Don't let the muse soil her gown!

I have a dear friend who shames me with her perfectly clean house. She's an accomplished and successful artist--with two kids!--and she once said to me, "I simply can't create unless I'm comfortable in my space." Stephen Pressfield, author of "The War of Art" echos this sentiment, saying, "The professional [artist] will not tolerate disorder. He will make sure the threshold is swept...so that the muse may enter and not soil her gown."

I have to remember two things: My friend does not have ADD (but I do), and Stephen Pressfield had no kids.

Finally letting my housework drop down a few notches in priority was essential in maintaining any sort of schedule for my art. If I'm going to get up early and greet my muse, then meeting her had to take priority over the dirty dishes. In a house with two small kids, the domestic work will simply NEVER be done. If I insist that there must be order (when my brain doesn't have the proper structure to dictate that order to me) for me to create, then the creation will never, ever, ever get done.

People with ADD are lacking essential structures in their brain. It's almost impossible to filter out distractions and focus on the task at hand. If we *are* able to focus, we very well might end up in a state of "hyper-focus", where we zone out for hours at a time and focus on one specific thing to the exclusion of all else.

That's not good if the toddler is trying to eat her pencil.

However, a good compromise seems to be to get OUT of my house in order to write. I've been pretty successful at writing at Starbucks, and now I'm 1/4th of the way through my first feature-length screenplay. Here, it's someone *else's* job to sweep the threshold, which may be why the muse so frequently greets me.

First things first.....

I've discovered the first thing necessary to succeeding as an artist-mom: sleep. I can't live without it. No matter how hard I try, I can't even go 24 hours without it. There was a day when I could deprive myself of sleep for an extended period of time (like, 2+ years) and the only person I hurt was myself. Now, if I do that, I hurt myself, my husband, my kids, and my creativity. I can't plan to reasonably execute a project or a play-date without adequate sleep.

Why it took me so long to figure this out is anyone's guess. My second baby just started sleeping through the night two months ago. She didn't accomplish this feat until she was eight months old. And of course, she wouldn't take a bottle, so I was the only one who could feed her. (Whine) As soon as I was reasonably rested, I got my booty to Starbucks at 5:30am, and started writing.

I don't know how much time I wasted, beating myself up for not writing, not creating, and not being perfect in my balance of the various juggling balls of life. I wouldn't expect anyone else to do anything without sleep. And I didn't sleep. I existed.

Before my second daughter was born, I didn't sleep either. I worked 3rd shift. I tried to continue having a life during the day, and I worked during the night, and I never slept. Again, it's no wonder that my creative life suffered. I had to be perfect. I had to live without debt, and without depending on my husband to make decisions, and had to clean my house perfectly, and have my oldest daughter behaving perfectly (she wouldn't, dangit! ;) ) and I wondered why I was never happy. Why I was always ready to snap at someone. Why I couldn't just relax and enjoy anything.

Perfection is an illusion. It's a mirage that makes you walk a little bit farther up a burning hot hill, but keeps slipping a few more inches away from you. It's not worth pursuing. It's a strangling, death-grip on creativity. And on family. Only when I let my perfectionistic expectations fall by the wayside did I actually let myself enjoy my oldest daughter for who she is. I'm just glad that she was 3 and not 30 when I figured this out. Then I slept.