I was a dark storm cloud of a miserable mom yesterday afternoon. My little artist son has an artist’s temperment, as do I, and sometimes those strong wills, and fierce emotions, and melodrama collide and we are a tangle of frustration with each other.
Luckily we have been very clear about how dramatically we love one another – as big as the universe, as loud as the pipes on Daddy’s motorcycle, as high as the sky, as blue as the ocean, as yellow as the sun. Our love has been described in so many ways back and forth – one day, Ben told me he loved me as much as all my shoes – and I have a lot of shoes. I love him as much as every blade of grass in the whole back yard – and we both agreed that would be nearly impossible to count. We have some mighty big love!
So – because we are so verbose and descriptive about our love, we are able to weather stormy days because one or the other of us will remember to say out loud – that “I love you even when I’m mad at you.” And our dark and dramatic selves will have to smile and retreat a little and go create something of beauty together – because that’s what artists do. We take our pain or our trauma and stir it together with all our dreams and wishes and spread all that stuff onto the canvas and smear it around until we forget that we started out mad.
Picture of my artist son’s hands came from my camera yesterday evening.
