My Pottery Blog

Enough

What is enough work? Since preschool ended for the summer have been sorely missing my chunks of work time. It's been difficult with the new schedule, and teaching kids classes, and summer shows, and a disastrously messy studio (that I've been trying to clean out) to get much in the way of actual clay work done.

However, I have been spending some wonderful quality time with my daughter. We've made cakes and cookies and bread, practiced reading, played with play dough, sang silly songs together, and read our way through wonderful novels like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Dragon Rider, and some of The Series of Unfortunate Events. I'm insanely pleased and proud of the way she's started reading more difficult words on her own, and the way she likes to read easy readers to me "without help". I know that I will miss all of this when I go back to school in the Fall and she goes to full-time preschool, so I try to make the most of our time together. Still, I have a nagging itchy feeling when I'm not able to devote solid time to working with clay and I wonder at times if I'm just being lazy when I sit to cuddle with my little one and watch an episode of Star Trek from our recently purchased DVD collection.

In many ways, whether what I'm doing is "enough" comes down to who I'm trying to be. I often feel pulled a million ways by mothering, housework, extracurriculars for my little one, teaching, and making pots. Do I "really" want to be an artist, a supermom, or a teacher? And what if I want to be all of those things at once? Something has to give, and right now I feel like it's the art. Maybe that's ok.