Roar
On my way to work today I had a thought, the image of something quite random. An art workshop I went to about five or so years ago. It was actually a really beautiful creativity and flow workshop disguised as an art workshop and I loved every minute of it.
I was there because I had lost all of my creative space, every millimeter of it. I was seven years and three children into motherhood and I had pretty well forgotten that I had ever had a creative side to me.
It was a full day workshop and it was exquisite. I took my oil pastels and chalks and made a huge, colourful, dusty, oily mess. Just because. I didn’t produce anything or accomplish anything or complete anything. I just played and listened and sat with my oils and chalks and the other people who had come to play , draw and be too.
We were a mixed bag. Ages, genders, backgrounds. We wouldn’t have crossed paths on an ordinary day but we connected and gelled over just being in that space at that time, drawn to something in what had been offered. The invitation to be with our idea of art, drawing and creating.
Towards the end of the day, after lunch as we were settling back in I think it was, a question was asked of me. The question I thought of this morning, by a woman twice my age. The woman in the image I saw. She, like all of the others had shared about her life, had shared that she had no children. She was curious about me and mine presumably when she asked…
“When you walk around town with a pram, do you feel like a lesser part of the community, of society? Do you feel embarrassed?”
They may not have been her exact words but that was the feel. Does being ‘just’ a Mum make you feel inferior? Like you’re not as valuable as someone accomplished, someone working a ‘real’ paid job?.
I thought about it today with a smile on my face similar to the one I remember holding on my face in that moment. While my heart was sure enough back then of what I know motherhood to be, my voice was not what it is today. Though I had the image of the lioness on my heart by that stage, I had not yet found her roar.
My response was a quiet, almost silent purr. A gentle shake of my head. Though her words were not able to stick to anything within me, to hurt, unsettle or poke at any part of me that might have believed the sentiment she was curiously trying to express, they also were not met with an adequate response that day.
I smiled and gestured no, quietly. I turned back to my art, to my dusty, oily, colourful mess. To my being, to the confusion of what I had heard and what it had meant to me about the world. I carried on because the confusion made me too unsteady to stay. I kept going and so the question and the energy it carried stayed in me, until today.
Today, when the image of her appeared it was met by an image of me now. With that same gentle smile as well as a deep, steady and measured roar. I did not feel lesser than then, nor now, not ever with a pram in front or a small hand in mine. How could I? I feel and know the opposite to be true.
I have spent the past twelve years raising a small but mighty part of the next generation of caretakers of this Earth. Who may change the world just by their way of being in it, which I may have influenced and continue to influence during my time with and care of them. Not a single one of my ‘real paid’ jobs has ever compared to that and none in the future ever will.
I don’t blame the woman for her question, her curiosity or her experience of life, so different to mine. But I do feel the need to roar today in response to the society and structures that her question was born out of.
I feel the need to roar for all of the mothers who are creating, nurturing and protecting the future of a world that can curiously, candidly and consistently look down on them like they are not working, not contributing and therefore not of value.
