Mammaphonic

Tonight was my night to hostess Book Club.  Our book, Mamaphonic, edited by Bea Lavendar is a collection of essays written by artists of various genres.  I was given the book when my first was born in 2004, by my dear artist teacher friend and mother-mentor Beth.  I chose the book for several reasons.  One, it was a different genre then we have read before.  Two, the short stories may lend themselves to be finished while not-so-much watching the kids in the park.  And, three, I wanted to read it again, nine years later.  The conversation of the Club offered mixed reviews with one consensus, there were only a handful of stories worth processing.  Overall, the summary of our collective motherhood journey of fitting in our own time doing whatever we do is an ever evolving experiment.

    Upon closing the door and turning out the porch light, I began to contemplate my own journey from the first read to the second read of this collection of essays.  Before I earned my identity as mother, I had given up.  I lost two babies in my tenth week with a year between each.  Another year had passed.  I had processed the mourning through paintings and journals entries.  Then scooted them in my shadows with a shaky confidence.  I was going to be an artist.  I would spend my summers free of teaching and seek out galleries for representation.  Putting all my business of art in order was cathartic.

    Portfolios were all in order and ready to start pounding the pavement in the "big city."  October.  I was pregnant.  November, the baby was still there.  December, she was still there.  We shared the news she was still there, and my world started to spin.  My art world that is.  Just like some of these mothers in this book, I was faced with deciding how I was going to fit it all in.  Teacher-artist-wife was a piece of cake.  Four roles, how would that work out?  Long story short, I chose Mother-wife-artist.  Given the opportunity to stay home and paint was a grand opportunity.  I knew that I could not be the teacher I wanted to be and be the artist I wanted to be all the while changing diapers and purée fruit and veggies.  

     With slight reverence, I slide into the role of stay-at-home, just for one year.  That year was grand.  Just me and the baby.  There were spaces for me to create.  Pockets of time to just do what I wanted to do.  Daughter spent most of her first six months swaddled like a burrito in the portable crib in the basement I called my studio.  We walked through the cemetery nearby and strolled all through the neighborhoods between 15th and 1st Street and Main Street and Sunset.  I could draw you a map.        I may not have been very productive or inspiring during this time, but it was our time.  It was a time I waited for her to be old enough for going to the pool and dipping her fingers in paint without them going right into her mouth.

     We moved from the two bedroom.  We had room for another.  And, so he came, a surprise.  Two babies, one mom.  At first they consumed me with one napping every three hours and the other giving up her two nap schedule.  Art? What art?  Hand quilting fit in the spaces.  Not awe defining, just simply making something. Once a day napper and a twice a day napper.  What was art?  A sketch book doodle, a journal entry, a lullaby e, a poem, those were the art of mothering. A few feeble paintings were sketched out in the wee hours of the night between toddler bed training and the next nursing session.  This was their time.  Not mine.

     As they grew and became mobile, they stopped putting everything in their mouths.  So I set up a table in my studio and we did stuff.  I am not really certain what all that stuff was.  Watercolors, crayons, chalks, drooling on the paper, eating the home-made play-dough, and toddling over to distract me.  But, I made stuff in the spaces.  I made enough to stay in my art co-op and brought them in to my sittings at the gallery.  This worked until they were not just mobile but fast movers. I no longer trusted them around the work of the glass blower and gave up my membership.

    I was a mom-wife-occassional artist until one of them was going to school three hours once a week.  Awesome!  Then two kids going to farm school together, the same time, out, gone, my house, my space, silence.  Bites of two hours and thirty five minutes to be in my space, to think.  My time to create increased as the year passed to the next.  This allowed me more time to dedicate to them when They weren't in school without the distraction of creation.  I knew I would get me time, it was scheduled.  These are my favorite years with my children.  Life was grand and ticked by like a well engineered clock.

    In and out of years, in and out of time, we have travelled to far and strange places as a unit of three. Yes, there is a fourth, a co-commander, but during the day, it is us.  This past year they were both in school full time.  I had lots of time to create in and out of all the stuff of life that gets in my way. We found time to make stuff together on weekends and after school.  I have ambitions of teaching both to sew in spite of having to finish most everything that is started.  Each has evolved into the studious painters with the help of "real art class"in school.  I also started teaching after school once a week and hope they learned more then how to sharpen two dozen pencils and stack stools at the end of class.  My Daughter still draws her portraits with the eyes on the fore head, but Son does not.  He must have been listening more then I thought when he was giggling with the other first grader in the class.  Daughter can tell a story with her images.  I wonder what will come of her unicorns as she matures as an artist.

  Yes, when they are in school, art, yoga, therapy, volunteering, doctors appointments, and coffee Fridays all squeeze in to a week.  Yet, I longed for full days not crowded with to-do lists.  Now, that it is summer break again, I have travelled full circle.  There are not nappies needing to be changed nor fruits to be puréed (unless lunch is a smoothie, of course.). There are camps to be driven to, pools to go to, chores to get done, play dates to arrange, and stuff, lots of stuff, to be picked up.  Every night I rake the house.  I like it that way.  But, sure enough, each time the kids walk through a door, any door, the leaves of stuff blow right back in smothering my sanity and diminishing my time.  I know, poor me, sounds like a personal problem, blah blah blah.  Oh, the time to create sits in my head and waits.  It waits for the moment when both have disappeared on their bikes to trole the neighborhood.  All the while, I long for them to be home as I force myself to set down my rake and head up to my studio.  I have grown a lot the past several years letting the leaves collect in the corners with the cob webs to grasp my time in between the noise.  My prince and princess have as well. When they come home from their wonderings, I don't have to put down my paint brush.  At least not right away.  No, not until my most honest critiques have told me to use more pink and neon green.

     The second time I read Mammaphonic, I discovered different stories, the ones by moms with older kids.  Writers, artists, and musicians trying to hold their doing in their fists, finding spaces, balancing.  Everyone balances their life in their own way.  Yet, it is all the same finding the space for your doing whatever we are all so busy doing in amongst all the chatter of have-to-do.