Mama-mania

On the eve of Mother's Day I am presented with THE perfect Mother's Day present. Well, presents. Jeremy and the kids ventured to U City today and did some walking and some shopping and some eating of giant burritos. What their little adventure yielded though is a greater inspiration than they might have guessed.

In addition to an incredible caricature sketch of the kids, some rockin cds, and a lovely new windchime (for the wind took my earlier chimes away, tearing the strings, leaving silver tubes scattered across the yard), I got a book. Mamaphonic.

It is a collection of essays that insist that creativity does not die with the onset of mothering, but rather can truly begin. They are essays (the 4 I've already devoured anyway) that tell tales of creativity and perseverance with little ones. Scatter brained toddler years that put some artistic pursuits on hold while often birthing new ones. All the while the mind and heart of a writer, poet, artist, critic, dancer, lives on and grows into a newer, usually better, writer, poet, artist, critic, dancer.

Anyone who has spent time caring for young children knows how quickly the mind seems to go soft. How quickly the possibility of intelligent, coherent conversations with adults become impossible. How quickly the ability to form witty, or even intelligible, sentences seems to leave you.

I know this place. I know the lurking, stinking suspicion that the artist/writer/dreamer/thinker that once filled this skin has been replaced by a somewhat poorly kept, slightly larger, slightly sleepier, slightly stupider version of her former self.

I know the silly girl dreaming of greatness, sure that she was marked for something grand - just never sure quite what. And sometimes too sure that it wasn't this.

And then I stumble on moments that fall into places I didn't know had been left empty, gaping and without purpose or sweetness. I find wonderment again. I find an imagination again. I find out that this greatness is so much more.

I find the time somehow just before bed to go rambling on here. I find that my scattered brain may have just straightened itself out a bit - or at least scattered itself into something more adventuresome. I find a beginning.

And with this one silly book, I find a dream I had long since abandonned. A dream I had threatened to loose. A dream of being a mom who thinks, a mom who is still a whole person and not the barren rind of a cantalope, all its juicy sweetness sucked out, a shriveled empty remnant of what was, for a moment, something wonderful. A dream of being a mom who creates or at least basks in, if nothing else, wonder and excitement.

Happy Mother's Day to all the moms who do just that in their very own ways. happy Mother's Day to one mom who believed I could too.