“If we want to raise grown-ups (and we do), we have to make this grown-up thing look good – for their sakes, and for our own. Find something fun and give yourself permission to do it.” – KJ Dell’Antonia, How to Be a Happier Parent
Recently, while reading KJ Dell’Antonia’s wonderful book, How to Be a Happier Parent, a few things made me think about her section telling parents to Find Your Own Thing and inspired me to make more room in my schedule for myself.
First, I made a card for a friend, who enjoyed the card but was surprised that I “do art.” This is someone I see multiple times a month, sometimes multiple times a week, but whom I got to know after our children were born. That she was surprised to find out that I was creative made it feel like well actually, we’re really not that close. Everyone who knew me pre-children knows that I can paint and draw, as I have taken art classes for as long as I can remember, up until the year I got pregnant. Then post-children, large chunks of time became rarer, and my paints have mostly dried up. It’s like Mommy Me is really just some alternate motherhood version of the real me.
Around that time I also watched Sing! with my children and felt shown up by Rosita the Pig. A mother of twenty-five piglets and married to a daddy pig that doesn’t seem to notice her or care to help at all , Rosita yearns to rekindle days when she sang. When she has that opportunity but can’t find a sitter, she pulls an all-nighter fashioning a contraption that allows her to be gone and robotically take care of her children, while she leaves to follow her own interests. None of her twenty-five children or husband seems to notice or care that she isn’t there, underscoring how mechanical her time with her family has become. Not surprisingly, her time with her family after she carves out some time on her own makes her happier and makes the time that she does spend with them better.
As silly as it may sound, I was motivated by Rosita. If a mother of more than a couple dozen piglets and the wife of an indifferent husband could get out of the house, surely I could do it with my two kids and ultra-supportive husband. So I found myself searching through the offerings at the local museum school. The school had for a while offered a drop in figure drawing class, where you come and pay twenty bucks and draw for three hours from a live (nude!) model. I had thought about going many times but didn’t, both because I felt I should get home to my children and because I was intimidated by the naked models and the students that could draw them. But I found a seminar that was taught for the hour before the drop-in portion. I thought I could commit to doing that, then stay for the live model when I didn’t need to get home or back to work.
During the six-week course I only missed two classes, once because I was at a conference and another time because I had a dinner with friends. I also stayed for the drop-in session a couple of times, and it was amazing. The technical aspect of drawing will take me more time to get back, but during the periods of time that I was hyper focused it felt almost meditative.
And I did feel different. In the six weeks of being enrolled in an art class made me go from someone who used to “do art” to someone who was enrolled in an art class, as short as the commitment was. I’m also less intimidated by the drop-in figure drawing class and feel confident enough to go occasionally now that the seminar is over. I’m now someone who can drop to casual acquaintances that I can’t do something that night, because of my art class. What’s that? You didn’t know I was into that? Well here, let me show you a picture of my latest work.
I can also show my kids that look, Mommy has hobbies! Also, kids, if you take lots of art classes you can someday stare at naked strangers, too. (My husband and I debated but came down on the side of showing my daughter my sketchbook, reasoning that if we took her to a museum we wouldn’t shield her from nude drawings or sculptures. I am just worried that she is going to tell someone that mommy showed her pictures of naked people.)
I do know that I am a different person than I was five years ago. Motherhood has changed me, mostly for the better. But carving time out to enjoy an activity that predated myself as a mom has made me feel more fulfilled, more creative, more me.
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