School begins

Hello friend,

It’s been a while! Life has presented many changes over the past few months. We sent our young child off to school five days a week, and that’s been a gift but also a little source of sadness. I miss long lingering mornings by the beach and having the whole day in front of us with no plans, letting the days unfold magically. I don’t miss the days when we were bored and trapped in the house due to weather and wrangling a child who wanted to be doing literally anything else!

The beginning of school is a funny milestone. If you had asked me before having kids, I would have nodded in agreement, yes school, the first day ever! What an exciting moment. But now living it I’m like, “Oh.” We will never again in our entire lives together have several years to just be with each other. Ever again. That sort of breaks my heart a bit. The relationship between parents and children is always shifting, but this moment feels seismic.

I’m sort of desperate for another baby, but I know if I go back and look at my writing from when Baz was one or so, I was just desperate for more free time. I guess there’s no real winning here. You either want one thing or the other.

Now that he’s in school I feel like I have to make the most of my days. Work work work, make up for years of lost work! It feels great to work hard again; finally getting around to all sorts of ideas that have been brewing.

Facing a mountain of unrealized ideas is intimidating. If I really sit down and do the work I’m meant to do, I could fail at that. The fear of failure keeps me from diving deep, I suppose. Easier to do the things that can be checked off a list: laundry, dishes, child-minding, dinner.

Have you started the new Sally Mann book? I so appreciate the letter to her friend Ted where she describes having a total meltdown around Christmas from the overwhelm of having a house full of kids and many things to be done but still feeling that pull to make art work. A universal artist mother experience.

Mostly I wanted to say that there’s always a tension between making art and all of the other things that fill up a life. The only way I know to overcome this tension is to do both things everyday no matter how imperfectly or incompletely.

During the two full weeks of school I made several of these trash flags. I collected beach umbrellas from the trash throughout the summer, washed them, deconstructed them and put them back together as bunting. Not yet available on my website, but message me if you want one and I’ll get to putting them online ASAP. More colors and more on these soon!

That’s it for this week,
See you soon (sooner than I have been writing all summer!!)
Bekka