse hole with chairs and couch cushions and filled it with toys. A bag of baby carrots was perched on the roof. The mice were taking small round bites out of tortillas and peeking through them.
Gah! I thought, how do I sell school? My stomach tightened up and I was about to use the big voice and start issuing orders when something better prevailed. Mousies! I announced, please come here. It’s time to put on your tiny mouse clothes and eat your breakfast in the mouse hole. The mice were delighted and scampered off to get dressed. After choosing grey shirts and jeans they were soon gathered back in their hole munching on cheese. And then again, without hesitation, they loaded themselves onto the mousy school bus, and in a bustle of squeaks, we were on our way to school in record time.
When I pull something like this off I am amazed. I wish such creative strategies were the norm for me. When they arrive it feels like I am relating to my children from a deeper well, a place that invites imagination and creativity into our hectic lives. The mood shifts and my family becomes a creative democracy -- a small incubator for world peace.
My brother’s high spirited two-year-old girl suddenly became unmanageable at bedtime. He and his wife were taking turns each night negotiating a high stakes battle of wills with their arm waving screaming daughter who, despite her tidy blond bob, and pink pajamas became a terror at 7pm. After running through the usual methods of coercion, begging, appeasement, and discipline my brother took off in another direction. He came up with an obstacle course in the neighborhood park. He ran her (and the dog) up hills and around trees over and under obstacles for a full 20 minutes of heart pounding giggling exertion. Rather than resisting her he acknowledged that she wasn’t done with her day. After her ‘workout’ and a bath she crashed like a wet noodle.
For me these examples are small but meaningful detours from the mundane patterns of our lives that can transform caregiving from a drudgery to an art or, better yet, a form of play. I see water finding its way around a rock smoothing edges and keeping life fresh. This is not the urgent caregiving of physical survival or a modern-day brand of high-performance caregiving but a sincere approach that moves from one creative soul directly into another.
For today’s caregivers there are countless outside pressures and distractions clamoring for time and energy. How do we resist the ongoing sensation that we are simultaneously overworked and underperforming? How do we reach deeper into the most vital resource we bring to our children – ourselves?
Never in all my reading through parenting and caregiving literature have I seen caregiving referred to as an art form. But why? I can’t think of a more adventurous and bold act of creation than raising a human being. How then do we protect the buoyant and creative energy that inspired us to have children in the first place? And how do we remember to share ourselves with our kids rather than for them?
In my experience, when I follow the thread of my own creative impulses for reading and writing, for fresh food, art and music I begin to circle around answers to these questions. And in the process I find other caregivers from whom I can draw support and inspiration. When I look and listen I uncover stories of creative caregiving all around me.
I have a friend who worked her way through a college degree in photography when her girls were small. The family lived in a small house and money was tight. Her husband and children became the subject of her work. The black and white images she took during this time capture a vein of silent richness that runs through the life of her family. The photos are a timeless legacy for her children – a visual record of how she as an artist sees them with their beauty their spirit and their rough edges. In a personal statement on her work she writes, “I made it into the darkroom to print for the first time and the most amazing thing happened: I exposed a negative, dunked it in the developer and there before my eyes was my daughter in our yard in a way I had never seen before.” Through blending her role as mother with her calling as an artist she nourished both her children and her chosen art in a simple and inspiring way.
I have a friend who returned to law school the same day her youngest son started kindergarten. She tells how she loaded his small backpack put her hands on his shoulders and looked him squarely in the eye. “Look,” she said, “I won’t have time to help you very much with school so you have to put everything I need to see and all the work you need to do inside this backpack.” We can never fully understand the magic of one compelling moment with a child but that boy took full responsibility for his academic life. He never turned in an assignment late, never forgot to bring things home and went on to graduate from high school at the top of his class. His mother will never know whether watching her return to school alongside him shaped his emerging attitude towards learning but it’s tempting to make a direct connection. Although the modalities of law school and photography are so different the basic impulse is the same -- two caregivers raising their kids from the intelligent, authentic place of their individual journey through life.
If a poet needs to find her voice or a painter needs to find her medium, isn’t it the greatest calling of parenthood to find the forms of expression that bring us to our work intact with both body and spirit?
My mother will be the first to admit that her overriding emotion when she brought each of her three children home from the hospital was fear. She was afraid we would get sick and die and afraid that she would fail us. Somehow she thought if she could kill every last germ we would be all right. Fear is a challenge to creativity and many of my early memories feature my mother scrubbing. She scrubbed me and my brothers, the toilet, the sink, her own teeth.
But, as I discovered recently, even inside this deep compulsion there was still artistry. During my mother’s last visit I could feel the impact of her arrival within minutes. In the kitchen a few things were lined up in rows and stacked. I started to unwind in an imperceptible way that seemed to tug all the way back to my childhood. Over the years I had unconsciously come to expect and even crave my mother’s ability to organize my surroundings. My brothers and I will never know to what extent her efforts allowed us to conserve our energy and develop as human beings inside a clean and ordered space.
Although I am grateful for this, the times that my mother’s more creative self peeked through made the deepest and most lasting impressions on me. At regular intervals as I was growing up I would come home from school to find a new book waiting for me on top of my bed. It was not for a birthday or to reward good behavior and no thank you was expected. I would just climb onto my bed and read. Her book selections were thoughtful and engaging and I learned to trust her judgment. The generosity of this gesture encouraged me to plow into books that were just beyond my reading level and experience the rewards of chasing after a more enriching read. In hindsight, it was also a personal and inclusive offering because it came directly from her own love of reading and matched up with the big pile of books on her night table.
As I write this and use the words creativity and imagination I worry that they will be interpreted as a call to a Pinterest model complete with crafty activities and food cut in clever ways. Certainly, if you express yourself this way it is lovely. But the stage is so much wider than that. There are infinite ways to share your creative self with your children -- there is music, movement, language, color, sports, food preparation, the outdoors, organizational ability, spirituality, personal style and so on and so on.
Ideally, we get to choose from many modes of expression but sometimes outside pressures can limit our choices. Adversity and scarcity sometimes arrive uninvited and force us to improvise and use our creativity in unexpected ways. Starting when she was nineteen years old, my cousin had four babies in quick succession. Without a college education, she often had to work three jobs and sacrifice time with her kids. As the kids grew up the family went through a house fire and a painful divorce. They lived in Montana and still managed to spend a great deal of time outdoors skiing, sailing, fly fishing, and riding horses. Through all of the lean times my cousin insisted on keeping her sailboat and making time to go out on Flathead Lake both alone and with her children. “ It’s ridiculous,” she told me, “Here I am a broke single mother with a sailboat.” You could call this stubborn, impractical, even selfish, but I call it inspired. The message she gave her children was powerful – in the face of adversity stay true to the needs of your spirit.
The line between remaining true to yourself and caring for your children can be thin. As I write this my boys are having a robust play session in their room. They sound like small drunken sailors. If I press on for too long I will face a big mess and three empty stomachs. At what point does the time I set aside to write become self indulgent and turn into a kind of benign neglect? I don’t know the answer to that question but I am willing to step out on the line and try.
The call to the imagination in caregiving appeals to my free spirit because there is no cookie cutter, no formula, no right or wrong. There is only a recognition of what rises up most naturally from within. It is a personal search for the singular and unique spirit that each one of us brings to the work of raising our kids. Clearly, we can’t spend all our days shimmering with creative radiance but we can try and stay alert for the moments when inspiration visits. We can stop from time to time and ask if we have invited our best selves along for the ride. Because caregiving can be a grind, and there are times when the best we can do is stumble along. Creative endeavors honor and recognize the tough times folding them into the greater experience of our lives. It is art, and not perfectionism, that welcomes and incorporates error and difficulty.
Raising children is so full of contradictions. We are called on to offer up a sense of permanence while staying in motion ourselves and making it all up as we go along. We are asked to be sensitive and strong, cautious and fearless, humble and powerful. The creative path winds its way through these extremes and helps to keep us whole. When our creative spirit blends together with the work of caregiving we can, even for one small moment, become artists and reach past the physical boundaries of being human.
