When I was a kid, my mom and I would played “The Alphabet Game.” We’d pick a theme and then try to come up with words for each letter of the alphabet. My eight-year-old and I have started our own alphabet game, only we use it to make dada-ish nonsense poems together in the pool. (I jot them down in my waterproof notebook.)
When I was growing up, my parents would occasionally mark my height on the wall with my name and the date in pencil. One day I was drawing chalk outlines with my kids in the driveway and I dreamed up this art project that I wish I’d have thought to start when they were babies.
Instructions:
If you have babies or small children, feel free to steal this idea and send me pictures of the results!
When my oldest was five, he recited this poem:
A FART
by Owen KleonA fart! A fart!
You can hear a fart!A fart! A fart!
You can smell a fart!A fart! A fart!
O why can’t you see a fart?
Perhaps that was the inspiration for our fart collages, an ongoing collaboration and art activity I pull out whenever the kids are driving me absolutely crazy. It’s very easy to make a fart collage: simply cut out a photo from a magazine and add a toot visualization.
I believe deeply, you see, in the connection between fart jokes and creativity. (There’s a whole wiki devoted to Mozart’s love of scatalogical humor.) Jokes, pranks, irreverence — if we start poking fun at the world, at a certain point we wonder if maybe we can change it…
One of my very favorite lines about being a parent comes from Andrew Solomon’s Far From The Tree: “Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is that we give our children what we wanted, whether they want it or not.”
So I was primed for the punch of this thread from Tiersa McQueen (@tiersaj):
Carl Jung said that nothing had a bigger influence on the child than the unlived life of the parent. Those unlived lives linger. (I am struck often by how many artists are raised by people who didn’t fulfill their own artistic ambitions. Most recently, Twyla Tharp, in Twlya Moves, talking about her mother, who was a pianist, and groomed her daughter for a life in the arts, driving her all over Indiana for lessons, etc.)
One must be careful to not transfer unwanted dreams onto their children, maybe even more so when your children are inclined to doing the things you, too, love. (One of my sons loves music and video games, the other loves stories and drawing. You can imagine the dreams I have for them, dreams that I find it best to keep to myself.)
It’s a dance. You have to give yourself what you needed, but give your kids what they need now. Build the world you always wanted, but make sure there’s room in it for the world they want, too.
(And know it will change and be constantly in flux, day by day.)
Dan Sinker is one of the writers who I think is best capturing the fury and heartbreak and fleeting moments of beauty involved in being a parent right now.
I loved this piece about bird-watching during the pandemic and this epic thread of his kid’s drawings:
If you want something nice in your feed, here are posters from the last few weeks of the four-year-olds research projects. pic.twitter.com/QKHCLbHkF4
— ? damned sinker ? (@dansinker) June 15, 2020
He recently published “There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Good’ Parent in a Pandemic” in Esquire:
Every parent wants to be a good parent. And every parent, every day, fails at that because, right now, being a good parent is literally impossible. A fine parent? Maybe. An OK one? Possibly. But a good one? We’re eleven months into a pandemic that sent all our children home, laid waste to jobs, killed a half-million people in this country, and sickened many millions more. Politicians like Ted Cruz ensured it would hurt as much as possible by fighting against public health measures and relief efforts that would have made a difference. So no: a good parent isn’t really an option. We’re all just barely getting by.
“Every parent—every single parent—has known the crash this year,” he writes.
Yup.
I have two of these bumper stickers: one in my studio, and one on our refrigerator.
What I hang onto these days is the D.W. Winnicott’s concept of the “good-enough” mother. “Success” in caring for children, he wrote in Playing and Reality, “depends on the fact of devotion, not on cleverness or intellectual enlightenment.” All the devotion required is an ordinary devotion, as he put it. No particular need for extraordinary skill or expertise.
In Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2016), she jokes about the concept’s popularity:
Winnicott’s concept of “good enough” mothering is in resurgence right now. You can find it everywhere from mommy blogs to Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Are You My Mother? to reams of critical theory. (One of this book’s titles, in an alternate universe: Why Winnicott Now?)
“If you are satisfied with being a good enough parent, and have no illusions that perfection is possible,” Peter Gray writes, “you see this problem for what it is, a problem to try to solve, not a tragedy, not an occasion for blame or shame.”
Me, I’m trying to see it as a comedy, or a farce, or maybe just bad improv. Making do with what we have.
We might not be able to be good right now, but we can be good enough.
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See also: “Manifesto of the Idle Parent” and “You are forgiven!”
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