By Heather LaPorte

It’s mid-November, and the leaves in Washington, D.C. have just hit their peak. Luke and I try to take in a little of the wonder during long afternoon walks which usually lull him to sleep. We walk down an avenue near our house. It has a wide median filled with mature trees, and it feels like walking through an outdoor room as I push the stroller down the sidewalk. The canopy above us is yellow, almost translucent, and as light comes through the leaves, it is more like walking in the sunshine than in the shade of trees.

During our walk, I’m at work. I pick colors out of the landscape—the burnished red of a leaf on the sidewalk or the muddy blue of a distant stand of trees—and I calculate how to mix the colors that I see. I consider what pigments of paint it would take to create a particular shade of gold, red, or blue. I am a mother and a painter, and this is how I try to stay sharp. It’s theory and meditation at the same time. However, today this exercise feels extra special—both futile and imperative—because I am going to dismantle my art studio this weekend. This is a tough move for me. The studio is my work, and I struggle with what giving up that space says about me. Am I less of an artist?

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When we bought our house several years ago we had no plans for children, so from the start, the second bedroom was known only as the studio. We never called it anything else. I had great plans for all that would happen in there. In our apartment I had kept my artwork in a corner of the kitchen, having to beat it back like a weed when it crept too far beyond the place where the walls came together. So I relished having an entire room in which to work, being able to sprawl out and create at will. Sometimes I would go in there late at night. I would leave the blinds open. I liked to look out at the moon, the silvery city sky, and passing cars while I worked. One of my neighbors told me she saw me when she went to bed some nights. “I saw you working in your little glowing window again,� she told me. I liked the sound of that. That’s a bit how it felt; that room was my little glowing world.

Then along came Luke. He was more than I bargained for. He was louder and more demanding, but my love for him was ancient. Pregnancy and birth were so familiar, the waiting, the working, and the final push that moves a piece from canvas to artwork, from gestation to baby. When I saw him I was literally startled, like seeing a painting that has finally come together: “Well, there you are and don’t you look fine.� And there was a resonance, too, as though a string stretching from my throat to my heart had just been strummed. I have never had an experience so entirely new and so wholly familiar.

When we return from our autumn walk, Luke, as usual, is asleep. I carefully unhook him from the stroller’s latches and buckles, trying not to disturb him. I arch my back and pull him onto my shoulder, and as I do, I look up at the second floor window, the one that belongs to my studio. There is an unfurling Mandela decal in one corner of the glass. I think I will leave the Mandela in the window once the room has become Luke’s bedroom. It will be a reminder of what was there before. Upstairs I lay Luke in his crib, which is in the master bedroom. To call the bedroom master is really a generous term, however. It’s cramped with his crib wedged into an alcove adjacent to our bed, and I’ve begun to curse the blocks and board books that cause me to stumble. I close the curtains to create a place for his sleep and then I walk down the hall to my studio.

The top of my drafting table is visible, a black expanse that I rarely see. On the wall behind the table are photos from magazines, taped to the wall at odd angles with snatches of masking tape. There are probably a dozen or more decorating the wall. I remove one of my favorites. It’s a photograph of a couple walking beneath a colorful umbrella in some anonymous urban square. When I saw that one my heart double beat; I could already see the painting in my mind, and like the others pictures on the wall, I had ripped that one out covertly at the gym or doctor’s office. They were all images that I just couldn’t live without—a crude black and white print of wilting tulips, a woman in party dress laying on a bed, her body curving like the hills of a distant mountain. I slip the photos, one at a time, into a manila folder labeled “ideas�. I’ve been putting things in there since Luke was born, and it’s starting to look like it is hiding someone’s golden egg.

Despite my resolve, during the first year of Luke’s life I rarely saw the inside of my studio, unless Luke wandered in there to pull something off a shelf or to hug my easel. (How I understood his gesture). If I did get in there, it seemed I would just begin something, and it would be time to put it away. I would just get into the rhythm, and the song would end. My studio became the room that I breezed passed on my way back from changing a diaper or retrieving Mr. Whoozit. It became the room of frozen possibility. Each time, as I hurried past, I saw my paintbrushes gathered together like flowers in a mason jar. They were a conciliatory bouquet; for the previous year I had been a painter because I had a studio and not because I painted. And since we’ve chosen to live in the city, where space is at a commodity, reserving an entire room for something I only rarely got around to doing was too selfish to bear.

So for the last several weeks, during Luke’s naps, I have sifted through sooty papers, canvases, and plastic bins of supplies and found objects: driftwood, metal pieces, hand-dyed ribbons, Mexican worry dolls. I re-read quotes that I saved and looked through old sketchbooks. I sorted, I stacked, I tossed. The process took time; it was like deep breathing. It reminded me of the days before Luke. Since inspiration needs its space, those days were often solitary and roomy days, like curtains on a windy afternoon. I spent hours immersed in shape and value and the challenge of rendering a three-dimensional figure on a two dimensional surface. Those days are such a contrast to my days now, days of what feels like constant motion and commotion, running after a toddler who has just discovered his own agenda. Which do I like better, painter or mother? It’s an impossible question. They both require the diligence of the religious.

The last step is to clear the walls, and it’s the hardest step for me. I feel the reticence in my muscles as I remove properly framed drawings and paintings from their nails. I lean them against the slanting leg of the drafting table one at a time. The last thing I take down is a larger-than-life self-portrait completed for an art class long ago. It’s Luke’s favorite thing to look at when we go in the studio. It is bright yellow and my eyes, in the drawing, are large and pronounced like those of any good cartoon character. I lean it against my drafting table.

Later Luke passes the studio, and seeing the picture within his reach, he approaches it, squealing all the way. He bangs his small hand against the plexi-glass. This is a moment of lightness for me. I crouch next to him and point out the eyes, nose, and mouth. My husband, watching from the doorway, suggests that I hang the picture in Luke’s new room since he likes it so much. I tell him I would feel too much like Chairman Mao and we laugh.

What follows is a mad, mad weekend of work as we paint the room the color of peppermint ice cream. While I paint in my studio for the last time, I think of the new mint green paint lying protectively over the pomegranate red, preserving my studio, that time in my life. Once the room is complete, we bring Luke in to see his new space. He shrieks and marches, in his Frankenstein way, over to the basket of toys. That night, before I go to bed, I look over at the corner of our bedroom where his crib used to be. Now my drafting table and easel, both terribly clean, sit there, and my husband confesses that he misses Luke. I agree. And I have that glimmer of doubt that always follows a big action. When you buy something it’s called buyers’ remorse. I am not sure what it was called when you give your son your creative space and begin calling it his bedroom.

These days Luke and I spend portions of the afternoon playing in his new room. When I used to paint in there, at my drafting table, I looked out over the fences of my neighbors. Now, in Luke’s room, I sit mostly on the floor, and from that vantage point, I see only the neighbors’ treetops. I still spend odd moments drilling myself about colors and imagining all the things I want to paint, and occasionally I embark on one of those ideas, usually late at night, sitting at my drafting table or my easel in a corner of my bedroom beneath the lamp’s yellow glow. I will get back to it slowly because I know the desire is there, because I am a painter. And I am a mom. I still don’t know in what order to put these two things, and that is the nature of my life, the balance is tenuous and ever-shifting.

Heather LaPorte is an artist, writer, and SAHM. Her award-winning paintings have been included in several galleries and national exhibitions. In addition to chasing her two babes around the backyard, she's currently illustrating a coloring book, creating the Mombom(b) zine, and working to get her novel published.