Those Creative Types

I love my daughter. I really do. She has become such a joy to be around. We talk more, connect more. But it is still difficult for us to live in the same house.

I’ve pondered the reason for this and come up with more than a few. But today, as I am once again drowning beneath a mound of dishes, I’ve identified a new one: creativity.

You see, creativity is messy. For her, that literally means a mess in the kitchen. The kind it takes more than one person to clean up. For me, when I’m writing, that means leaving some household things until they absolutely have to be done.

Can you see where this is going? When I’m working, I’ll leave the dishes in the sink a couple of days. When she is cooking, that’s impossible, both because the pile is so high it must be dealt with and because eventually every single dish in my kitchen will be in that pile. So her creative pursuit gets in the way of my creative pursuit. And because I’m the mom, mine gets relegated to back-seat priority.

So while I love having her around, it is hard when I have writing work I need to get done. And yet that is exactly what keeps happening. Somehow we have to find a way to co-exist. I guess we’ll have an entire summer to figure it out!