For the Others on Mother’s Day

Tomorrow is Sunday. Mother’s Day. Maybe you feel guilty, or sad, or just wonder what other people were so sentimental about. Mother’s Day. The day when no praise is extravagant enough, no card kitschy enough, no sentiment sweet enough. And you aren’t feeling it. At all.

Collage: “Flight” ©Quinn McDonald, 2014

If your childhood was happy and you had a mother who gave you everything you needed and no card can express the love and admiration you feel,  today’s blog is not for you.

It’s for the others. You know who you are.

This is for those who  never really had the mother you needed. The one you wished would comfort you and praise you and love you when you were unlovable and  help without anger when you sewed the pieces of your gingham skirt together backwards. Twice. The one you so wanted to show up with comfort and forgiveness, but it didn’t happen. Not in your life.

Maybe you chose not to be a mother and everyone asks you why, or you wanted to be a mother and it didn’t happen for you and you are still pretending that’s just fine, but you don’t know how to act on Mother’s Day.

It’s complicated. Whether your mother was cruel or uncaring or clueless, the pain is there. If your mother is still alive, you probably won’t be able to have the big turnaround your friends keep promising you. Or blaming you for not working harder to make happen.

I have a horrible secret: Reconciliation may never happen. Not even on her deathbed.  And that may have to be OK, too, because that may be a hope you still have outstanding. It is not up to you alone to make it happen. You may do the work and it will still come to nothing.

If your mother is dead, you may replay scenes, wondering if you had acted differently, if the results would have been different. You’ll never know, but a wild guess tells me No. Some things can’t be changed, fixed, or healed. And never by one person. Two people, a mother and her child, might be able to fix old wounds,  but it’s hard. And if your mom is a believer in the old parent rules school, it is harder still.

The relationships between mothers and daughters is always hard. There is unwritten jealousy between age and experience and youth and naivete. There is anger in lost opportunities and unmet expectations.  For some, the fact that you were a daughter was enough of a disappointment to fill a lifetime.

“Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn’t. ” – Marge Piercy

But here is a truth you might want to hear right now, today, on Mother’s Day. You cannot be anyone else except the person you are today, with all your faults, experiences, hardships, joys, stumbles, successes and backslides. That is also true of your mother. No matter what happened, your awareness and work brought you to where you are today. With or without her approval.

And starting today, you can choose to be generous and kind and patient. To be a different person than the one who taught you to hate whoever you were at that moment.

Maybe you cannot be generous and kind to your mother, but you can be all those things with the women who surround you. The ones who work with you and don’t meet your expectations. The pretty ones who get promoted ahead of you.

The ones who don’t take the opportunities you wanted and they have the freedom to turn down. All those women you meet on your path during the day. You can swallow the angry remark. You can wish them well. You can choose not to judge. That is your choice now. And choosing that freedom instead of choosing retribution is worth celebrating. Today and every day.

—Quinn McDonald is a mother who did her best with what she knew at the time. She was not the perfect mom, either.

Selling Doesn’t Make You an Artist

When I saw the Sephora bag being packed in the store, I thought, “this could be a journal.” (This is what happened when I got too eager and didn’t plan enough.) Accidentally, I spoke that out loud. The sales associate lit up. “How would you do that?” she asked. I folded the bag to show her.

Photograph © Quinn McDonald, 2018

“That would be so cute!” she gushed. “And you could sell them on Etsy and make a lot of money and be a real artist!” There was so much in that comment to understand and come to grips with. In real life, I smiled, took my purchase and left the store.

In my head, I began to wonder how we got from being an artist, to being defined as an artist if we sell our work. Make a living. Get rich. That’s the American business model–develop an idea, monetize it, get rich. Success!

Years ago, I wrote a book called Raw Art Journaling. It was for people who wanted to do art for themselves. To heal. To making meaning in life, instead of chasing meaning. I believed every word of it then, and still do. Art is a way to express yourself creatively, and it has nothing to do with selling and making money.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great if you are a working artist and successful. For years, I did support myself with my art. I found it hard work and the joy of art left me. So I left the field of money-making artist. And I became a meaning-making artist.  It is not mutually exclusive–making art and making money. But for me, I chose the making art–making meaning path. I’m happy with it.

Much of my art is weird. Much of my life is weird. It becomes clearer to me, makes more sense, when I make art out of it.

I can start a piece and not have to choose what frame I’ll use first.

I can decide to use a paper that is not archival, simply because I like it.

I can experiment without wondering how much I can charge for it.

I can make mistakes and take a long time to decide how to change the work without worrying about time management.  In fact, I can make mistakes and decide to leave it just the way it is because I understand more about it now.

Art and money are not necessarily linked. I do other work to take care of my family. Work I love, but different from art. Being an artist is exploring the dark, interesting, funny, odd, hard, difficult parts of your life and seeing what you can discover about it. For me, that’s valuable.

When people ask me if I’m an artist, I generally say, “I do creative expression.” Sometimes I’m asked if I make money, and all I say is, “I decided not to sell my work any more.” It’s all I need to explain about my deeply important art.

—Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach who helps people cope with the creativity they don’t know they have.

Being Creative, Being Different

Is being creative the same as being different? In a world of “there are many ways, but only one right way,” and “it’s either wrong or right,” the word “creative” has taken a beating.

There were the go-getters who tried to make “disruptive” a synonym for “creative.” The connotation of disruptive is often negative–an idea barging in, taking over, crashing the status quo.  But the disrupters were mostly being different, and not necessarily creative, which has the connotation of being visually interesting, but not necessarily practical.

Being different can mean standing alone. Being creative means being colorful while doing standing alone. Photo: ©Hans-Peter Clamann

Creativity carries the burden of explaining ourselves. Creativity is not necessarily a new invention, a new method, although creativity is required to create. Most of us really don’t want to be too creative. We want to think we are different, but not actually be different. Being called “creative” feels a lot better than being labeled “different.” We prefer being different enough to still be interesting, maybe eccentric, but accepted, rather than stand-alone different. There is fear in having to explain ourselves—and failing.

Creativity is often thought of as self-expression—visual art, singing, dancing, writing, are examples. But often creativity is thought of only in terms of monetary gain. “Will this add to the bottom line?” But that’s not the point of creativity.

We live in a world of image, driven by consumer values. Creativity includes pressure to be accepted, to fit in, to have supporters, successful Instagram “likes”, re-tweets. To hold back on wilder ideas in order to gather acceptance and “likes.” Building an audience can be a goal, but the goal of creativity isn’t building an audience.

Creative self-expression is more therapy for the soul than it is a tool for personal financial advancement. Of course you can sell your work, but if you want to be creative without selling you work, that is a  clear choice you have.  And a limitless one.

Once you turn creative self-expression into a business, you are trading creative limits for financial gain. It’s not a one-on-one trade, but it changes how you think of your creativity.

I’ve sold my work and made a living doing it. Right now, I’m working on creative self expression to reduce anxiety (there’s fuel for that fire in every minute of the day), self-growth, and self-care. I’ll never sell what I make, because it is not geared to popular taste. But I love this work, and I love not having to explain it to anyone. And I love the feeling of getting better at solving problems–in my art and in life. For me, at least, creativity is problem solving. Sometimes practical, sometimes imagined, but it clears a path ahead.

—Quinn McDonald is working on a book, The Invisible, Visible World, on creative self-expression. She teaches creative thinking and problem solving. She also teaches writing.

 

Advice From the Sidewalk

We’d had a nice dinner, my friend and I. She had offered to help me with videos for a class I’m developing for the Invisible, Visible World book. She is a generous soul— something we all need more of in our life—generosity. Giving and getting.

I’m combining my creative site with my professional site for a new look and new ideas. (This site will remain right here.) But I want people who hire me to train their employees in writing or critical thinking or problem solving to know that I’m not the “read the PowerPoint” kind of instructor, that in my class, everyone speaks, everyone questions, everyone is invited to engage and participate.

It’s a risky step–there are a lot of companies that don’t want to hear a class laughing. I do. When adults laugh, they are ready to learn. They are eager to try out something new. And that’s the place I want to stand when I teach.

I was leaving the restaurant when I noticed writing on another restaurant across the street. It was a great idea, almost glowing in the evening light. It made me smile. And ready to learn.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer who teaches writing, thinking, and creative expression.

Box of Colors

Storage sheds. We all know about them, we all need them.  Most of mine have had a jumble of broken items, tools, spiders, toads, snakes and rust in them.

Today, I found a shed clearly planned ahead and carefully. It’s in an older neighborhood in Phoenix, but as so often happens, once the updating started, almost everyone on the block got into the updating swing.

I love this box because it is not what you would expect. It does not hide itself. It stands, colorful and proudly offering its services while also brightening a front yard.  Being different isn’t easy, but it can be beautiful.

–Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach who is working on a book about the Invisible, Visible World.

Variety Adds Interest

A new fence went up in my neighborhood. Everyone in Phoenix has a fence around their side or back yards. (Largely to keep kids and pets out of pools, but also because housing is close together here.)

The fence is different from all the other fences in the neighborhood. Instead of being made out of wood cut to the same width and height, it uses a variety of widths, a variety of lengths. The result is a far more interesting fence.

Instead of looking at the fence to see where there might be a mistake, where one slat is a tiny bit higher than the rest, I look at the fence as a whole, pleasing in its effect–a functional piece made from different sizes of lumber. And functionally, it would be harder to jump this fence than one that’s the same height.

This fence. Just like real life. A lot of metaphor happening there.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer who helps people ask for what they want.

The Tiny Fence

The Invisible, Visible World depends on perspective. Seeing things differently than others. Appreciating what shows up in front of you as you walk.

I am two different people: one who wants to know how everything works, is interested in reasons and causes and one who wants to experience the world through my senses.

Sometimes I see something and just want to enjoy what I see, what it makes me think of, the memories it brings out.

Here’s an example of how it works: I saw the tiny plant, clearly planted as a seed, surrounded by sticks, clearly broken off by hand, and stuck in the ground.  A tiny, wireless fence. It looks as if a child did it, but there were five of them, all in a neat row. Too neat for a small child. How could that protect anything?

But as I stood and looked at it, in the middle of the downtown front yard, I realized that the most likely attacker of the plant would be birds. (No rabbits in this part of town.)

The sticks were too tall for the birds to reach over, too close together for the bigger birds to squeeze through, and too tall for them to jump over.

A week later, the plants were bigger, and still there. I noticed the shadows the sticks cast, and the health of the plant. I noticed that the soil was damp and smelled like rain.  The things that protect us don’t have to be fancy, or complicated. Simple works. On plants. On people.

–Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach who helps people discover their creativity and put it to use. While she helps people who are labeled “creative,” she works with parents, investment bankers, teachers, and marketing executives, who often don’t know how to find their creativity.

 

Blessing for the Autumn Equinox

Relief from the burning sun is a blessing.
A blessing, too, is the bounty from the garden, the plants that bloom as proof that life is generous.
Bless the food that grows and stores the sun and makes the light delicious.

The balance in your life as night equals day, then slowly lengthens the shadows, that is a blessing to you.

To understand that your time walking on this earth is limited is a blessing;
as is your chance to be kind for another day.

Bless this night for everything that leaves us, that grows dark, that we can release into the mystery of the moon, the stars, and the sun that will rise into another day.

Bless the cooling pavement, the sidewalks that do not radiate heat to the knees.
Bless the waning heat–no longer hot enough to stand on your skin like a knife.

May you harvest the heat and use it in the darker months to brighten life,
to shine your goodness onto the world,
to let it be a dot of light in the dark night to comfort the wanderer
who sees it in his distance.

The wheel of life has moved through a year to this point,
and you are here again.
Blessed is this sacred time we walk on the face of the earth,
knowing there is a dawn to come.
–Q. McDonald, © 2018

That One Moment

In that one moment, when I turned the corner and noticed a breeze in the canyon the streets make, I noticed a flash of color.  A fabric flower, discarded, was picked up by the breeze and tossed down the city street.

It was incongruous all on its own–a piece of pink fabric in a sleepy downtown city street. The pink petals lost the lift of the breeze and settled on a eucalyptus tree branch.  It was a perfect moment–a flower on a green tree against a white block fence.

I took the photo knowing that I was caught in a special moment. In another minute, the flower would be shaken out of the tree by another breeze. It might be blown into a pool, or run over by a car. But in that one instant in time, I could witness this temporary tree in fantasy bloom. We all need such moments.

—Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach who teaches creative problem solving and healing trauma through poetry. She also takes photos of the Invisible, Visible World.

Changing Your Mind

We often fight new ideas because a new idea leads to growth and growth means we will have to change something else about our life. In other words, growth leads to change. And we hate that.

This tree is growing. The bark doesn’t fit anymore. In spring, the bark splits and peels back. The new bark is revealed. It’s not scary, it’s expected every spring.

Growth doesn’t happen all at once. When you let it happen naturally, one step at a time, it’s manageable. As your old ideas peel away, save them. They help you shape more new ideas.

—Quinn McDonald is a writer who teaches writing, getting along with difficult people, and creative problem solving. She is also a creativity coach.