I was born to write, call it my destiny. Unfortunately, after I graduated from college and began seeking gainful employment, I learned quickly that knowing one’s destiny is much easier than fulfilling it. I was shocked when I was consistently and unceremoniously turned away from every magazine, newspaper, public relations and advertising firm in the large metropolitan city where I live. I rationalized that the hiring gods at these fine establishments simply had not yet been made aware of my destiny and not one to give up, I set myself to the weighty task of educating them. However, after a year of shouting from the rooftops, I was forced to reluctantly reevaluate my destiny and settle for a job as en editor instead. I was still in the business of writing, after all. In fact, I was helping writers write better. I tried to accept my fate, but no matter how much I tried to strangle it, the urge to write would not die. The muses still called on me on a regular basis, whispering story ideas to me at the most unexpected times—when I was driving, or sleeping, or going to the bathroom (do they have no shame?).
Fortunately, I had something to distract me from the visions of by-lines that danced in my head. It was at this time in my life that I met and married my husband and quickly thereafter we were blessed with baby number one—a boy, who cruelly tortured me for the first year of his life, even though I had intervened on his behalf at birth and deterred his adoring father from thoughtlessly dubbing him Ignazio. I was convinced that this small child with the big voice had scared the muses away forever. I can still remember staring down at my finally-asleep son, with raw, tired eyes, after an agonizing night of sleeplessness, thinking, “Well, it’s official; I will never write again.� I mean really, how would I ever be able to put a coherent sentence together when I hadn’t had more than an hour and a half of uninterrupted slumber since I left the hospital?
And even if I was well-rested and thinking clearly, how would I ever find the time to sit down at my computer when I couldn’t even manage to put him down long enough to make my bed? I had enjoyed Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own immensely in college. I considered it an excellent historical commentary on the depressed state of women in previous years. I felt tremendous pity for the women that had gone before me, those who never had a spare moment for quiet contemplation and creative pursuits. Little did I know that in just a few short years motherhood would instantly turn me into one of those women. Over night I went from someone who slept until ten on Sunday mornings and then spent several hours reading the Times to a woman who couldn’t even go to the bathroom alone. Suddenly, I had grown an appendage that was literally strapped to me from dawn to dusk, whose cries prevented me from even being alone with my thoughts.
The thing about being a mother though is that I really didn’t mind. In fact, I loved being a mom and my colicky son so much that when it came time to return to my editorial duties I resigned so that I could be sleep deprived and incoherent full-time. Unlike when I had accepted the editorial position, this time I didn’t have any conflicting feelings about the new path my life had taken. I knew in my heart that I had found my calling. I had been told (many times) that I wasn’t a writer and I never felt like I was really an editor, but there could be no doubt that I was a mother and arguably a good one, so far. I had no delusions that now my time was not my own; it belonged to this new little person that depended on me for everything and I gave it away gladly, although I was a little regretful that I hadn’t made better use of the time while I had it. Ah well. Hopefully, the muses would pass along my inspiration to others who were more worthy and childless. My time for that was gone.
The first sixth months of my career as a mom, I was nothing more than a zombie, a shell of my former self. I came to understand first-hand why sleep deprivation is such an effective form of torture. And while we are on the subject, someone should really look into the wisdom in letting new mothers drive because, if I am at all representative of the norm, there are greater hazards on the road than drunk drivers. But one day, while I was folding laundry and watching Oprah, something changed. I felt something familiar stirring inside me. It wasn’t fetal movement, morning sickness, or uterine cramps. So what was it? And what should I do about it? I stopped folding the laundry and focused all of my attention on the television. Oprah would have the answer; she had the answers for everything. She did not disappoint.
The next night I listened intently as my husband walked in through the garage door and proceeded directly to the bathroom as he always does. The next thing I heard was his voice echoing from inside the guest lav: “What the…?� The baby and I joined him in the tiny water closet as he walked slowly around in circles staring at the walls. “Do you like it?� I asked innocently. “What is it?� he asked, looking at the fern green blobs of paint that now adorned all of the walls. “It’s called stamping. I stamped leaves on the walls. It’s an inexpensive and fashionable substitute for wall paper.� (Was that me talking or was it Oprah?) My husband just looked at me for a long time and he knew, the way good husbands do, how important this was to my very being. He didn’t say he liked it (he’s not one for innocent lies), instead he went with a neutral, “Good job, hun.�
That is how Creativity snuck back into my life, through the garage door so to speak. Once the door was opened though, there was no closing it. There were many more projects after that, most of them involving paint. I stenciled a vine around our guest bedroom and ABCs on the baby’s closet (I was desperate for a paint surface). I faux finished our bedroom walls (one of my more successful attempts) and refinished our breakfast table and chairs. These projects brought me back to the land of the living. They gave me purpose. They made me feel like I was doing more than just surviving. As I had more children (yes, I survived the first and went on to have two more to date) these projects became even more important when I felt like nothing more than a vacuum cleaner and a washing machine (by this point, I had become one with my household appliances).
There was another reason that these projects were so important. Motherhood is very hard to measure quantitatively. Until the children are grown and have fulfilled their own destiny, there is nothing you can point to and say, “I did this.� There are no raises, no bonuses, no “atta girl� from the boss, no company perks. This can be very defeating for a professional mother who has devoted all of her time, energy, and resources to the care and maintenance of her house, husband, and children. On a day-to-day basis, I found I had nothing to contribute when my husband would come home and ask, “So, what did you do today?� I knew that I had done a lot that day, but nothing I felt was worth recounting (“Let’s see I woke up, made the beds, spent 45 minutes getting the kids dressed, found the lost Lego submarine man, cooked scrambled eggs for Kate, pancakes for Nick, and oatmeal for the baby, put away the dishes from last night, put in the dishes from this morning, started a load of laundry, changed Grace’s diaper again…�) An excerpt from my life wasn’t exactly witty cocktail party conversation. Having something tangible to show for my day made me feel in a very small way that I was still a productive person. I found that I got a much better response from dinner guests when I humbly pointed out the garage-sale dresser that I had antiqued and stenciled than when I asked my two-year old to drop his drawers and show everyone his new Barney underpants. Beats me why no one was impressed that I had potty trained the boy; I certainly was.
That’s how it started anyway. My brushes, so to speak, with stenciling, toll painting, faux finishing, and refinishing, helped me feel like I wasn’t just a babysitter, fry cook, maid and chauffer, but they evolved into something more. As I have said Creativity had snuck back into my house and was making herself at home. I became very comfortable with a paint brush which is surprising for a kid who took independent study to avoid having to take an art class in high school. My sister was the artistic one, not me. She was the left brain, I the right. She was the artist, I was the scholar. Even though I loved to write, I never considered myself artistic, just intellectual. Now, I found myself studying painting and experimenting with shading, tone, and hue.
Having discovered my artistic side, I wanted to do more but I wasn’t so delusional that I thought I could fill a whole canvas with my brush strokes. What else could I possibly do though when my only available time was 45 minutes at nap time, if I was lucky, and about the same time at night before exhaustion caught up with me? A friend suggested sewing. I feigned interest to be polite, but really I had loftier ideas about what my next artistic pursuit should be--something along the lines of sculpture, photography, or even pottery. Sewing just sounded so “domestic� (pronounced with an air of disgust). But once I saw the beautiful things she made for her children I became intrigued. I liked the idea of being able to share my creations with my inspiration—my children. I enrolled in a sewing class thinking that I could learn how to sew the same way I had learned decorative paint techniques, but sewing proved much more difficult. I walked out in the middle of the third class with a new respect for people who could sew and less respect for my own talents. What was I thinking? I could never cut straight anyway and sewing requires an attention-to-detail that I have been lacking since birth.
When I told my mother that I was throwing in the towel, she volunteered to help. I was a little surprised because I didn’t even know she could sew beyond hemming my Brownie uniforms. When I said as much, my mother produced countless photos of me and my sister in matching Christmas and Easter dresses. I remembered the dresses but I guess, like all kids, I took my mother’s efforts for granted. My mother-in-law turned out to be an excellent mentor as well. I know now that’s because sewing, like other “female arts� (i.e., knitting, weaving, needlepoint), is meant to be handed down from woman-to-woman, from generation-to-generation. On top of being a challenging and productive new hobby for me, sewing had the added bonus of bringing me closer to these two important women. Suddenly we had something more in common than family ties and we had loads of non-confrontational things to talk about. We have never disagreed about how to sew a French seam the way we have about child rearing.
Throughout this time, I was fortunate to have a writer friend who never failed to ask me about my writing, even though I hadn’t written a word other than a kind note on a greeting card since I left college. I don’t know if she didn’t remember or didn’t believe me when I said that I had no desire to write anymore. I told her that I had left my writing behind with so many other of life’s disappointments as part of my pre-baby past and I had, until my baby boy turned five years-old and started to read. When my son sounded out his first words, I couldn’t wait to share the world of books with him, the world that had such a profound affect on my life. As soon as he was able to read three-letter words on his own, I started collecting the children’s classics that I had loved to pass along to him. I knew he couldn’t read Wind in the Willows yet, but it had to be soon, right? Wrong.
The learning process was agonizing slow, or at least it was for me. First came three letter words, then words with a silent “e� at the end, then blends and diagraphs. If this sounds boring to you, imagine how monotonous it was for a five year-old boy with a short to non-existent attention span. The road to independent reading was way too long for him and I realized with horror that before he had even really begun, my son was learning to hate reading. Every time I would suggest we sit down with one of his readers, he would respond, “Not reading again. Why do I have to read all the time? Reading is so boring.� And I couldn’t blame him; there was too much effort for too little pay off. How was he supposed to be excited about decoding a book that says, “See Matt, Matt sat, Matt sat on the hat�? I scoured bookstores looking for good stories that weren’t too taxing for a new reader. There had to be something compelling out there that he could read right now. There wasn’t.
I couldn’t just sit by and watch my son become an anti-reader, but what was a mother to do? What was a mother, who thought at one time that she was a writer, to do? Okay, I know what I could do, but I couldn’t possibly. I wasn’t a writer; I was just a stay-at-home mom. But… maybe I could. After all, didn’t I paint a wall-size mural in the living room? And so what if it’s terrible, my son, the boy who wears the Halloween costume I made for him last year to bed every night, will adore it anyway. And he did. Watching the gleam in my son’s eyes as he read the story his mom wrote just for him, I knew I would never be able to stop writing again. I had mentioned in regards to my stamping fiasco that Creativity snuck into my life through the garage door; well, writing “Jack the Tug� threw all the doors in the house wide open and the muses came dancing back in.
That was only two years ago, but since that time I have written dozens of stories for my children and even started a novel for them too. Some of them are good, some of them might be good some day, and some of them suck. Even the worst, however, are better than anything I have written before. I would pit my story about Mr. Ernest, the trash man against anything I’ve written professionally. I write with a confidence and conviction now that I didn’t have B.C. (before children). My newfound confidence stems from all that I’ve accomplished as a mom. Not only, did I bring three children into this world, but I’ve also managed to keep them alive to date (an impressive feat considering my record with houseplants). I successfully retained my sanity during several years of forced insomnia and even managed to leave my “tag,� as graffiti artists call it, on several of our bedroom walls in the process. I’ve sewn two sister dresses in a month for the holidays and all of the curtains in our new house. Not only that, but now I am writing for something more important than a paycheck, a publishing credit, or personal praise. I am writing for my children and I’m sure it comes as a big surprise that mom has a lot to say to them.
Where are these self-proclaimed pieces of literary art, you may ask? Most of them are safely filed away and password-protected on my computer so that only my children and their children can enjoy them, but I have submitted a few to publishers. They aren’t filling my mailboxes with acceptance letters so far, but whether or not I ever get published does not change this fact-- I am a mother and I am a writer and I am an artist; it is my destiny.