The art of raising babies

Year ago, when my children were small, I made a choice—babies or art.

Perhaps it is easier for a writer. But for a painter the choice is clear—you cannot pick up a baby when your hands are covered in cadmium yellow. It is poison. You can switch to pastels, but then the baby is always Technicolor and anyway, who knows what’s in those as well? So you switch to charcoal, but now the baby looks like you let him crawl around on the cellar floor, which in fact you do, and oh my god what is he putting in his mouth.

So you put down the charcoal stick and take him to the park. And then you don’t pick up the stick again for 17 yea… well you never pick it up again.

I did finally get my family to understand that the portion of the cellar where I used to make my art cannot be used as a dumping ground. They cleared it out and now I have a nice unimpeded view of the unfinished portrait of my mother that I started in 1999.
Perhaps I am just weak or a willing patsy of the patriarchy or maybe I wasn’t talented enough or committed enough, but someone has to cook dinner and someone has to take the baby to get her shots and someone has to hold the “real” job that pays for the health insurance. And you get tired of having to spell out what you need when you have spent your whole life anticipating what everybody else needs and they don’t even know it.

So, what? Am I an idiot? Am I weak? A failure? Or am I missing the point? My feminist sisters say, just like the patriarchy does, that after all it’s my fault. I should just have blithely gone on painting like Jo March writing with her gaudy cap. Sign on the door—IF THE CAP IS ON THE FLOOR I AM IN ARTISTIC AGONY AND NOT TO BE DISTURBED. GET YOUR OWN DAMN DINNER. Right.

Personally I am exhausted just trying to maintain floor space in my unused studio, let alone actually paint.

The problem is not that the children are all the creativity I need to fulfill my artistic impulse, but that they are such a drain on creative energy that I have none left to give a sheet of blank paper.

Excuses

It's not just lack of time, I tell myself. There's too much going on and I'm just not getting any ideas. Plus, you know, there's a lot going on. I have, probably, a broken finger, so it's too hard to type. This is such a busy time of year-- special projects at work, wrapping up house and business for the year end, weekly work seminar in Milwaukee, rehabbing the stairwell and the foyer.

I'm kidding myself, though. Mostly, it's that Nga Jee is here. I've written about this phenomenon before. When the kids are around I don't write. When they were small, the art-making slowly petered off. Even when they are living in my world as lightly as Nga Jee is this round, my creative impulse directs itself to them and away from the interior workings of my own brain and artistic needs.

The children (hardly that anymore!) are the canvas, even if at this point it's just a matter of cleaning the paint off the brushes prior to putting them away.

Who are you?

In conversation at a Chamber of Commerce meeting on Tuesday, my four companions included the 60ish grandson of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. He still spoke Yiddish, and had a different last name from the rest of his family, because his father, 9 years old at the time, spoke some English and was able to correct the spelling when the Ellis Island clerk got it wrong.

A mixed race black woman had an unusually-spelled African given name and a prosaic family name. Why? The immigration clerk didn't like the ethnic name. This woman's daughter wanted the ethnic name back. Mom's reaction? Fine, honey, but I'm not paying the legal fees. Her feeling-- I am not my name.

The hispanic bank manager to my left corrected our anglicized pronunciation of his name. He, in contrast, WAS his name, and wanted it recognized.

My children have names that reflect the mixed bag of their backgrounds-- Greek (Aspasia) and Swedish (Nelson) and Chinese (Chin, Seng-lim and Nga-jee) and Anglo (Julian and Nora). Perhaps we are not our names, but our names are our history. Everyone at the table had a story that used their names to illustrate something about themselves.

Contact

Postcard from the seaman, phone call from the skater. They're far flung but thinking of us, which is the main thing. God how I miss them.

My arms ache, my fingernails will never be clean again, but I’m smug and happy with the beauty I have coaxed, with all due respect to Mother Nature, out of this small plot of land. With my garden going on 20, I am continually amazed at both the new panaromas and new details that I find every day.

I’ve always thought of the garden as my canvas. Since I stopped making art for a living more than a decade ago, I have used the garden as a living work of art that is never done. Now for the first time I have both the perspective and the schedule to really treat it that way on an ongoing basis and I find myself going through very similar thoughts and actions in caring for and creating it.

Art happens in the garden much the way it happens in the studio. You have a plan and you execute it, but the result is never quite what you expect.

Kind of like rearing children.

Less room in an empty nest than you might think

My 19-yr-old daughter, who's been living on a theatrical tour for more than a year, will be home for a month in November.

Last time she was home for an extended period, she drove us crazy-- messy, disengaged, expecting to be catered to (at least emotionally), and frankly kind of mean to her mother (that would be me). It's too long to be considered a houseguest, and too short to really integrate her back into systems. She can be somewhat oblivious to her effect on those around her, but is generally charming and great to be around. I just don't want to have to either pick up her shit, or remind her to do so.

So I asked an on-line forum what to do, and the consensus was lay down the rules then chill out and get out of her way.

The best of the comments:
"She's an adult, who's been living "on her own" for about a year now. Expect a lot of frustration if you try to fit her back into the teen-child mold. Let her know you know she's an adult, but also let her know that as family, not a house-guest, she is expected to be responsible. Set guidelines and boundaries up front, in clear terms, without judgments expressed or implied. In terms of expectations in regards to messiness, I'd say let her deal with her own space, but set reasonable requirements for shared spaces, like the kitchen. Try to present your requirements as you would to a potential tenant, not as to a disobedient child."

Life can be so simple sometimes.

Why I hate the web

Just waiting for the roofer to show up, on hold with all of my work projects, so I start to surf. Knowing that it's a bad idea, I decide to check out the blog of the daughter of a close friend, and lo and behold, she's using it as a diary and conversation with her friends, she does not want her mother's friend looking at it, and yet now I know it is there. Now it is a scab that I can scratch. Now I know something about her that I don't want her to know that I know. I have removed the bookmark, but I still know that it is there.

The internet gives you the ability, if not outright permission, to snoop. It lets you know what an ignoble person you are, because the ability to do this is irresistible. I never had trouble not snooping in my children's rooms or among their belongings. I've cleaned their rooms without ever feeling a need to find things or pass judgment on items that pass through my hands. I have never read their diaries.

Yet the internet offers a way to look without looking. Pop over to Facebook and see who's talking to them. Drop in at MySpace and check out the page hits. Since I feel sneaky and uncomfortable when I do this, clearly I'm in a morally unpleasant area, and should stop. And yet, who will know?