God, I’m a miserable shit when I don’t write.
I look everywhere, upside down and right side up.
I look enraged.
My kids see me as a person who blames, enflamed.
Remember that poem by Shel Silverstein?
“Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout, would not take the garbage out”
Her life a big and peely mess, trash a heaping and piling all about?
I pile on duties and responsibilities to avoid the creative bubble inside of me.
I tamper it and blow on it and mist it with water of dishes and picking up piles and piles of dirty socks and goldfish cracker crumbs and scrubbing red cracked plates with stuck egg yolks, crusted milk cups and tumbled coffee grounds from yesterday’s morning.
The demands of my life are never ending when I quiet my creativity.
So I tell my little flame, wait. Shush now. She’s got work to do and then I’ll attend to you.
But I’ve awoken her too much now that she gets impudent, she stomps and pouts and places hands on hips so that I am disintegrated. I get confused. And when I get confused my first impulse is not to place myself inward, look to the smooth pebble of knowing and guidance.
It’s to get fucking mad.
I kick and I scream and lord do I blame.
You did it.
They did it.
This life and all its demands and what kind of dumb idea did I have anyway to write it all down anyway?
To have the audacity to sit and listen to children’s poems and close my eyes and eat words like peaches and place my own fingers on keyboards, massage some ache inside of me until it works itself out? Relaxed in its musings. Relaxed to have been given open air.
To partner with myself is so very new.
Today I threw a tantrum, today I grew scared my creativity would get wings and fly away from me, and because I don’t quite yet trust myself, I grew fearful.
And growing fearful means growing mean sometimes.
And then I wanted to nurse that elixir of shame, suck on that known bone of sadness and stuckness.
Out loud my lips made the shape of no, not even wontan or shattered,
More like a sigh, more like an invitation to the other parts of me.
Not today. I’ve been down this road and I want to do it differently in this moment.
Come along now all of you, pieces and pleasures and little crumbly bits, lets gather
at the holy altar of the washing machine on a Friday morning and have a chat.
I’m scared it will go away. I named it. And I waited.
Sit down, it said.
There are dishes to do and kids to pick up in an hour and my hair is dirty.
Sit down, it said again.
I sat down. Well first I attempted to fold some laundry and I looked over at my computer and I sat down.
‘But children, remember Sarah Stout
And always take the garbage out’
Mothers, caretakers, givers, and adults,
remember Amy Rose,
And always take your creativity out.