Tracks to Clementine

Stay at Home What?

I've decided that Stay at Home Mom (or SAHM if you like acronyms) is not a very good description of me.

...and I also think that means that the term has been sullied by our oh-so-loaded culture.

Anyway, the other day I was all "wow, this is great, all this time...maybe I should learn to play the clarinet!"

And then I came to my senses. Not my senses as in it takes a bunch of time to take care of the sweethead kid (which it does, but not in an unreasonable way), nor that it currently takes me one million years to complete household tasks, but my senses as in I have enough half-finished projects going on already upon which I could, say, brush up. I haven't picked up any brushes on any of them, but I have learned to sing some new songs, including one with the lyric "every time the baby cries, stick my finger in the baby's eyes."

Yes, that is the kind of mother I am.

I'm also the kind of mother who finds it relaxing to be able to focus on one baby instead of nine million classes full of other people's children. This still isn't a true sabbatical, but it sure feels like it. The burn out of years past is finally gone. There's a little phoenix egg waiting to hatch in its ashes. I don't know exactly what will come of it, but I do know that I'm reveling in beginning to think about how my artistic and professional life can and will be retooled now that I've been granted the time to figure it out via my sweet daughter (and I suppose my working husband of a Yellow Dog).

Speaking of that sweet daughter, she's quite a wonder, just as she should be. She gazes with interest at the world around her, makes all sorts of chirping and cooing sounds, grins up a storm, and eats and eats and eats. (And sleeps...she's napping next to me right now.)

I've got more to say, but too many thoughts about what the saying is to put any more down right now. Let's consider this a beginning of things to come, of art continued, of plans percolating.

As proof, here's herself in France with the other herself being an eight-week-old bean-on-the-inside (not that my stomach is pictured for attempted glimpsing...but my face is, so that's got to be proof of some kind of derring-do):

Posted by Ida at February 21, 2008 12:28 PM