Mom guilt, Robin Hood, and reading magazines like a grandma

Part III of a discussion with Aimee Guest on Creativity and Motherhood

Part I, Part II

Dear Aimee,

You beautifully titled your response “Maybe it’s not stolen. Maybe it’s a gift.” and that thought has been with me for weeks now. The way you reframed my own guilty conscience about making “me-time” when my kids were younger is still relevant to me now, with my youngest child being twenty years old. I am still the person who puts tasks that have a visible outcome—doing the laundry, mopping the floors, unpiling the papers on my desk—above the writing. I am sporadic with my craft, easily knocked off my routines and rhythms in favor of getting stuff done. But I come back again, and the time to write or paint or create anything at all is a gift, not stolen goods. You’ve given me a mantra.

Your paragraph at the end gives me chills:

“Tresta, maybe we were thieves. But maybe we were more like Robin Hood, stealing creative hours to become more fully ourselves and giving our kids permission to do the same.”

I think that’s still the way. With the kids grown and adulting, maybe we’re still modeling a future for them that has room for creativity, in many forms. I’ll be forty-nine in a couple weeks and I have so much I want to create, like someone who started the race late, who has more ideas than resources to implement them, and I want to run even harder now.

Aimee, I know you will understand the joy of what I’m about to say, but the dear reader with toddlers tangled around her feet or teenagers taking too many liberties may take this as a measuring stick, or a test to teach toward, and it is not either of those things. There are no equations or guarantees. I say this in pure giddy, surprised delight:

My adult children write poetry and share it with me. They share YouTube videos of Malcom Guite with me and tell me they’ve been listening to him for a couple of years. They read good books I give them and they share good books with their dad and I. They shun some technologies. They enjoy nature. They love Jesus and have deep discussions with us. They don’t agree with everything I say. They design things, paint things, draw and decorate things.

Is it because of our sporadic Tea Time & Poetry over the years? Because of the time we made for art? The good books we read together and the nature walks we took with our journals and colored pencils? I can’t say for sure. I only know that I have absolutely zero regrets for the time we spent on those curricular “extras”. I regret some of the push for academics—like you, I believed in rigor and high standards—and I regret the tears over phonics and math and chemistry (those may have been my tears). But nothing creative that we engaged in was ever a waste.

You asked if it was still a struggle for me to justify a creative life, with grown kids and grandkids and our two businesses, and I was going to answer you with a lot of words about permission and freedom and blessing; and then all of a sudden I remembered, again, what I forget when I try to justify writing: when I write, I learn who I am and what I think.

I am proud of my kids because they are creative adults who think well. Yes—they have good jobs they enjoy. Yes—they did the maths and sciences. But if they only work and make money and pay their bills and clean their houses—all those visible things we can check off a list—without any of the beauty of a creative life, I would feel something was missing.

If it’s a good thing for my kids to be creative adults, isn’t it a good thing for me, too?

I guess I had to raise the people who would affirm the creativity in me. I had to accept the encouragement of the man I married. I needed years of practice being me, regaining my own education and childhood. Like you, I wanted to do everything right as a mom, and that left little grace for being me, myself; still a child.

Hopkins set this wisdom so beautifully in his poem As Kingfishers Catch Fire.

“Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying What I do is me: for that I came.”

You seemed to catch on faster than I, and I love that our kids are even quicker. I love hearing how creativity threads into your family’s life. Your daughter’s response to the question of justifying time spent creating is golden: “Justify it? Why would you have to justify it?” Well done.

Back to the L’Engle quote that got us riffing on motherhood and creativity: she said, “It was more difficult for me to justify time to write when my children were little than it was to find time to write. And that was false guilt.” If there is no guilt, there is no need for justification. I think I could have arrived there a lot sooner if I had chosen to listen to the right people, instead of adopting “the images the world would put on us” of perfect mothers who are always in their children’s presence. My first instinct is to say that, like you, I didn’t have real life examples of mothers who were also living a creative life, but I think that’s unfair. I think my own ideas of motherhood—which were not my own, but picked up from books and blogs and friends—were too imbedded for me to see the real people around me who were being creative while raising children. And once we were past the naptime stage¹, when homeschooling was in full swing and all the hours from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. were charted and accounted for², it was even more difficult for me to justify carving out time to write.

I think I’ll just end here with a few suggestions. At the risk of being that pretentious older woman, if I were to suggest a reading list for young mothers, here are a few things that would be on it:

Create Anyway: The Joy of Pursuing Creativity in the Margins of Motherhood, by Ashlee Gadd

Making Time to Make Things, an essay by Jonathan Rogers

The Crosswicks Journals (duh),by Madeleine L’Engle

The Hidden Art of Homemaking, by Edith Schaeffer (it’s been many years since I read this but I remember it as gracious and inspiring).

Subscriptions to beautiful magazines. I’ve felt a real draw back to magazines this last year as an anti-scroll remedy so this suggestion is for anybody, not specifically young moms. I have In Her Studio, Mockingbird, Magnolia, and Gardens Illustrated, which all have different focuses. I just want to have lovely things to look at, read and think about, without reaching for my phone. Picture me with a cup of tea in the afternoon, thumbing through a magazine. Grandma goals.

What would you add? If you were to write a curriculum for young moms who felt drawn to creating art, what would be on it?

1. My life goal was to get all the kids to nap at the same time so I could have an hour or two to myself. Ask me how many times those plans were frustrated.

2. Ever heard of Managers of Their Homes (MOTH)? I think there was some good in that system but it made me a bit too neurotic about schedules.