Modus Operandi
Dear ones,
I have been surrounded by descendants lately… the wonderful summertime crush of family who come to where I am to see me and each other. In addition to the great pleasure of seeing my loved ones, this has given me the opportunity to grapple with the challenge of remembering what I’m trying to do in my life while also enjoying lots of social family time.
It’s so easy for me to forget.
It’s not just social time vs my own work time that I have to negotiate… it’s who I am. For most of my adult life my MO, my identity, was taking direct care of other people. Here I am, kids. What do you need? I got trained up by the requirements of what I perceived as my job—my duty—to function in very particular ways. To see myself in very particular ways.
Now I want to embrace a different calling. It’s taken me so long. Significant interior shifts are hard. It’s so hard to give up what once worked (that no longer works) for the next stage, even though that is what we do throughout our lives, willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously, and most likely, a mixture of both. We get so habituated to an idea of who we are that it is practically a miracle to be able to let go with enough resolve for something new to emerge.
This quote from the I Ching means a lot to me. Please excuse the old-fashioned sexist language. When it says, ‘men, or ‘a man’ or ‘his’ or ‘him’ that means YOU, whoever you are. It means person. This English translation was published in 1950. The Chinese text got started around 1000 B.C.
Unlimited possibilities are not suited to man; if they existed, his life would only dissolve in the boundless. To become strong, a man’s life needs the limitations ordained by duty and voluntarily accepted. The individual attains significance as a free spirit only by surrounding himself with these limitations and by determining for himself what his duty is. (my emphasis). #60, Limitation
I had to determine for myself what my duty was early on in my career as a mother. I was raised by a woman for whom being an artist and a mother was a continuous, painful conflict. She was a passionate artist, and she got stuck with marriage and kids far too young, mostly because her generation and culture (and mother) dictated this. I have great compassion for her rock/hard place situation.
I had to be different from her because I knew what it felt like to be considered an impediment. I had to know that my children were my priority. That’s how the generational chain of working stuff out often goes. Action/Reaction. And then, hopefully, somewhere down the generational pike, integration.
Like my mother, I was very young when I started having children. I was too confused and traumatized by my life so far to have any cogent plan for what to do next. Pregnancy felt like a job assigned by the universe… Growing a person in my body and then taking care of them after they exited as an extremely helpless being was a body/mind/spirit-blowing project, common though it is. Is there any other job that upstages one’s own immaturity and incompleteness as much as having a child does?
After the birth of my second child I had one of those decisive cosmic moments in which I felt that I had to CHOOSE between being an artist and being a mother. Pick one. You only get one. I was already a mother so it wasn’t a real choice. It was about getting my priorities straight. The only way I could prove to myself that my children were my priority was to "give up" art. I made that decision. And the nanosecond I did, I realized that I did not have to give up art at all; I just had to determine for myself what my duty was, so that I could avoid feeling the conflict my mother had felt, and that I experienced as her child.
Life offers us the mysterious chance to redeem the past by changing the story. None of this is easy or inevitable. So much of the incomprehensible pain we walk around with is whatever our forebears were not able to understand or process and therefore has been handed down to us.
Most of the ancestral detritus we’re reacting to is invisible. It lives in our psychic and physical DNA, pricking us to intervene/redeem/heal.
Jung talks about the effect on children of the unlived lives of the parents. I would also say that what we are called to integrate in ourselves stretches back farther than we can possibly see and is part of the evolution of consciousness. We are all on that slow, circuitous path. If you are not raising children, you may be raising your ancestors.
I see plenty of evidence that my children have been able to integrate the responsibility of parenting and the call of creative endeavor without feeling it as a wrenching contradiction. Anyone who has children has to figure out how to juggle—how to provide food, clothing, shelter, education, attention and love with whatever resources one has and can get. Couples/families/communities share these responsibilities in various ways. It’s complicated for everyone and especially complicated for a single parent.
Raising children as imperfectly as we do takes great pure effort. Making art also takes great pure effort. Juggling time and space is a puzzle, but it does not necessarily have to be an emotional conflict.
My mother felt the conflict emotionally because she was not ready to have children. Maybe she would never have been ready, or maybe she would have been ready when she was older and knew more about herself. Nobody is ready, exactly, but a person can be at a place in their life where they are willing to accept the challenge. And yes, nature’s little plan is for babies of every type and species to come along whether or not the parents are 'ready.'
I made art while I raised my children. I shared some of my work through a small paper products business I started, and I worked on other speculative projects as well as lots of freelance graphic design and illustration. I’ve always functioned as a highly skilled, creative person, but I did not think of myself as an ‘artist’ in the sense of identity or responsibility.
As difficult as it has been for me to redetermine what my duty is, if I can do it—if I can accept a new calling with a whole heart—I will be doing something valuable for my children as well as myself. I will be modeling the ability to change. What a great ability that is! What we model is what counts, what has an effect. All the blah blah blah in the world can’t compete.
Expressing experience/feeling as art.
And yet. My desire to share what I’m experiencing is strong. Writing/drawing are art forms. What I try to protect myself from is the opposite of making art; it is making pronouncements. I have to be humble enough to admit that making pronouncements is a big part of my MO. But I know what I want. I want to share what comes to me, through me, in a spirit of exploration, mystery, not-knowing, faith in not-knowing. I want to make art.
Dear ones, this kind of psychic space/permission/confidence to allow, rather than defend—to be here now—is so beautiful, so productive of understanding and creativity. It’s a crazy world, and we are all crazy to varying degrees. Dancing with the endless sturm und drang of life, may we embrace and explore the mysterious landscape within. May we become our own loving parent.