Moms, Art, and Words
This year I’m posting three times per month: WORDS on the 3rd, PICTURES on the 13th, and SOUND on the 23rd
(which has turned into a podcast, with episodes collected here). This is my 5th installment of WORDS.
Here’s What I Was GOING to Say…
I was going to write today about “moms and art.” I have some thoughts about how easy it is for mothers to lose our Selves in motherhood — how challenging it can be to maintain a connection with our own identity amid the 24/7 demands of parenting young humans. And how for me, hanging on to a teeny thread of my interest in art helped me reel myself back in later on, once the children were older and I could come up for air.
I was going to mention how often I’ve had mothers come to my workshops (Yay! You’re making time for yourself!) and spend the whole three hours creating something for or about their kids.
I wanted to remind us that continuing to develop personal interests is a great way to model self-care and let our offspring see non-parental sides of us — perhaps glimpses of our life-before-kids, professional aspirations, or hobbies that have nothing to do with them.
I have a Carl Jung quote at my elbow here that says, “The greatest burden a child can have is the unlived life of a parent.”
When I realized Mother’s Day was just around the corner, I thought “perfect timing to write about this!” But the deeper I got into it, the more preachy it began to feel, and the last thing I want to do is make over-burdened moms feel guilty about not taking good enough care of themselves — especially right now. Plus they’re probably too busy to read this anyway. And maybe other moms know all of this already. Maybe I was the only one who struggled to remember who I was, and maybe that wasn’t because of being a parent at all, but because of other factors in my life.
Plus, all this is easy for me to say, perched in my quiet, empty nest, right?
The whole topic felt fraught.
I wanted to keep it from getting too heavy, though, by citing some psychological studies where the terms “adequate” and “good enough” are actually used to describe the kinds of mother-child attachment that scientists are cool with. Problems grow out of inadequate attachment, but the adequate moms are deemed good enough that they don’t interest the researchers anymore. They and their kids are presumed to be ok, or at least to have normal levels of difficulties. (Because childhood and parenting are hard for everyone.)
That’s great news for moms, right? We don’t need to be perfect! We literally just need to aim for adequate. Turns out that good enough is actually good enough, despite the lifetime’s worth of commercials and sitcoms and movies and now Instagram feeds that demonstrate for us how truly magnanimous and selfless we really ought to be, all the time and in every way.
Then I thought, “I could spend a whole afternoon writing about the word Selfless.”
Somewhere Around This Point, I Got a Better Idea
When I get muddled in a topic (never a dull moment up in my head) my new strategy is to look for EASE. And since this is a Words post, I decided to just give you a bunch of words this month.
As in a list. Of words.
Make Your Own Word Game
Yeah, we just did a big pivot there. I ditched the Mom talk; we’re gonna play now instead.
Here’s the deal: You get to decide what to do with the word list below. That’s right, just make something up, or see what jumps out at you. Here’s a bit of context and a few ideas to get you started.
Last summer I posted on Instagram some groups of words under the headings:
Words I couldn’t relate to until my 40s or 50s
Words I’m sick of
Words our society misunderstands or is afraid of
Words I’m sorting out for myself right now
Words that are juicy for me right now
Of course I made those categories up because that’s the kind of thing I do for fun. I had three words under one of those headings, 13 under another. Numbers don’t matter — unless you want to make that part of your game. You could come up with sillier categories like “words that are fun to say” and “words that bug me.”
Sometimes I’ll mull a word over, the way I imagine a jeweler examines a fine diamond or a chef savors a particular blend of flavors, only my mulling can last for days/weeks/months. (Recent example of a heavily mulled word: “striving.”) So if a word resonates with you or perplexes you or irritates or grabs you in some way, you could use it as a journal prompt or make a collage about it or ponder it on your next walk around the neighborhood. Unpack it to find out more about yourself.
You could play that word game where you take one word, say “FOREVER”, and see how many words you can find embedded inside, like FOR, EVER, FEVER, OVER, REEF, OR, OF, and so on.
You could group the words by vowel sounds or subject categories, or make a game for someone else to guess what these three particular words have in common.
You could make up MadLibs-types of sentences with them.
You could illustrate them, sort of like in my drawing above. (I normally write about art, so recently I decided to make art about writing. There’s a painting in progress.)
You could create a crossword puzzle or a word search out of them. Or scrap my list completely and come up with your own list (highly encouraged). Or add words that you think are missing from my list. Change my list into your list.
You could make a list of all the words that are ubiquitous now during this coronavirus pandemic, that we barely used before.
Here Goes
Ready? Here’s my list, sourced from the top of my head at this moment in Week Eight of quarantine (which might explain a lot of things).
FRAUGHT
SPACE
EPIGENETICS
RESILIENCE
APRON
FERTILE
CONTINGENCY
MULCH
MANTRA
SYNDICATION
CHOCOLATE
JUICY
BUBBLE
UNKNOWN
SACRED
CHANNEL
SWAB
TWINKLE
MISINFORMATION
AMARANTH
INTERDEPENDENT
STRETCH
AGENCY
SOLITUDE
ADEQUATE
So, what will you do with them? Leave a comment or send an email — I’d love to hear about it. Remember that creativity only needs the tiniest, most mundane spark to catch fire. It’s all around, available everywhere, to anyone. And as I read somewhere recently (I’m paraphrasing): “Every word contains a universe.”
Now who wants to go exploring?
Finally, Happy Upcoming Mothers Day to my fellow adequate moms, and remember this: As important as you are in your role of mama, the world needs you just as much as YOU. So stay in touch with her, please (the non-mom You). And if quarantine is testing your last parenting nerve, this New York Times article has some ideas for sneaking alone time. 🤓❤️🙏🏽
With word-nerd love,
- Pam
P.S. Turns out I need to go to the post office again this week, so if you want to squeak in a Mother’s Day order, for example, from my shop, I’ll be shipping things on Tuesday, May 5th. Plan accordingly.
P.P.S. I’m super excited that The Accidental Muralist Podcast is now available on Apple Podcasts! You can subscribe and everything, just like with real podcasts. 😉When I get around to it, I will try to get it also onto Stitcher, Podbean, and those other platforms (whatever they are). One step at a time. Look for new episodes on the 23rd of each month.