Your mom and how you create

What did you learn about creative power from your Mother?

Before I start, you all know Mother/Maker starts next week right? Just checking.

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Baltimore Museum of Art. @artbma on giphy

Picture me peering over wire-frame psychoanalyst glasses and speaking in an Austrian accent as I begin: Let us talk about your Mother.

We shall even capitalize the first letter ‘M’ to make it clear we are talking about more than a specific person. We’re in the realm of archetype now.

Maybe your first Mother was the person whose name is on your birth certificate, but maybe not. Who made sure you were fed or dressed or got to school on time, or who didn’t but should have? For some people that’s a biological mother. For others it’s a grandmother, an adoptive parent, a father, siblings, a foster parent, a cluster of aunties, or even an institution or faith community that tried to stand in as a sort of “Mother-culture.” Sometimes there’s no clear person at all, just a diffuse sense that you were orbiting something that claimed to care for you.

Whoever that was for you, there was an entanglement between your needs and how comfortable she was being a specific, creative being. I don’t assume anything about what that was like for you, or for her. Your mother might have been devoted or distracted, affectionate or callous, overrun by everyone else’s demands or fiercely self-protective. Maybe a combination. She might have been joyful, bitter, ambitious, cruel, fun, ill, artistic, checked out, alive in flashes.

That’s the place I want to look when I ask:

What did you learn about creative power from your Mother?

You watched a Mother navigate her needs, other people’s needs, the demands of money, work, partners, God, the state, community.

I’m really asking:

What did you learn about bringing your own life, your own desires, into a dynamic where people need stuff from you? (This includes your '“audience,” by the way.)

By “creative power,” I don’t just mean whether your Mother showed up to your school play or encouraged your hobbies. Start from the perspective of the Mother herself. Think about a time when your Mother figure was in as much creative control as she allowed herself to be. She could be angry, joyful, absorbed in something, undone. Now remember what happened in the room. How it was talked about when she chose something for herself, or when she didn’t?

@g1ft3d on Giphy

A core tension of the Mother and Creative Power boils down to the split between the need for connection versus the need for singularity.

There’s no neat conclusion required here, and I don’t mean for this to be a blame-the-mother moment. I don’t know the richness of your story, and I’m not interested in turning the person who raised you into a simple metaphor for sacrifice or failure or heroism. Mothers (and mother-figures) are people inside complex systems.

What I’m interested in is the way that particular entanglement shaped your imagination. I don’t assume you are just like your Mother at all, but there’s gold in understanding how that early song is still humming in the background every time you sit down to make something while also needing to ask for something, or say no.

You would think that the more you heal, the less divided you’d feel. That is the basic promise of most self-help: do your inner work and all will be chill, aligned, with no peaks and valleys.

But what I’ve seen (in myself, in clients) is almost the opposite. The more honest you become, the more you feel the split because you’ve stopped numbing yourself to it. You can take in the multitudes within you instead of fighting for a single, tidy identity. You can move stealthily between connection and single-mindedness. They cross-pollinate.

What if the way this tension feels to you today is a teacher with a customized curriculum? What if your creative power is learning a new language? Maaaaybe the discomfort you feel when you take time for your own work, or raise your prices, or say no to a request, isn’t evidence that you’re behind, selfish or broken, but a clue that you’re crossing a line your body learned very early not to cross?

These questions are for every culture maker, not just people who are mothers now. ASK:

• How did your Mother’s relationships (romantic, familial, professional) limit or expand her creative life? Maybe both?

• What risks did she take? What risks did she avoid? And what forces made those risks feel either viable or unreachable?

• When she was deeply engaged in something of her own (work, creativity, friendships, study, rest) did good or bad things happen? How did the world around her treat that absorption? Was she punished, praised, resented, admired, mocked?

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A chance to go deeper:

If you play the Mother role, and paying attention to your Mother’s life stirs something sharp or electric in you, that’s your cue to join Mother/Maker

We start next week! Right in time for the holidays, where familiar things tend to happen.

More than a gentle reflection exercise or techniques to try, Mother/Maker is live space where we actually enter the tangle and come out the other side. The part of you that wants to be dependable and the part that wants a room of your own both need to be heard. We’re not going to resolve that tension, we’re going to make your actual life from it

That’s the work.