Letting Go of Creative Expectations
Some simple, not-so-simple advice on maintaining a creative mindset while caring for small children.
Letting go has become one of my biggest lessons of motherhood and creativity. It was not until I became a mother that I finally felt a motivated commitment to pursue my creativity. For years, I had ignored my paints, scrapbooks, drawing pencils, and camera. The weight of what others would think of my work, my inner critic assuming my work would not impress, kept me from making almost anything at all. But then, I had a baby and my entire life was turned upside down, everything I thought I knew, wanted, and expected from life was questioned. This was an incredibly painful process, but it was also necessary growth, like tempering steel.
It was as if the complete lack of time to myself, finally pushed me to use my time wisely. Gone were the days of streaming shows for hours in a bored stupor, now any time I had to myself was used to remind myself of who I was. By the time my daughter was 18 months old, I began to paint during her naps, using the 100 Day Project as a structure. A lot of what I made was messy, and felt amateur, but it was mostly fun and freeing. It brought me back to the feeling I had when creating alone in my room as a child and teenager, allowing the paint or craft in front of me to embody whatever I was feeling or imagining in that moment. I felt possibility again, after over a year of feeling as if my time, my body, my life belonged to someone else. By focusing on using my limited time deliberately, I was able to let go of some of the old stories that held me back.
Soon after this success, I became pregnant with my second child. The transition from one to two was difficult, but not in the ways I expected. All of a sudden the challenges of dealing with an infant felt easier, but balancing my attention “equally” (as I always admonished myself) was overwhelming. Every moment there was a call of “mama” or a cry. Back and forth my head would pivot, my body pin-balling from one room of the house to another. It's been four years and I often still find myself listening to two different voices asking different things of me at the exact same time, three if my partner happens to be around. I began to wonder… What about my voice? My needs? All of the bubbling frustrations, exhaustion and resentment of my first postpartum period boiled over into that infant-toddler period. It was all I could do to keep myself from drowning in my rage and grief over expectations lost. This wasn’t what I thought my life would look like.
I began to look for a life preserver, something I could use to keep my identity, distinct from my family roles, intact. I joined online artist communities where I watched video after video of other people creating art. I almost never completed any of the lessons myself, but in the act of looking on as someone else demonstrated color mixing or a particular technique I told myself I was keeping my creative mind alive. Then I found Lenka Clayton’s Artist Residency in Motherhood. When my second daughter was 3 months old, I decided to proclaim my residency. I had no childcare, my husband worked outside of the home, so this residency was less about creating and more about collecting. My goal was to see how my mothering could be art. How I could find art within my daily routine. Could I let go of how I thought things were meant to be and find a new way forward?
In practice, this looked like keeping a note on my phone with an ongoing list of art ideas, usually focused around the unusual things my children did or how they affected me. An account of the absurdity that was meant to be endured by the primary caregiver, such as:
Sound, echo chamber, noise comes on all sides at once, it is too much and just as suddenly it is gone and you feel calm, relieved and grateful
Don’t mind the automatic milk dispensary–happy nursing babe, wrecked mom
Ripping telephone books in half rage
Holding toddler on monkey bars with baby in carrier on chest
Breastfeeding infant while squatting with toddler on potty
Coming out of the shower, the fog in the mirror obscures my face more than my breasts; women/mothers are just breasts; forgotten details/identities
I also began to take photos with my children when they were on top of me in some absurd way. The physical weight and discomfort of them, such as sleeping with feet on my head; climbing up my legs and back as I lean over a table; or with a toddler laying across my legs upside down as the baby nurses.
For over a year I collected these notes for myself, saved these images in an album on my phone. I especially documented the feelings I was not warned about–the grief of losing my life before children, the rage at it never being equal labor with my partner, the exhaustion of a baby not sleeping turning into a cold indifference where I am a rocking, humming robot dissociating from the moment. None of the baby books talked about the dark feelings, apart from a little note about how your doctor will do a postpartum depression screening.1 In capturing the negativity, overwhelm, distress, and the things that made me laugh (at least in irony) because if I didn’t I would cry, I was able to push through to something else. I began to be more present. I began to find the same feelings of creativity, not in creating, but just in the noticing. I have still not made much from my list of ideas, but just as watching art videos kept my creative mind alive, so did taking the time to notice. I wasn’t just surviving through different situations, but I was documenting them and that gave them more purpose and meaning.
Creativity and motherhood go hand in hand, but it will look different for every person. I would longingly watch the mother-artists who would bring their preschoolers into the studio tossing crayons or paints on the floor for them, attaching their infant to their chest and going on with their own creative work. I still cannot work seriously alongside my children. I can play with watercolor or perhaps stitch a few lines of embroidery, but the constant up and down of helping them with something or replying to whatever game of pretend they are trying to play with me at the same time does not work for me. My making time only comes after my children are asleep, but the opportunity to look for inspiration, to shift my perspective on a moment, to find the kernel of a new story to tell, is always there. As long as I remember to take advantage of it.
For me the real, ongoing lesson of the last six years attempting to balance motherhood and creativity is a continual letting go of expectations and being flexible to what is there in the moment. Letting go of what I thought I knew art “should” look like, letting go of co-creating with my children, letting go of hustling to make a business out of my creativity, letting go of needing others’ approval to be worthy of creative work and play. As I slowly allowed myself to let go of these old expectations (many not even my own), I have been able to relax into being more open and flexible about what my creative life can look like. My mind is quieter now that I am not rushing to make things come together in any particular way; not obsessing over how to package something for an external audience. Sometimes letting go into whatever your present moment looks like is the most compassionate answer. Sometimes creativity is simply the lens through which you view the world, the act of making something from that is just an optional add-on.
How can you lean into your present and use it to fuel your creative mind?
This essay was originally inspired by prompt from find her work at .
These screenings always left me thinking, “so if I don’t cry a lot I’m not depressed?” Somehow I don’t think that is accurate, which is just one of a million things we need to improve about maternal health care.