Nanowrimo and Parenting or Again

Again, by Rowena Murillo

The first time I did nano, I had a one year old and I was pregnant with my second. I went through the infant stages, the toddler stages, preschooler, kindergartner, early elementary and now the mid grade years. Every year, I managed to keep them alive and fed and relatively clean and happy. Nine years later and I have attempted nano every year and only failed the year I also moved cross country in November.

The thing about nanowrimo is that life never gets out of the way for it. Every year, it's the holidays. Every year, there are technical difficulties with family and work and living and health and relationships and money and time. Every single year. I've moved in November, twice. Last year I got separated in November. I've struggled with the flu. I've needed to find a new job.

The other thing about nanowrimo is that if you keep going, if you keep putting one word down after the other, if you keep giving yourself 15 minutes, half an hour, nap time, the minutes while the chicken is baking, an afternoon while grandma babysits, an hour after the kids go down for the night, if you keep giving yourself that time to write and you actually do it, you will succeed.

Make the time. Keep writing. Don't judge yourself. Don't edit. Sit down and write. Find the time. Commit. Just do it. Write. In little bits and drabbles or in long bingeing periods where you forget to eat and neglect your kids (actually don't neglect your kids, just pawn them off on someone else) just keep writing.

Nanowrimo tells me that over the course of the last 9 years, I have written over half a million words during nanowrimo. That's right. 500,000 words. And that's not counting the work I've done outside of November, the new work, the research, the outlining, the editing, the revising. I actually have one full, finished final manuscript that I am sending out to agents. And I have become a much better writer for all the effort.

As parents, we might not have as much free time as other nanowrimo participants. We might have more responsibilities and sticky handed time bandits, but we also know what matters in life. We know what matters to us. We know that if we want something, we have to take care of it.

So the first question to ask yourself at the beginning of nanowrimo is this: how much do you want it?

The second question to ask is what will you to do take care of it?

Greeting Cards with Tea Party Charms

 Greeting Card with Tea Pot charm

Now you see what I had in mind with all my little doo dad paintings. I had a request for a couple of cards. Let me tell you, research and development can take a long time.

But then, I love to futz with things and figure out how I can make them work. I like to invent things and create new solutions. And make pretty things, of course.

Greeting Card with Tea Party Charm

I like to think of these as little bits of joy that can be sent in the mail. The little pleasures in life that you can hang up on a wall to remind yourself that it's the little things that make life happy. Or put into a book and used as a book mark.

I'm a little obsessed with books lately, the idea of reading, the adventure of stories, the mystery of a new novel, the education in a non fiction book.

I suppose it's today's kick off festival for the library summer reading program, or maybe it's because my son is becoming a reader and I am reliving my youth as an avid reader.

Maybe I'll turn the rest of my little doo-dads that I painted into book marks. Goodness knows, between my own reading and my kids', I'm reading enough books right now to need more book marks. I mean, receipts and scrap paper will do the trick, but it's nice to have something pretty to put between the pages, just another pleasant thing about reading.

Hooray for Summer!

 Hooray for Summer!

We're getting really excited over here for summer. Hoping for long days and green shadows, sprinklers and popsicles, projects and adventures.

Tomorrow is the last day of school and the kick off for the library reading program, with games and crafts and prizes and lots of fun down town. I think that's why I whipped together this little package of joy.

It's a book (vintage, which I was planning on using for a craft project) wrapped in brown paper, which I love and can't help wrapping everything in as I sing Favorite Things. Then I decorated it with some little flags I made and the "hooray!" banner. Those are little illustrations that I already posted about, so I'm kind of pleased that I figured out something to do with them.

That's what summer feels like to me. A wrapped present, a celebration, a mystery, and the possibility of adventure... because to me, a book is always an adventure. I guess you know what kind of gal I am.

We've already started on the summer preparations, since the girl has been out of school for a while. This is her lilac bush tent/fort/hideout. 

 She's giving the thumbs up.

And this was the beginning of a play, put on with a neighbor, who is the one who had the brilliant idea to dress up in costumes. Somehow costumes always make things seem to be more of an event.

As for me, I'm getting together a summer bucket list of activities and adventures to go on. I've been spending some time on planning the kids portion of the summer, because the end of school is so near, but underneath that is my personal bucket list, pushing at the mom.

I've got some things I need to do. And I've got to figure out a way to get those things done when I've got two rambunctious kids around all day and a part time job as well.

What have you done to fit your passions into a full life with work and kids? Any tips on incorporating summer break into your personal work?

Self Portrait, or I Am Made of Lessons

Self Portrait, or I Am Made of Lessons

gesso, torn vintage book pages with drawings, acrylic paint, moleskine notebook

Yesterday, while dinner was cooking, after blogging and browsing pinterest and planning and organizing, I had the sudden urge to paint. And then I laid out my stuff and painted. Just painted. No fuss, no talking, no worries, no self doubt, no questions. I just painted. 

I had an idea, which bubbled up after looking at this and this, after many weeks of thinking I wanted to give some interest to my grounds, but not really knowing what to do. After many weeks of letting the desire to take up painting again simmer on the back burner while I lived my life and went on organizing my thoughts and my work space and my supplies.  

I grabbed an old moleskine notebook, and opened, not to a blank page, but to one that had already been prepped with a wash of blue.  Then I went to my collection of scrap papers and found an old Alice in Wonderland page that I'd already started to draw on but had never been satisfied with.  Then I gessoed the painted page, and I ripped up the Alice in Wonderland altered page and fixed it to the gessoed, painted page, then I gessoed that. 

And then I took a quick snapshot of my face... which is often much easier than using a mirror... and started painting, quickly, almost carelessly. First the eye, then the other eye, then the hairline swooping around to the cheekbone, jaw, the other cheekbone. Place the nose, the lips, the hair. Adjust the eyes. Add some pink, some warmer colors, shadows, hilights. Touch ups. Done.

It went so fast and so easily that I never even thought to take process photos. It was done before dinner was ready. And voila. Almost effortless. As if it came out of nowhere.  But that is an illusion. 

I'm really happy with this painting and I impressed myself with the way it came out. Paying attention to only those few minutes when I was painting makes it look like magic. Looking at the end point only, as we do so often with things that are successful, makes it seem like these accomplishments are miraculous, the gift of genius, something that is unreachable for us lowly people here on the ground.

But the truth is, I didn't just paint this in 15 minutes. The act of painting, took 15 minutes, but so much went into this painting, it was actually 40 years in the making. Without even considering my last few weeks of thought and organizing and browsing and intending and wishing, there are years of observing and practicing and failures and struggles and art classes and photography and playing and doodling and self assessing and museum going and reading and sketching and finding out what I like and color matching and collaging and journaling and so on and so on. 

Anyone who achieves at anything has been working on it for a very long thing and putting into it the result of many different lessons learned. No one starts out knowing how to be a great artist or a great anything. 

You just keep at it and you get better and better the more you are willing to fail.

I show you this one successful painting, but you do not see the pages that failed, the sketches that were covered over, the drawings hidden in folders or deep in journals from years ago. You don't see the 10 years of self portrait practice in my twenties, where I could often be found with a mirror and some drawing tools. You don't see the other pages in that same moleskine where self portraits hide because they're just not right. Actually... sometimes you do see those, because I have a tendency to show even some of my failures here on my blog, because I believe in showing the man behind the curtain of the wizardry. I believe in transparency and process. I believe it helps us to know that no one is perfect and failure and struggle is part of the process... not just of art, but also of life.

We fall down. We make mistakes. We get up and keep trying until we figure it out. Until it starts to make sense. Until we start moving forward. Until we find success.

Just like this painting, we are made of the failures and successes that came before. The stories read, the extra paint that we didn't know what to do with. The discards and the yucks. They make us what we are. Just like this painting, you almost can't see what was on the original ground. You almost can't see what was behind the painting.... but it's there.

Turning Negatives to Positives

Inspiration board, Home
71/100 in 100 Creative Challenge
mixed media art journal

This is another exercise in making art for my own benefit instead of just my etsy shop. It won't be sold, it's just for me. Just the way I used to do art.

This is actually the endpaper in my journal. When I bought it, I didn't open the book to check out the pages, but when I started it, I realized the first few pages were a little torn and rumpled.

Boo.

So I turned a negative into a positive and collaged it all. I usually leave it blank and fill it with quotes I discover over the course of the journal... but I've been keeping quotes in my organization notebook. So why not?

Another thing this inspiration board does is help me focus on creating the situation I want to create in my life. I want a new home, but not just any home. I want something that fits my needs. I've read elsewhere about how writing a letter to the universe, or some such variation on that theme helps to bring these wishes into reality.

All I can say is it can't hurt... but it can help. I think it's better to focus on the positive, on what you want to create in life than on what you don't have. When you are putting energy into negativity, nots, and absences, you get negativity, nos and loss back. In other words, the universe confirms your energy for you.

So if you put positive thoughts, gratitude and abundance out there, does that mean that the universe will confirm that energy? I could use some of all that.

So focus on the joys that are. The life that is available for me. The world I want to create. And the things I have at my disposal to take steps toward what I want to manifest.

Along those lines, today I was trying to organize my art, put them into little portfolios according to what I want to do with them. Prints, Originals and I had a pile of work I didn't want to sell because I thought they were not done or not my best work. I got out an archival box where I was going to store them, and inside, I found a whole pile of work that is etsy worthy! I had forgotten about it all.

I have SOOOO much work to put up in my shop. I guess I took an etsy hiatus, but never really stopped painting. What an archive.

This is abundance.

Sometimes it feels like a bit too much and I get overwhelmed...

But that's another topic. Focusing on fears, anxieties and overwhelm.

Maybe I should just go back to the positivity.

Kids and Moms, Wreck This Journal and 59-63

Cover Page/Wreck This Journal/Draw Popsiple trees, Mommy!
59/100 in 100 creative challenge
pitt artist pens
(this and all following pictures from Wreck This Journal, by Keri Smith)

I'm trying to finish my book this week. I don't think I will totally finish, but I'm making a good effort. A lot of the pages are half done, so I just need to find my focus and wreck with intention. Or wreck randomly, really.

This post is child directed.

These are all pages that have been wrecked by my children or pages that have been directed by my children.

The cover page, for instance, was created because Ivy required that I draw "popsiple trees." She is obsessed with them.

As you will see by the following pages.

More Popsiple Trees, Mommy!/Instructions
60/100 in 100 creative challenge
pitt artist pens, diptych

Red!

Green!

Black!

They told me, and I had to figure out a way to make it work. Kind of interesting being instructed by bother Keri Smith and my children.

I particularly like the gray/black/green page.

Nice color combo. And the trees growing out of the words are whimsical and graphic at the same time. I could see using this somewhere else in the future.

Number Page
61/100 in 100 creative challenge
collage, newspaper, gold paint pen

It says here 1234canihavealittlemore5678910iloveyou... I don't know if my lyrics are wrong. I don't care.

Okay. This isn't child directed, oh well.
BLANK (double sided)
62/100 in 100 creative challenge
acrylic, pitt artist pen
BLANK (back side)

Kind of a post modern take on the instructions. She said to leave it blank.

Rather than ignore it. I blanked it. And I traced the blankness on the other side.

What does it really mean to be blank, anyway? What if your intention is blankness?

The opposite page is my intention of moving on and letting go of the past. Moving forward. It is awaiting the flame.

1st Ave Riding Sketch
63/100 in 100 creative challenge
pen, watercolor, pitt artist pen

Also not child driven. But drawn with them in the back seat on the way to the grocery store. don't worry I wasn't driving.

When things slide past you so fast, it's hard to capture exactly what's there. However, it wasn't as bumpy as I thought it would be. Watercolor was added later, as was the writing.
not counting this one in my creativity totals.

I couldn't bear to chew on the page. So I had Ivy do it. She didn't like it much, but she enjoyed doodling on the page. I think this is kind of her "writing." I think she might have signed it.
This is Ivy's page, too. Also not counting it in my totals, as it's hers.

She's been working on it for a while. She wants to use my markers, which she isn't allowed to usually. I don't know what she's trying to convey here, quite.

Here is Gabriel's page. Not my creative challenge, either, but I do know what he is trying to convey. He's into designing houses, lately. He wants to build a dog house, but this is a people house. Oh, we have no dog.

He's got kitchens and living rooms and gardens and bedrooms and a reading room for mama. :)

What have I been learning from this Wreck This Journal?

I think I have been learning to loosen up and let go and stop putting so many constraints around my creativity. Freedom? Not a bad thing.

I think I have also discovered that I miss my personal journal. I think I'd like to take it up again, not just journaling on my blog but in my pen and paper journal.

And I think I want to get back to artjournaling.

You wouldn't believe how long I've been painting in books. I should share some of the stuff I've done over the years. I even made my own chapbook of art and poetry one year. Before all the digital photography and my own blogging. Old school photocopies and hand binding. It took forever.

There are fewer boundaries than we would think. We have more freedom than we know.

Of course, true freedom is scary as hell.

Golden Traveling and Wreckage

Golden Traveling
43/100 in 100 Creative Challenge 7/14/09
Golden Fluid Acrylic on watercolor paper, 5"x8"

Here's a new one. Moving away from the washes, and back to thicker more painterly effects. I was inspired by yesterday's painting, which was orange, but I almost wrote as gold. I thought, hey! why not try a gold landscape? How would that work? If it doesn't work out, I still get a post out of it. This is actually gold and bronze paint, with white and a touch of green and a turquoise, which surprisingly ended up being the same color as was actually in the bronze paint if you let it sit and separate. Like oxidized copper.

The blue I had thought was the sky beneath the clouds... but when I looked again it seemed like mountains. So hey, whatever you want. It's supposed to be abstracted. And then when I was done, I waffled over putting in the light streaks of the other Travelings... was it a gimmick? Was it just thrown in there randomly because I'd done it before. I must have sat there for a good long time with the paint on my brush before deciding that I liked the streaks for the feeling of movement, along with the graphic, flattening element.
What is Left When I Close My Eyes, (Wreck This Journal)
44/100 in 100 Creative Challenge
Golden Fluid Acrylic, Gel Medium, Dryer Lint

Ha Ha! My first inclusion of Wreck This Journal into my 100 paintings in 100 days creative challenge. Let me tell you, with one readjusting of my personal constraints, my totals will shoot up and I will no longer need to feel like I HAVE to paint just to keep up my numbers. I will be free to experiment, to try new things, to be meaningful or explore things that are outside of my Flying Girls or Travelings or what have you.

This wreckage, for instance is from the page that says to collect your pocket lint. I don't have that much pocket lint, and often don't wear pockets and besides, I just didn't like the itsy bitsy pieces I was coming up with. And I remembered seeing some artist somewhere who used dryer lint in different shades, so I thought, what the hey? Why not? I took the lint out and folded it and cut it like a snowflake, then painted the page black, even the instructions. I've decided to not let the instructions rule my wreckage. Then I used gel medium to stick it on. I thought I'd collect more lint, but when I brushed the lint with my hand some of it came off and some of it dusted down onto the rest of the page. Instead, I decided to paint on it. I kind of like the way it came out although I don't know what it means or anything.
Breathe and Release (Wreck This Journal)
45/100 in 100 creative challenge
Golden Fluid Acrylic and Lavender shower gel.

This is the page marked "infuse this page with scent." The kid dumped all my essential rose oil out.. so my night table infused with roses, but I remember reading that to make regular moleskine paper work with watercolors was to wash it with dishsoap, so why not use this pretty smelling soap and mix it with my paint? That's what I did. And it now makes me feel so good and calm whenever I open the book and take a breath in that I wrote about breathing and releasing on the page. Ahh.

There's more wreckage, but a lot of it is in progress. I think I'm using the instructions as kind of background for something that I want to say. Not just exercises for exercise sake, but as kind of prompts into exploration and creativity.

Flying Girl Cuts it Away, or Let Go of All That Is Not Yours

Flying Girl Cuts it Away, or Let Go of All That Is Not Yours
3/22/09
Mixed Media, Golden Fluid Acrylic, Antique Book Pages, on paper, 7"x10"

I had no idea what I was going to do with this picture until I thought of using some of the old pages that came out of a book I altered about five years ago. And then I realized I also wanted to use the themes from Illustration Friday (Subtract) and Next Chapter: 12 Secrets book club (Subtract Serenity Stealers). How convenient that they dove tail so nicely. Who planned that?

Anyway, there is actually a fully painted flying girl underneath the paper collage. I guess in order to subtract things, you have to add first.

The idea I had here is that in order to find the heart of the matter, the center of the self, you often have to cut away all the things that do not matter. You find out what does not fit, what does not give you joy, what makes you feel bad about yourself or out of sorts, and you get rid of it.

A lot of people have been asking, here and there, how to find their passion. Really, I think it's first a matter of finding that spark, and then cutting away the excess around it. For instance, I discovered I loved writing when I was a kid, then I learned a lot about different kinds of literature, fiction, non fiction, poetry, epic tales, post modernism. I learned about reading and writing and teaching. I learned about various topics, art and science and culture and psychology. I followed breadcrumb trails down dark alleys and scrounged for bits and pieces of magic, or trash.

As time went on, I was able to eliminate what I did not want to focus on. Or I was able to take pieces of an idea and fit it into my passion. So here I am years later, realizing that I still love writing, but I don't need to be writing the next Pulitzer Prize winning serious literary novel. I like my Science Fiction and Fantasy, and my blogging and maybe I'll go somewhere further with it all.

I could just as easily have discovered my passion to be photography, or jewelry making or philosophy or geology. Actually, the truth is, there are many worthy pursuits and passions out there. How do you know which fits you best until you explore them?

On my journeys, especially in the last few years, I was also able to eliminate old outmoded ideas of thought that kept me down and kept me scared. One idea being that I should be a precocious young thing who becomes a literary sensation before the age of 30, or that only literary fiction is worthy. Another idea is that I can not have financial abundance, or that I can not earn a living with my art and/or writing. This is after years of collecting dustbunnies on those silly ideas. I began to figure out which ideas are just full of ego, which ones are full of fear, which ones were placed on me by other people but don't really have basis in my reality.

And I get out my scissors and I snip it all away.

In my mind, all the biggest serenity stealers are in the mind. Even if your life is full of people and things that clutter up your world, if you can find the right place to exist in your mind, you can live in peace. That doesn't mean we shouldn't purge old things (sometimes those things are laden with ideas) but the most important part of that is the getting rid of the mental, emotional and psychic clutter.

What mind clutter are you willing to let go of in order to live your passion and reach your dream?

Oh yeah, to buy a print of this you can go here.

Inquiry: Living into Life

I took yesterday off. Except for a few details drawn in this piece. that I've been working on for a couple of days. This collage in my journal reminding me to live my life, to use my art to enrich my life. Life comes first. Riches come next. That means I have to step back from the ambition sometimes and just BE there in the day, in the moment, in the body.

Yikes.

Yes I did. I didn't feel guilty about not writing (well, maybe a little, until I decided a Sunday without work wasn't a bad thing). I struggle with the concept of taking a day off as I work on developing my daily writing habit. That's the struggle right there. If I want a daily writing habit, then how can I take a day off?

But, more than anything, I want to have a sustainable writing habit. What good is an everyday habit that exhausts me so I give up writing in a month? There has to be room for me to let go, if I am going to keep it up, I think.

Maybe if my day job was one where I had a couple of days off it would be a different story. But I barely get any non sleeping hours off of my day job. And my boss has a tendency to wake up with poopy diapers and/or crawl into bed in the middle of the night, so there's no guarantee I get time off during sleep, either.

On an interesting note, I wrote 3500 words today. Maybe if I log details like this, I will find out if my productivity increases regularly after taking a rest.

Anyway, it's interesting that during the Portfolio Project, which seems like it should be about PRODUCT, I am renewing my interest in process and in living. Living, not doing. Being.

Hey. I just had a thought.

When I teach, the portfolio is not simply a body of work. It is a record of the work the students have done, the things that they have learned, the struggles that they have overcome. Perhaps this version of a portfolio has influenced me more than a professional portfolio of work to sell or image to market.

I think my portfolio for me, right now, is not about that creating of a professional portfolio, but a document of my INQUIRY into how to become a working artist. How to live an artist's life.

You know what else I just did? I opened up my planning and idea notebook and made a list of questions I had about the business of art. Questions like what queries should look like, if I needed a business license to sell art, what to do about taxes. Maybe, just like I had my students do, I should do an idea web taking stock about what I already know about the business off art. I bet it's more than I thought I knew. That would give me a base to start on to BUILD the life I want to live, even in the areas where I am the most insecure.

And it is about building.

There is no way to have that castle in the sky dream without having the structure underneath it to hold it up.
City in the trees, or How We Rise
1/11/09
Pitt Artist Pens, White Gel Pen, Golden Fluid Acrylic

Coincidence that I drew this little city in the trees? No. I don't think so. Do you see all the building verbs in the trunk? I imagine the roots of the tree to have words about my past and education and experiences and all the things that have gotten me to the point where I can start building my little tree house of life.

I like to think that building a life takes all the elements that it might take to grow a tree, the fire of passion and the sun, the water of soul and fluidity, the earth to ground us, and the air that allows us to breathe, to think, to imagine.

Flying Girl Will No Longer Be Trapped By Other People's Stories, or Alice

Flying Girl Will No Longer Be Trapped By Other People's Stories, or Alice, 10/1/08
Vintage Alice In Wonderland Pages, Golden Fluid Acrylic, Faber Castell Pitt Artist Pens.

Ai Dios Mio. Sometimes prompts do NOT help in the execution of an idea. Or perhaps it's trying to take on too many all at once. Inspire Me Thursday's prompt (from last week) was "papercut," which is why I took out my old Alice in Wonderland, partially altered book. I wanted to use the Alice in a Warrior Girl, but then I had the concept that I would integrate The Big Draw in the project too. I don't know. Maybe I was just not in the place last night to paint, feeling low, despite having a good day, maybe I really did take on too much but this is the original painting.
Don't mind the crappy photo... I was in the midst of taking it when I decided I hated this painting and had to fix it. (Ugh I really hate it.)

What does that tell me? Sometimes, when you make a commitment and go down a certain path, the outcome is not that great. Sometimes you try to hard to coddle something worthwhile together and it just does not work. That is fine.

You can change it. There is also the possibility that you can scrap it all together. You aren't chained to any particular path (be it painting or life path). But let's say you don't want to just toss all the effort you put into a thing already. You are not required to stay with what you hate. You are free to adjust your project, shifting focus from one element to another, painting over an element, or adding a new one.

In fact, you can also take what you have learned from your original project... a thing that perhaps did not work out as you thought it might... and create a new piece/project/path that works out much better.

I originally made a papercut of a tree for the Inspire Me Thursday challenge, it nearly crippled my hand, because I did not have the appropriate tools, but I did not end up using it in the Flying Girl. I went with the house/Alice instead (which turned out to be my favorite part of this painting). Then there I was, after what I thought was finishing my Flying Girl, with this papercut tree and a tossed off planning sketch that matched it in shape and idea, differing only in medium. And I thought, "well there's my drawing for the big draw." Unfortunately, I'd done it on a piece of paper that Ivy had scribbled on, because I wasn't planning on using it. Then I got a brainstorm.

There's my drawing. There's my papercut. How interesting they would look together. How interesting to see the different media. Look, they fit on the page together with room for a third. I think green would look nice. Gee, I should use a different medium, how about watercolor pencil? Why don't I cut out the first sketch along it's traced shape, trace it again, and paste everything down on a new page? No more scribbled page!
Three Trees, 10/1/08 The Big Draw, IMT
Prismacolor Watercolor Pencil, Vintage Alice in Wonderland Page, Faber Castell Pitt Artist Pen.

I really like how it turned out. This ended up being my favorite piece of the day, and I wouldn't have gotten there if I had not tried all the things that did not work before. If I had been satisfied with the Flying Girl and met my challenges, I don't think I would have seen the possibility in this new piece.

This was a good lesson for me. Something I need to remember as I embark down a scary new path that I had always before shied away from. It's scary to make choices in life. In art, too, but the stakes of a couple hours, a piece of paper and a few supplies are much lower than the stakes of reaching your destiny. Perhaps this is what I have been afraid of. Being a professional artist has always scared the bejeebers out of me, from when I was 16 and decided that I did not want to go to an art college.

But isn't it better to make the commitment, go boldly down that path, and adjust your journey as you go? Perhaps you will end up some place better than you intended, perhaps with even more new and exciting paths stretching out ahead of you. We don't have to know exactly how things are going to turn out when we first step out on our journey. The bad is fixable, temporary, survivable, a learning experience.

The good can be even more amazing than we dreamed.

Doodles and Scribbles

Here is one more piece in the Hand series. I should probably officially name it something more poetic, like "In the Palm of My Hand," or "Held in My Hand." Eh. Let me think about it. Right now, it's obvious it's a hand. So that's what it is.

This new piece is a collage using a painting that baby Ivy did. Crayola watercolors and Crayola markers on plain old white paper. Actually, I helped her paint. Sometimes it motivates them if I start a drawing out with a circle or a smiley face or a monster or a spiral. So those spirals you see there are my beginnings for her painting, which she then went to town on. I traced my hand and cut it out and then pasted it in my journal. And then filled the background doodles in plain old black ink.

It looks like it is just doodles and scribbles, but this was kind of an important piece for me. This is being mom. This is being more than being mom, it's being me. It's being an artist.

Symbolically speaking, I took my life as a mom, with my daughter's painting, and recognized that this is my life. That is why it is the hand. This is not only the life I have, this is the life I make. It is my story, as much as it seems that I have deferred my story for the sake of my children's stories. Can I make art of my life with babies? Yes. It is not as simple as it was when I was single, and would doodle a whole page while I was sitting in meetings or talking on the phone. Now, I barely have time or a free hand to doodle. If I try while there are kids about, they want to be in on it.

But that part of me, the freely creative, casually art making, passionate and dedicated thinker part, she hasn't gone away. She's still here, or maybe it's more that she has become me, who I am now. None of that intensity was wasted. Those doodles I drew are very close to what fills my notebooks from years ago. I reclaimed them.

I am right now, but I come from before. They are both part of me identity. There's really no point in missing the freedoms of being young and fancy free, and no point bemoaning the hard work of raising two young children... that, too will inform who I am to become.

Life is interesting. It is not one single painting that defines you. It is the string of painting done through out your life. It is the stream of artifacts you have left behind. It is the list of actions and choices you have made. It is a river and it doesn't stop moving, even when it seems to have been bogged down in the swamps.

I have been out of it for a few weeks. Stumped and unmotivated and not really wanting to work my way back into productivity. Some of it was external, but some of it was internal.

Something has lifted though, since then. I don't know what it is or what caused it. My brain has begun working again in a manner that it hasn't for three or four years. I am thinking up new projects. I am planning activities with the kids. I am filling my journal with paintings.

It's almost bizarre. For the first time in a long time, I actually have a back log of posts. I have pictures to post, some of paintings some of creative activities that I am doing with the kids.

This is the thing that is the weirdest for me. I have a degree in education. I wrote my thesis on integrating creativity into education. I was famous for artsy projects to help kids learn, sometimes even adults. And yet, with my own kids, I did almost nothing. I had no ideas, no motivation.

All of a sudden, I want to make cardboard robots and pop bottle piggy banks and I want to grow sweet potatoes in jars and make silhouette drawings of the kids and collage with them and melt ice with warm water and go on nature walks to make charts.

What the heck???? Am I finally coming back? Is it because I have been working slowly and steadily at bringing me back? (Those Hand paintings have served before as a ladder back to myself.) Is it because I allowed myself to STOP being creative and just rest and read and relax? Is it just a coincidence that my youngest just turned 18 months?

Hmm. I am actually a big believer on the toll that having kids takes on moms minds, spirits and bodies. I had no idea before how truly demanding it was. The hormones, the exhaustion, the attention. And maybe it also takes a while to learn the ropes of this mom thing. Whatever it is, I'm glad something has broken through, and I hope that by writing about it, I do not jinx myself. I am a big believer in jinxing, too. So.... *knock on wood.*

Crazy for Feelin' So Lonely

This is a collage I did for a creative project I am doing with some friends. It was all supposed to be based around the ephemera of my life that I collected. I titled it L.O.N.E.L.Y for some boy/girl type reasons, but upon further reflection (pushed by my friend) I realized that I was not lonely for someone else, but lonely for my SELF. When that came to me, it was like the clouds lifted. Of course! It was the fact that I was surrounded by people 24 hours a day, without any time (especially with the wedding) for myself.

Wow. That was a realization. Well, I knew I wanted some good me time, I knew I wanted to relive my glory days and spend weeks just delving into creative projects, I wanted to wander new cities, exploring galleries and museums and woods and junk shops. I knew I wanted to sit with tea and stare out at the wide open skies, urban, suburban or rural... but I didn't realize how much of my current frustration was coming from the constant gogogo of motherhood and living and familial responsibilities. If it's not the kids, which it usually is, it's the dishes, the laundry, the job, the wedding to go to, the aunt to visit with, the uncle to watch movies and chat with, the dinner to cook. Always thinking of someone else, and even when I am trying to do my own thing, someone else is always on the edge of my consciousness, knowing that my time for myself is limited.

What I really need for my mom creative health-- maybe just for my human creative health-- is to take some time and just be. I'm really glad that during the whole weekend of road trip and wedding festivities there was one afternoon nap time when I was able to just sit out on the beautiful deck with my journal, mostly just staring off into space. It took a good long time of staring off at this view:
before I was able to even open up my laptop with my novel and do some serious creative work.

People talk all the time about how moms need to take care of themselves, but they are so often referring to things like manicures and outings with the girls. Don't get me wrong, those are great things, but what I need like deep breathing is the stillness that allows me to listen to what my soul has to say.