My Three Selves, and Yours Too
(Or how to live with a child, a mother and an artist in the same body.)
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
-Mary Oliver
Who Are The Three Selves?
The Child
The Mother/Partner
The Artist
What Are Our Three Questions?
How does memory shape our art?
How does motherhood shape our time?
How does artistry shape us?
I have just finished reading Mary Oliver’s collected book of essays, Upstream. It is a lovely collection centered on nature, as per usual for Oliver, some that touched on her favorite authors: Emerson, Poe, Whitman and Wordsworth, but also an especially powerful one for our work as creatives trying to balance parenthood with our artistic selves entitled: “Of Power and Time”. In this one, which I think is a must-read, she discusses the idea of the three selves we inhabit at all times: The Child, The Mother/Partner, The Artist. She does not name them in this way, but for the sake of ease, I will refer to them this way for the work we do together. We are inhabiting these selves all the time, and each one can interrupt the other at work. The work of creating, the work of daily tasks, and even the work of remembering. And for those of us who wish to touch the mystic band of art, in the fifteen minutes we may have, we have to learn to ignore the call of The Child and The Mother/Partner sometimes, to be our most fully realized Self.
The Child
This is how Mary Oliver describes her Child self: “Powerful, egotistical, insinuating--its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams.”
It is this child that reminds us of our past, and of the hurts and desires of our childhood. It fuels both our doubt and our imagination. It can always distract us with thoughts of slights or new adventures. It monopolizes our energy and requires constant care. Maybe we spend our time seeking out new ways to heal these old wounds, or exert our creative energy on pacifying old stories. Maybe we think that the mass of habits we have spent a lifetime cultivating are immovable forces that will frighten the child self if we remove them, like asking them to sleep without their safety blanket. But it is in the child’s insistence and grit that we can cull the lessons to be ruthless with our creative time. When we express our childhood’s joys, what does that look like? Did you love to dance as a child and now ignore those urges because who has the time for classes or lessons? Did making large messy finger paintings get us in trouble when we were young, and we never learned to let ourselves go as a result? Whatever the lessons in that child self, spend some time reframing them as creative permissions, so that the child and the artist can learn to coexist with co-opting the precious time you offer them.
The Mother/Partner (Oliver calls it the social/attentive self)
This is how Mary Oliver describes the Mother/Partner self: “This is the smiler and the doorkeeper. This is the portion that winds the clock, that steers through the dailiness of life, that keeps in mind appointments that must be made, and then met.”
While Oliver calls this clock-keeper the social/attentive self, for those who know that I am always looking to help mothers carve out creative time, please allow me to rename this self the Mother/Partner. This is the most dangerous of the selves, for it will derail the creative spirit with “more important things”. Things like, orthodontist appointments, course registration deadlines, the plumber. All those ordinary requirements to make a household and family run, all of those things that threaten the creative spirit and devalue its importance in the lives of the mother, all those things that actually make life more human, that make us feel more alive. And while it is impossible to eliminate ones to-do list entirely, it is possible to protect the creative space and make its presence on your calendar just as sacrosanct as those lists that shape the rest of it. I find it fascinating that the first thing to go for me is my writing time, it is not the breakfast meeting with a friend or the afternoon session with my son’s counselor, it is the very thing that makes me feel less frazzled that makes me feel more sacred and more powerful, and I quickly resent those obstacles that make it more difficult to wander aimlessly in my imagination for a while or to get the good work done in favor of the mundane.
The Artist
This is how Mary Oliver describes the Artist self: “This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.”
This is the self we are desperate to release from its darkened home. It is the one that demands we pay attention to it, and shames us for ignoring it in favor of those other selves. It is insatiable, and when we allow it to come out into the light, this self is sometimes so mad at us, it sits paralyzed in its squeaky rocking chair, and torments us with its incessant noise while refusing to get up and play with us. That was a lot of mixed metaphors, but man, I hope you get the point. The artist self is the one that gives our lives meaning and consciousness. It makes us more human and less robotic. It is the most formidable self of all. It has the power to stop time, and it can produce fruit in fallow times. It makes our heart race faster, our mind more sharp, it is uniquely our own and impossible to share, yet it yearns to be heard and seen, and recognized. This self, when acknowledged properly and allowed time to breathe in the sunlight, can be generous and curious. It can inspire and grow exponentially. It will create the kind of life we are longing for.
Now that we have separated and investigated each of these selves, remember, we are always all three selves all the time. And we must forgive ourselves when we cannot thin the veil between the sacred work of art and the reality of life in the 21st century. This new metaverse that demands our attention incessantly must not steal the time you dedicate to pursuing good work. Practice recognizing when one of these selves is blocking you from another, when one’s demands are louder than others, and come up with ways to listen and dismiss. That you are even trying to reach through the mundane and touch the sublime is enough on some days. But try, my friend, try really hard to spend some more time there. The time spent with your joyful artistic self, taking up space and singing out, will resonate out to others and change the way you energize yourself.
The generosity you show others, you must first show yourself.
Keep Writing,
x A