We met for coffee on a balmy day. It was one of those Tampa days that makes you feel like maybe God loves Florida just a little more than any other place: 77 degrees, light breeze, salty air, and a few seagulls for effect – it was simply a lovely afternoon.
She drank her Americano, and I sipped my Chai Tea Latte, and we talked together about creativity.
I’m a writer; words are my escape from the world around me. Strung together, these words fill the canvas of my mind. They are my art, and I see the colors in each well thought out sentence.
She’s a baker. Her canvas is shortbread, and on it she paints with icing, creating images that are truly works of art, and that taste as good as they look.
We’re both moms, each of us trying to fit our art into our daily lives, and to figure out how to use these gifts of ours to the benefit of others.
“See,” she said to me, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses so that I could see the reflection of the palm trees behind me, “I didn’t always see what I do as being that useful.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, I see what you do, how your words impact others, and it seems so valuable. But when I looked at what I was doing it all felt so…froofy.”
I smiled, because the word ‘froofy‘ is funny, and it should be employed more in the English language.
“I make cookies. Like, that’s all I’m doing. I see the value in great writing and music and art, but in a plate full of cookies? It just felt so silly.”
I nodded, and I blinked back a couple of tears, because there we sat, two creative moms, both of us trying to figure out how these things we loved fit into the grand canvas of this world.
We’re both so uniquely different, and yet we’re strikingly similar. And maybe you find yourself sidling up to the proverbial table with us.
There’s a unique Renaissance happening right now. Open up any online device, and you might notice it. Art and creativity are oozing through the internet’s pores, begging us all to see the world in different ways.
With the explosion of sites like Pinterest and Instagram, artists around the world have found a platform to showcase their God-given abilities.
And many of those artists are moms, showcasing their art from inside their homes.
They’re posting gorgeous pictures of their children, of their beautifully decorated homes. They make us drool over their spectacular cakes, and ponder life as we read their poetic words. We’re breathless at the photography, the paintings, the songs, and the beauty of it all.
My friend Wendy and I have watched this Renaissance explosion, and we’ve been entirely enamored by it. We started discussing ways that we could affirm these creative moms two years ago. Because while we see all the various forms of art displayed on our computer screens, we also know that it isn’t easy.
It’s hard to walk that line between art and motherhood. It’s hard to balance the need to create with the need to keep a house running smoothly. We see the beauty behind the photos where mom finds herself desperate for a few moments to dive into those parts of her soul that cry out for pretty things, and yet her time is limited.
So we wrote a book about it!
Life Creative: Inspiration for Today’s Renaissance Momhits bookshelves September 27, and in it we dive deeper into this God-design of artistry and motherhood, and how the two melded together can look so messy and beautiful all at once.
As we prepare to launch this book into the world, we want to develop a community of women who celebrate one another. We want this to be a place where the cookie bakers and the photographers, the writers and home decorators, the jam makers, handmade shop owners, and artists of the world come together and rejoice in the beauty of art and motherhood all mashed up together.
This is a place for anyone who’s ever felt that maybe her gift was just a little too…froofy. This is for all moms, no matter what season of motherhood you’re in.
Wendy and I, along with our friend Alle McClosky, have launched an Instagram community specifically for those of you who are trying to fit the creativity into your life. It’s a place to be inspired, to build one another up, to share each other’s art, and to remember that God had a unique purpose in mind when He created you creative.
If you long to know more about this developing community, and to see your part in this online Renaissance, then sign up in the little green box to the right to receive these posts directly in your email inbox. I’d love to walk this Renaissance path together!
We looked over at each other across the couch last night and offered weary smiles. He held up his glass, and I held up mine, and we lightly clinked them together.
“Well done,” I said with a grin. “You made it to today’s finish line. You win the prize.”
The flurry of activity at the end of each long day is enough to drive one to drinking…if I really thought that drinking would help. By the time we get home from evening practices, get everyone fed and showered, and then go through the rigamarole of getting them all in bed (and getting them to stay there), we’re exhausted.
You just remembered you have homework due tomorrow? Whack!
Your toe hurts? Whack!
By the time the dust finally settles and the house quiets down, we are utterly spent. I’d love to tell you that we spend those last quiet hours of our evenings finishing up the day’s work, or reading rich books, but usually we’re so busy trying to recover from the trauma of bedtime that we find ourselves staring numbly at a wall.
Going to bed at night feels like a prize. I climb into my warm, soft sheets, and they greet me with a holy kiss. As I lay my head on my pillow, I hear it whisper, “Well done.”
Last night, Lee and I leaned our heads back on the couch after a particularly long evening (so. much. noise.), and we let loose a collective sigh.
“You think when we’re sixty-five we’ll look back on this and miss it?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I answered. “But probably not.”
Everyone tells you to enjoy it now because you’ll miss it. “You’ll miss the noise and the chaos when they’re all out of the house,” they say, but sometimes I’m not so sure. Maybe I will. But what if I don’t? What if I relish those quiet evening hours when they belong to me again?
Can I share with you one of the things that gets me through the never ending bedtime routines? (I hope you said yes because I fully intend on sharing it.)
I dream of the day when the children are all grown and out of the house.
In those future evenings, Lee and I will sit in our quiet house and perhaps we’ll feel a pang of longing for those bygone, hectic days. Maybe we’ll find ourselves blinking back tears as we remember her wanting to practice her recorder one last time at 8:30 pm, while he asks how to find the surface area of a cube, and the toddler screams in her bed, and the other boy wants to play indoor soccer with a hacky sack.
We’ll be past all of that, and maybe the silence will feel deafening. But then the phone will ring, and it will be one of our adult children, and in the background we’ll hear the screeching sounds of a recorder, and a basketball bouncing against the tile floor. There will be a baby crying, a dog barking, children bickering. All the sounds will greet our ears and we’ll duck our heads, the vestiges of parenting PTSD still lingering.
“This is so hard!” the grown child will tell us. “They won’t go to bed and I’m exhausted.”
We’ll nod and offer a few sympathetic words of encouragement, and then we’ll hang up the phone and look at one another with a smile.
“We did it,” I’ll say to him. “We did our time and paid our dues, and we won the prize.”
Then we’ll laugh maniacally on our couch inside our clean, quiet house.
Sometimes the only thing getting me through the endless bedtime hours is the promise that I won’t have to do this forever.
So it is with full acknowledgement that I come to you and tell you to hang in there. Every time you make it back to your bed, you’ve won the prize. That day’s game is through, and you’re on the other side.
And when it’s all said and done, your chicks having flown from the nest, you’ll sink into your soft, warm bed with the silence of the evening pushing in at you from all sides. Maybe the silence will hurt a little. Maybe it’ll bring a pang of longing, of nostalgia for the days when bustling life spilled through the room.
But it may also bring a pang of relief, and that’s okay, too. Because you made it. And as you lay your head on your pillow it will greet you with a holy kiss and whisper gently in your ear:
I get a lot of comments these days saying something to the effect of, “I don’t know how you keep up with all the things you’re doing. You must be superwoman!”
While I do appreciate this sentiment, the truth is I am not superwoman. Actually, I’m not super-anything. I don’t have any super powers, unless you count my ability to sense when the toddler is up to no good, and I could never pull off a skin tight super hero outfit.
I am ordinary…and that’s okay.
Most of us are ordinary. Perhaps even all of us are ordinary (unless you happen to be the actual superwoman reading this, in which case I’m willing to concede that you are more than ordinary).
We’re all doing the best we can inside each of our unique circumstances.
I used to think that in order to be successful, one had to be constantly in motion. But the more I push my way through this ordinary life of mine, the more I realize that success comes in the quiet moments – those quiet pockets of time when the frenzy dies down.
A few years ago, I attended a conference that was designed specifically for moms. On the second day, a woman stood in front of us, and she acknowledged the obvious: Moms don’t have a lot of time.
“What do you do,” she asked, “when you want to build your business, but the children are clamoring at your feet, and the moments in your day are parsed out?”
I leaned forward, ready to accept her answer to this question that often left me befuddled.
“You do one thing every day,” she said. The room was silent as a hundred moms with dreams soaked in this freeing nugget of wisdom.
“You can’t do all the things when you’re a mom, but you can do one thing. So do one thing every day that helps grow your business, develops your ideas, makes you money – whatever it is you’re working toward, keep pressing on, one step at a time.”
Yesterday was one of those days that seemed to spiral out of control. Between homeschool and toddlerhood, and all the life that crept into the cracks of my day, I found myself antsy and frustrated.
There simply wasn’t any time yesterday for me to sit and work.
By 8:00, I felt panic beginning to well up in my chest. I just wanted the kids to go to bed so the house would grow quiet, and I could find a moment to complete a thought.
It was 9:30 before I found that moment, and by then I was so exhausted the thoughts were tangled together, and I just wanted to go to bed myself, but I knew that if I could do just one thing I’d sleep a little more soundly.
As a writer, I’m finding this process of marketing books in the new media age to be rather intimidating. I’m not good with video or images – I’m a word girl. Facebook is my happy place because WORDS, all the WORDS!
Instagram bores me, and Pinterest intimidates me, and don’t even get me started on Periscope. But I need to step outside of this little comfortable box of mine, and I need to learn how to better utilize these online tools. So before bed, I went to Pinterest and poked around a bit.
I added a few photos to some character boards I’m developing for my book launch, and I looked at what other authors are doing on that platform.
This didn’t take a lot of time, and it didn’t require me to formulate any ideas. This was my one thing and it was all I had, but you know what?
I slept like a rock last night.
Doing one thing every day frees us up to enjoy the bigger picture. This season of my mothering life doesn’t offer loads of free time. I’ve got slivers of time in each day, and so I have to utilize those slivers to the best of my ability.
I slept so well last night because I went to bed knowing I’d done one thing. I didn’t toss and turn all night, chasing down ideas or fighting bitterness at all the stolen hours of my day. I felt a peace knowing I’d done something – one something – to get better at my job.
There will be other days when I can conquer my to-do list; days when the house is quiet and I can do a slew of book-related things. But those days are not the norm.
So I’ll keep doing one thing every day, then focus my attention on the children clamoring at my feet. And in this way, I manage to survive this ordinary, maybe even slightly extraordinary, life.
She sat across from me, her mouth turned up into a soft smile. With eyes crinkled at the edges, and a gentle lilt to her words, she took me back into the recesses of her memory.
It was 2003, and I was in Vinnitsya, Ukraine. Elizabeta Yepifanova agreed to meet with me on a brisk, March morning, and over a spread of tea and chocolates, she invited me into her story.
Elizabeta was sixteen when the Nazis invaded Vinnitsya. Unable to enlist in the Red Army, she found herself stuck, forced to live under the invader’s imposed law, and unwilling to stand idly by while young boys with cropped hair took over her home. She wasn’t, of course, the only one left heated with indignant pride.
A group of young men and women like herself formed a quiet group. Meeting weekly in the hushed corners of the local library, this pack of partisans made it their mission to fight a different kind of battle with the Nazis.
“We fought a psychological battle,” she told me. The interpreter sat quietly by my side, whispering Elizabeta’s every word like it was a sacred secret, and perhaps it was.
“We wanted those boys to know that though they had physical might, they did not have the power to break our spirit.” She tossed me a mischievous glance. “And we won that psychological battle.”
Not content to subject themselves to the Nazi’s rules, Elizabeta and her comrades devised secret plans to keep the German soldiers ever aware of their own infallibility. “The Germans were afraid of us,” she laughed. “We were unpredictable and shrewd. They never knew where we would strike next.”
“I got very close to a Nazi once,” she continued. “It was the most dangerous mission I participated in. But I was successful. Of course I was successful,” she chuckled. “I’m here talking with you now!”
Late one evening in 1943, Elizabeta and her friend, Sophia, walked to a nearby market where German soldiers were known to congregate, and they openly flirted with two of the Nazis.
“We got those boys to come with us easily,” she said, eyes twinkling. “We didn’t speak German, of course, and they knew very little Russian, so most of the communicating took place with gestures. But if you can believe it, I was quite beautiful then, so it didn’t take much to convince them to follow us.” I smiled, because I could believe it. Behind the wrinkles and the grey hair, Elizabeta Yepifanova had striking features.
“We lured them to our safe house and had them take off their coats in the front hall. When we saw their guns, we pretended shock and fear, and those boys were quick to remove the weapons and lay them down. They thought they’d get something from us that night, but we were the ones who got lucky.” With a slap of the knee, Elizabeta let out a hearty laugh.
I find little appeal in letting small water creatures nibble away at my calloused feet. Can we just agree that that’s gross and call it a day?
Here’s the funny thing, though – sometimes motherhood feels like you’re living inside that tank being nibbled to death by tiny fish.
We’re on day one of spring break, and I’m already exhausted. We chose to stay close to home this year both to save money, but also so that we could host two players from the FC Liverpool team who are visiting the States for a tournament. Sounds fun, right?
Except I basically tortured my children today by forcing them to clean on their spring break. It seems I’ve obliterated my chances for that Mom of the Year title…maybe forever.
They scrubbed toilets, pulled weeds, cleaned gutters, and made a half-hearted attempt to help me get some of the fallen leaves out of the flower bed.
And they were NONE TO HAPPY TO OBLIGE!
In between these torture sessions chores, I forced them to turn off electronics and move their bodies. You know…interact with the real world. Enjoy the perfect Florida day. Anything that didn’t involve a screen.
By noon we were all basically sick of one another. I was annoyed with their attitudes, and they were devastated at what can only be chalked up to a loss of all their freedoms.
This was when I gave my mom speech. That super motivational tome about all their many privileges, and how disappointing it was to be met with such ungratefulness. A real pep talk. I laid it on thick, then let the words sort of hang in their air for a few minutes until one of them skulked over with a weak “Sorry, Mom.”
The other two followed suit somewhat reluctantly. And Annika went on screaming because it was past her nap time, and she doesn’t give a flying flip about my disappointment.
The rest of the afternoon found the children much sweeter, but it seemed my mom speech backfired somewhat as now all the children wanted to be with me. Like, physically on my person. They wanted to be held and snuggled and played with and SWEET MERCY I HAD THINGS TO DO!
Little by little, though, their “I love you’s,” and “will you play with me’s” wore me down. Like the fish in those tanks, they nibbled away at my frustration until they’d all but smoothed it out. (Well a couple of them, anyway. One of those kids of mine is more like a leech, latching on and sucking the very life out of me most days.)
So all that to say, spring break is off to a great start. This staycation thing was a super idea. Saving money is just so much fun.
My fingers might be dropping a little sarcasm right now.
The rest of the week should prove to be more enjoyable. We have plans – real plans. Actual plans that involve leaving the house!
And so I shall continue to swim in this tank of my life, being slowly nibbled at by all these small people living with me. It’ll either smooth me out completely, leaving me refreshed and renewed…or it’ll kill me.
Jury’s out.
Yay spring!
(Who else is on spring break right now? Are you having fun, or are you choosing to torture your kids like me?)
