Maternal Dementia

Work is getting in the way of my creativity.

This is peculiar, because the work (that I get paid to do) is to inspire – or to construct an environment that will help to inspire – creativity. When I’m not running after my kids or dreaming up posts for this blog, I lead meetings and workshops designed to produce new ideas and solutions.

After a sleepy winter, the spring is filled with assignments. No complaints, I’m happy to have paid work (an important distinction from other work, because nobody pays me to fold the laundry). Since Short-pants and Buddy-roo don’t (yet) have the earning power to fend for themselves, let alone cover my extravagant tastes, it helps when De-facto and I can issue invoices. However, the work does cramp my blogging style.

Blame it on a colleague, a Brit who splits his time between the US and the UK. Thanks to him, I’m part of a team that facilitates what’s called a Sandpit, an event sponsored by one of the UK research councils, part of the British government’s scientific arm. The participants of a Sandpit – mostly researchers and scientists – have to apply to be invited to attend the rigorous 5-day event. This means they really want to be there. That’s because there’s booty: on the last day, a rather large chunk of change (X million pounds) is divvied up and awarded to the best research proposals.

The sandpit topics range from being technical (encouraging a digital economy) to practical (lightening the battery load of soldiers) to abstract (quantifying uncertainty in climate change predictions). Scary-smart scientists scratch their heads on important issues; I get to witness these Einstein-like characters in action and even (try to) learn a little bit of science.

Sometimes when the participants stand up to make their presentations, I squint my eyes and imagine them when they were 7 or 8 years old, the same age as Short-Pants. This is easier for the ones who still have a playful demeanor or who, despite their adult status, have kept a child-like stance or youthful facial expressions. I can picture what they were like when they were kids – probably so much smarter than the rest of their mates – figuring out how to fit in with the world, or deciding not to even bother. (When I start doing this, I know I’m ready to go home.)

By the end of the week, people start to ask me if I’m missing my children. “No,” I lie, “it’s so nice not to be interrupted.” I wait for their look of shock, and then assure them that I do miss my girls, and that they are a lovely interruption.

If I can just remember that when I get home, and they start interrupting me.

After visiting the void – at the Centre Pompidou the other day – I strolled by another exhibit that bears mention, a cluttered and eclectic assemblage of found objects donated to the museum by the artist Daniel Cordier. Its position, immediately adjacent to the nine empty rooms of The Void, was striking. These two contrary exhibits, side by side, must have been a deliberate act.

Oh, there was stuff! An odd collection of things, natural and man-made, primitive and contemporary, cast all around, laid out on the floor and set up on musuem-ish stands. Large carved-out tree trunks, actual sugar silos from India, stood like statues on the floor. It was all very woody; I think there were even pieces of driftwood, reminding me of those silly corkscrews we made in Girl Scouts. Mounted on the wall, an array of objects of curiosity, amongst more pictures and drawings of objects of curiosity. Cordier chose to ignore the functionality of these objects and focused instead on their form, making art out of otherwise everyday items. Art that, it could be said, resembles a tag sale.

It was all a bit too interesting to take in, after digesting nine rooms of nothing.

So I turned and quietly walked out. Not in protest, just in preference.

A single sentence, buried in the middle of a text the artist had written to describe the exhibit, mounted just outside of the rooms that hosted his collection is what got my attention. Addressing the haphazard quality of his work, he wrote: “It reflects the ungovernable disorder of pleasure.”

On my way out of the museum, I tried to keep my head in those first empty rooms with their poignant memories and limitless possibility. But thoughts of the other exhibit kept encroaching, stalking me, insisting I consider this notion of pleasure and its chaotic and uncontrollable nature.

The juxtaposition of these two worlds, I realized, is the paradox of my life with children, in a nutshell.

In (what’s left of) my mind, I have an idea about what I want this blog to be. While I’ve hung my shingle on the hook of motherhood and its resulting mindlessness, it is my hope not to be limited to that.

The paradox – that I love these children of mine, but I don’t love the train-wreck they’ve made of my life – spills over into my writing. I don’t want it to be all about them. But somehow, it ends up being all about them. Any mother can sing you this song.

Each day, groping about at my quotidian tasks, little patchworks of prose – on all manner of topics – miraculously assemble themselves in my mind and I say to myself (oddly, in the voice of Toad, from Frog & Toad), “I will write a post about that someday.” And I duly make a note of it.

Yet what has the strongest pull, what ultimately draws me to the keyboard and overrides that ever present resistance that all writers wrestle, is usually some silly (or painful) reflective anecdote about being a mom. I suppose that’s my branding, whether I like it or not, and I seem to respond naturally to the memes that have to do with mothering.

I do believe that I can (and should) occasionally veer from the core subject matter, as long as I circle around and find my way to home territory for grounding. Most of the thoughtful blogs I read do just that. I need only give myself permission.

I am a woman with a private and professional life that spans beyond the subject of coping with children. I have other things to say. And I would say them, if I could only remember what they are.