Parenting and Creating Art: Will the twain ever meet?

Having it all is a big fat lie and I think I may have figured out how tear it down forever.

As a mom of 2 I constantly feel my thoughts pulled in a million directions. Is the 4 year old being safe while I change the 1 year old’s diaper? Can the 1 year old choke on that? How do you train a 4 year old to care about leaving trash on the floor? Will this baby ever get a proper nap? What is this crud on the carpet? Do I care if my house is never properly cleaned ever again? (No.) Very rarely are my thoughts focused on me except for maybe wondering when it was that I actually last showered. But the one thing I am thinking about almost constantly in the background of the day is “Will I get to draw today?” I use an iPad so it’s easy to whip it out in a moment of random quiet before wondering why it’s SO DAMN QUIET? Usually my time is cut short by the one year old or 4 year old (or both at the same time) demanding attention. I am usually happy to oblige but sometimes I notice if I haven’t had enough time to pour into a creative outlet, that isn’t playing make believe or designing a menu for tiny humans, that I start to feel downright resentful. I have my moments of feeling guilty and indignant about that fact but it remains a reality that if I (inevitably) get interrupted I will probably be grumpy about it for a little while.

So how do you do it? How does one pursue personal and creative interests and parent well? Is it possible? I remember learning in psychology class in college that multitasking is a myth and I totally believe that. I’m a terrible basket case of a multitasker. I read something recently though that made more sense. You can’t do it. You simply cannot have it all. So as a parent with interests outside of parenting one must choose. But when you choose, do so consciously and OWN IT. If you choose productivity one day, chances are your kids will have more screen time than usual, and more snacks than full meals and very sparse one on one attention during that time, but let go of the guilt over that because you can and will choose connection with your kids over productivity another day. So the gist is basically choose one thing, do it well, let go of the guilt of not paying as much attention to the rest on that day or for that time period.

Anyway, I am not the most successful with this method yet because I have been told my whole life that I can probably have it all. I am unlearning that lie and working everyday to try to accept the reality that having it all isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact in trying to have it all everything suffers, myself most of all.

Of course I can’t find the blog or article or post that gave me this insight to share with you, but I found this poem that is lovely.

You Can't Have It All

By Barbara Ras

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam's twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,
it will always whisper, you can't have it all,
but there is this.