I miss living in poetry and thinking in images and talking in metaphor and living in a little bit of rebellion. I miss the opportunity to be an artist, which was - of course, a very self-indulgent life - however "cosmic" my then ideals might have been.
So many of my once rebellious thoughts have matured into polite agreements. And there are moments that I feel "sold out" for that reason. But the truth is, I entertained dangerous thoughts in those young days, and I entertained them deeply and madly. I let possibility run wild, and I untied all the ends of my ideas and let them wave around in the wind. And not that this is the "end," but . . . in the "end," some of those ideas became fastened down to safe places. To places that feel right. And I take no shame in that. I am thankful to no longer be a thing that has to blow wildly in the wind. I'm thankful to have some anchorage.
But I do still miss the opportunities to be wild. Not spring-break-in-Cancun wild . . . Jack Kerouac and Laurie Andersen wild. Taking the chaos of possibility and weaving it into something that seemed endless, not neat and finite and folded-into-color-coded laundry piles . . .
Motherhood has made my soul. I find myself even enjoying changing messy diapers, for the chance to laugh and watch him laugh, loving the laundry for the chance to adore little sparkly Tessa socks and fascinate at her brilliance while still yet so small. But today I do realize every human's need to be something in themselves, to have a personal identity and maintain that and carve it out. My art nowadays is the obsessive tidiness of our home, like some assemblage I once used to make.
I wonder what art I will make at 50 when my children are no longer at home. I will probably make something reflective, grieving to regain these days . . .
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