The greatest joy in life is creating. Especially creating life itself. Those tender early newborn moments. Where day is night and night is long. You surrender your body, your soul, your existence, into life/lives of others you grew inside your own belly. Through the cord, your blood merged with theres, your hopes and dreams intertwined in theirs. Your aspirations mixed with fresh blood, blurred along the lines of feeds and nappies.
I am exactly where I am meant to be.
That’s something I remind myself daily as I sometimes struggle wearing the hat only marked ‘Mother’. I don’t know how to only be ‘Mother’ when I want to be much more. I want to be an artist, a wife, a lover, a thinker, a reader, a doer, a fighter, fit, intelligent, relevant, everything. But in reality all those things done quiet fit together at once and fight as I try, I have to learn to do the thing I struggle with most and thats be still.
Surrender to the slow life. The life that requires rest to care for a newborn baby. One I so desperately longed for. Now he is here and I am fighting everything all at once.
‘You can have it all’
Thats a lie. Because I can’t. I have to realise that I cannot be the artist I want to be while being the Mother I choose to be and thats ok. I can try to do it all. In little snippets here or there but caring and raising my little Jonty trumps any desires or paintings I have burning holes in the back of my mind because one day, which I am sure will come faster than I ever though, I will have all the time in the world to paint.
So for now I will do what I can do.
