Lots have changed since this website went live.
Over the last few years, life looks very different; almost a world away in only a few changes of seasons.
I have become a mother to a beautiful, joyful daughter who has taken over my heart, mind and spirit since she came along. It would be untrue to say there haven't been moments of bereavement for what I once had: time to think, to make, to create, but of course, they are fleeting in the presence of responsibility and the unending love that comes with being a mother. There is nothing like it, nothing that can prepare you, nothing that compares.
Life is different, I am different in many ways, yet I still feel like the younger me in many ways. It's difficult to articulate but time works differently in your head, doesn't it? Ideas can stay locked up in corner cabinets somewhere at the back of your mind, dormant and ready to be dusted off when the time comes for them to be found again.
There have been times when I have been putting tremendous pressure on myself to get back to how I was five years ago, completely engrossed in my writing and therefore able to churn out work because I was in that season of my creative practice.
Now, I have snippets, clippings of time between (barely there) naps and a moment of exhale in the routine of parenthood (usually during a bath that lasts little longer than 5 minutes). I have been making using my hands every single day; no brainpower to imagine and create through written means, but through knitting. I became an avid knitter in lockdown as many did, but almost like an addiction more recently where I need a process and an outcome - I need to make, or maybe, less dramatically, my way of staying awake and having some opportunity to be Hannah, not just Mommy.
Knitting has taught me to slow down, that things take time, that process and progress (even a stitch at a time) is how you reach an end goal. It slows my panicked states - of which there are many - and the sensory benefits are fundamental to my enjoyment and need to knit: the colours, fibres, textures, patterns are all as important as the final product if you ask me.
So instead of having whole days to make, I need to come to terms with the fact that my creative space looks different now. With teaching part time and then caring for my daughter the rest of the week, I am not going to be able to make in the same way. I can be nostalgic to that time, but it's over, and we must get on with the present.
I have lots of grand ideas for where I want to be and what I want to create, but sometimes I have to remind myself that real life is, well, real, and instead of spending the time grieving for the plans that haven't come to fruition, to embrace how my life is now, that there is some flexibility, much more opportunity for fresh air and a slower pace than the Head of Art lifestyle that I fell into a few years ago. I was burnt out and constantly striving for better, when actually, all I wanted back then is what I have now.
Kommentare