Makers Gotta Mess

In the garden, in the studio, on the dining-room table, everywhere

The first poppies are blooming. Fat bees tumble bottom-up in the bright cups of California poppies between blue spires of lupine. One by one, the green globes of Icelandic poppies in bud raise their nodding heads. ready to open. Here a crimson one, there a rosy pink. I’m swooning. The bees are swooning. The neighbors who put up with my sheet-mulching all winter are swooning, now that they can see what I was up to.

About that: when other parents ask me for my best advice, near the top of my list¹ is makers gotta mess. Creativity is a messy business. A whole lot of the time, “a work in progress” is a synonym for “a hot mess.” This goes for first drafts, sketchbooks, thumbnails, rough cuts, LEGO creations, DIY projects, cello practice (ask me how I know), and a whole lot more. Including, absolutely, gardens.

In late winter, crows clawed aside the compost I’d used to hold down sheets of cardboard—the fastest, easiest way to kill off lawn. The sodden cardboard was like a Golden Corral buffet where every dish was worms. This unintended feast won me a lot of points with the local corvids, but a view of shredded boxes isn’t exactly what endears you to new (human) neighbors. I removed the scraps as fast as I could and sowed seeds with a liberal hand.

I’m happy to report that the payoff has come earlier than I expected. This soil is so rich! I feel like Farmer McBroom. The unsightly first stage of converting lawn to hedgerow didn’t take as long as I imagined. We have years to go before the habitat project matures, but the ugly-haircut phase is past. At least in this, the most public part of our yard.

My old studio in a painting phase

Chaos, but containerized

If you aren’t wired for mess—or if, say, you live in a small house with a large family, which was my situation for a whole lot of years—it can be really challenging to weather the chaotic stage of a creative project. Sewing, woodworking, robotics, cooking, all these awesome pursuits we want our kids to dive into, all these handcrafts and skills we love to see them develop—they require room to get sloppy. The paint-spattered corner, the room abandoned to fabric scraps and bits of Sculpey clay, the table overtaken by wires and circuit boards...the physical disarray of magic-in-the-making can be overwhelming and even impractical. We used to paint on the same table we had to clear for dinner.

I know it isn't always easy, especially for type-A parents, to live with the clutter and chaos that so often surrounds a creative mind, but there are ways to compromise. When my kids were little, it used to mean keeping the front of the house reasonably tidy—one main room where people can count on an uncluttered space—and letting the rest of the house wear a jumble of raw materials with abandon and zest. I was more or less bedazzled with glitter for a decade straight, thanks to my kids’ various projects.

I always tried to leave a few shelves or bins empty for holding works-in-progress when necessary. If you put them away too tidily, often the project loses its juice. And I’m not just talking about the kids’ projects: it’s true for my own creative endeavors, too. I like a tidy studio for writing, which means corralling all the visually chaotic bits and bobs of my fiber arts projects. But if I clean up too well, those projects just might sit idle until I forget all about them. I’ve had to learn the right balance between order and abundance to ensure that I really do make all the things I want to make.

Makers gotta…moon around?

As long as we’re talking about kids and creativity, here’s another piece of advice I wrote on Bonny Glen back in the day:

Along with Freedom to Be Messy goes Lots and Lots of Down Time...that's part two of my refrain: give ’em time to be bored, time to stare into space, time to tinker, time to obsess.

So much of my work as a writer happens when I'm far from my keyboard...I'm writing while I'm gardening, while I'm doing dishes, while I'm curled up under a blanket doing a crossword puzzle. I may look idle, but I'm not. Things are churning in my head.

Scott used to do his best writing on the walk home from the subway. Now,² far from NYC, sans commute, he stands in the backyard, his mind working while Huck runs circles around him.

Our kids know that we're absent sometimes—lost in our thoughts, working something out—and they understand, they know we try to make up for it by being extra-present, fully engaged, in other parts of the day. But also by giving them that same kind of mind-space in return: big chunks of the day unscheduled, unspoken for.

Let me get out of your hair so you can put glitter in it.

Related:

1. Also high on that list: Read aloud as much as possible. If you don’t enjoy reading out loud, make group audiobook listening a cornerstone of your family culture. If you do enjoy it, work out a couple of go-to character voices. Don’t stop readalouds just because the kids learn to read. No one is ever too old.

2. 2013, sob! Huck was four.