Creating in the Cracks: Making time for what you’re called to.

Making time for making work is not always easy as a mother artist but I feel like I am finally figuring it out. For me, that is. Creating looks so different from person to person and parenting looks so different from situation to situation. What works for one parent artist may not work for another. It is easy to compare in this area-to think well if my kid was xyz, I could do that too. But the truth is, our kids are always changing, and we are always changing, and there is only one way to keep creating in the midst of it all: Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. I am not the first to have said this, and I will not be the last. But it is so true. Some days, I get a paint stroke on the page-one paint stroke. Other days, I luck out and my husband says, “I’m taking the grem to the park” and I get an unexpected hour to paint. But the truth is, it hasn’t always been that way. For a long time in early motherhood, I felt lost among the care tasks, buried in dirty dishes, and laundry, and diapers, and demands for milk and attention (from everyone, not just my baby); Expectations for how I was supposed to show up, for others, became too much for me to hold. Slowly, over the course of about a year and a half, I had to put up stronger boundaries, learn how to say no and mean it, and consider my yeses for a while before the commitment. I had to reprioritize myself and my creativity.

Since I, myself, was a child, I have always loved to create-to make up stories, and songs, to draw designs for clothes, and create new animal hybrids. Before that though, I loved to move, to run and climb, to dance and perform any chance I got. For a time in my adult life, I pretended that I could be fully fulfilled doing something else as a career. But I now know that I was made to be these things: mover, maker, mama. Having a child of your own can help you see the things you need to hold close to as you watch other elements of your life slip away.

Acknowledging my privilege, that I have support and resources available to me that not everyone has, I will say that some days it is still hard to make the choice to create in the midst of it all; But every time I put a pen to paper or I create 6 seconds of choreography, it is worth it. Somedays are more distracting from this work than others, still I crack on creating in every way that I can, mothering every step of the way and I hope that in whatever season you are in, whatever your life work is, whatever caregiving looks like for you, that you are doing the same.