on motivation from motherhood

When my children were tiny, my making was compressed into stolen slices of time. I remember thinking “when they are older, it will be easier”. Except it wasn’t, and it’ just became a new kind of busy. My youngest is now twelve, and my eldest is living eight hours away at uni. Number two child has his licence and number three has a job. Fifteen years ago I would have thought I would have all the time in the world for pottering about on my hobbies. 

It felt like motherhood was sapping my everything, and I was only capable of the bare minimum. And yet now I have less of the all day every day eyeballs-on-the-child type of parenting to do, I find myself doing less of my own things. As I type this, I am sitting at the school table – Mr17 is working on maths revision to wrap up his year eleven program. He doesn’t need active instruction at the minute, just a presence nearby to be available for questions and help him keep focus. Miss15 is in her room, making notes on her current science unit – she prefers to read and notetake on her own at the start of a unit, before we work through her lessons. She also isn’t needing active instruction right now. Beetle has finished his independent work for the morning, and is about to start main lesson but he’s on a break and eating an apple as slow as a twelve year old avoiding emptying the dishwasher can. 2018 me would have been knitting while instructing, and then dashing to the computer to jot down a paragraph for a blog post. 2025 me has stared at this page a million times before flicking over to the Facebook tab to scroll. 

(and I just did it again…along with a side trip to Flickr and dragging my mates back down that rabbit hole with me)

I have a friend from school, who I catch up with quite regularly, and while i’m launching my not-so-little chickens into the world, dealing with unis and licences and cars and work shifts, she’s busy in the trenches of sleep deprivation and picking preschools and planning first birthdays. And it’s fun. We go to the park and my big boys love chasing after her little boy, and her little boy asks when he can play with my big boys. It’s adorable watching the wildly disparate age group get along like a house on fire. 

What else is fun is seeing her messages, asking for help on projects, that feel like an echo of my own motherhood in 2008, trying to find moments to be myself and to create as a form of self care in those busy, joyful, tiring, inspiring days. “Hey Rach,” she’ll message, “while <child> is napping I’m trying to get some of this quilt done. Can you help me with…”

It’s been an eye opener, as I struggle with motivation. I’ve spoken previously about how creating has been essential in my life as a long term stay-at-home-parent, to help me stay grounded and help build an identity beyond that of “mummy”. But what’s interesting to me, as I work through this slump, contemplate what my future of online sharing looks like, and at the same time, help my friend as she explores creative hobbies, is how much of my creative practice and motivation comes from motherhood. 

In the very early days, my projects, and thus my blogging, were focused on things for my children, or projects with my children. As I reconnected with the domestic arts I’d learned as a children, and remembered how much I loved working with my hands, I branched out into my own projects and exploring new mediums, but they would also be bounded by motherhood – could they fit into nap time? Can they be put aside for a kiddo project? For so many years, even personal projects existed through the lens of MOTHER.

a photo a year from my blog archives

Now, I’m in that weird phase where I’m still mothering, but now to independent teens. I came across a post on instagram, that talked about little kids needing us to be a dog-parent, full of energy and ready to play and smother them with affection, while teens are better suited to cat energy – existing in the same space, being available but not all up in their business. Which honestly, in my dog-parent era, I expected would allow me more time and creative freedom.

But in my cat-parent era, I’m finding myself somewhat adrift. I don’t have that scaffolding any more of “a mum that crafts”. The teens don’t want mummy-made matching Christmas outfits. They will sit and draw alongside me, but don’t need me to create an activity for them. As I type now, having come back to the computer after school lessons, my lounge room is full – Beetle is knitting, Butterfly is on the kids laptop working on a story, Boy2 is about to be reminded to stop scrolling and maybe pick up his pencils. And I’m sitting at the computer, feeling a little lost. I’m doing a bit of writing, but it’s not happening fast. 2018 me wants to reach through the years and smack me, I think, “wasting time” staring at the computer and not just getting stuck in, get the post done, and get into the fun stuff. 

“All this time,” she says, “and not only are you not crafting, but you’re not doing anything. You are daydreaming. GET OFF YOUR BACKSIDE WOMAN”. That me would be very cranky, and maybe that’s the answer. I need to keep her and her butt-kicking pep talks in my head, to keep me on track, I think, as I work through the shift into this new season. I have time (especially when I don’t procrastinate on my chores!). I have a craft room full of supplies curated over a decade and a half of telling myself “one day I’ll have time”. 

Motherhood gave me the push to get back into creative hobbies, share my hobbies, squeeze my hobbies into the edge of my days. Homeschooling has given me bonus time to multi-task and squeeze even more “fringe hours” out of my days. And I think even in this new era, motherhood still offers me scaffolding to my practice, though in a different way to “there’s fifteen minutes left of nap time, can I get this layer of paint done”. Just like my children seem to adopted my formerly untamed creative curiosity, I can also show them, by doing, that it’s ok to let your practice change, that different seasons have different needs, and that the best way to adjust is just start by making a change, rather than let the change just happen. 

Now, I need to go close Flickr and glue down some kite-paper birds…