As soon as I round the corner to the pick-up lane in car line today, I see Dash—his hand held tightly by a teacher who is no doubt working very hard to keep her grip. He’s pulling toward me with everything he has, ready to bolt, his face beyond emoji representation of excited to see me—the eyes, the smile, the tongue, the jumping. Picking them up from school is one of my most favorite moments of the day, when simply showing up—literally—is all it takes to make them happy. And it never wears off. I keep rolling up, just like I did the day before, just like I’ll do tomorrow—sometimes disheveled, sometimes distracted, a heap of parenting low moments sandwiching that pick-up—and yet when I pull up, they react like it’s Christmas morning. You came! You’re here! You’re enough! I love you!
I can barely connect his car seat straps today, he’s too excited. He wants his bag; there’s something in it he wants to show me. I hand it to him and watch as he pulls out a piece of construction paper art.
“I make,” he says as he hands it to me, his smile as wide as I’ve ever seen.
It’s a dinosaur cut from green construction paper, its back composed of three perfect handprint scales smooshed into the paper with thick green tempera paint I recognize from my classroom days. It smells like preschool—a heady cocktail of construction paper pulp and paint and glue stick. “Dash-o-saurus” is written at the top.
“Hand” he says as he points to the scales, and “eye” as he touches the one single googly eye glued to the dinosaur’s head. He clutches his art the entire ride home and wants me to find a place for it as soon as we walk through the door. After weeks of holding the best display spot in the house gallery—eye-level, refrigerator door—I move Nella’s latest collage to Art Wall #2, the last stop before it’s sent to the archives drawer, to make room for the new Dash-o-saurus.
I don’t save all their art—I simply can’t in this mission to transform my hoardish junkaholic ways to a more organized life with both home and brain space for more memories. But I try and display as much as I can and save the good stuff—like this dinosaur because it comes with so much pride and the memory above which I’ll write on the back of his art before storing it in the drawer we’ve designated for their best work.
I’ve been reading a lot about creativity lately, the stack of books on my desk proof of my quest: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic (buy it, read it, live it, you’re welcome), The War of Art and Creativity Inc. , all highlighted throughout and forming the Creative Life Trifecta. Not only have I gained more respect and value for my own need to make things, but for my kids’ creative life as well. Those macaroni noodle collages? The glue pools? The tempera paint hand prints and watercolor coffee filters? They’re all part of Creativity 101, the first course in the most important study of our kids’ lives. They are the first wobbly steps in what will hopefully turn out to be a lifelong stride of transforming little ideas, little stories, little sparks of talent into something bigger–a dance, a painting, an essay, a screenplay, a sculpture, a song, a poem, a pinecone ornament smothered in glitter. Their happiness depends on it.
“Through the mere act of creating something—anything—” Elizabeth Gilbert writes, “you might inadvertently produce work that is magnificent, eternal, or important.” We don’t grow into this practice after a certain age–we’re born into it which means it’s just as true for my two-year-old as it is for me.
I felt the importance and magnificence of the creative work from little hands earlier this year when, after a week of bare bulletin boards during the first days of school, they were finally filled with students’ first projects–colored pictures, painted collages, cotton balls and sequins sloppily glued on construction paper, and chicken-scratched names in big capital letters–Ella, Charlie, Lily, Lauren–proudly claiming “I made this.” The preschool hallway became a welcoming tunnel of happiness for me every morning. After we hustled out the door, remembering lunches and backpacks, making sure we made it on time, signing in, saying goodbye, there was something about that hallway, about their little works of art that felt magnificent and powerful, so much that I stopped by the preschool director’s office one morning.
“Can I tell you how happy this hallway makes me?” I told her. “These bulletin boards–I know the teachers worked hard to display this stuff. I just wanted to let you know that it matters. I love seeing the art the kids make, and I start my morning on a good note every day walking through this hallway. It’s so colorful and happy, and it’s important to a lot of people.”
As a teacher, I know how important reading goals are. I know that math benchmarks and comprehension strategies and scientific methods are necessary parts of our children’s education. But as a human, a mother, a woman, a writer–okay and sometimes a kitchen interpretive dance choreographer–good Lord, do I hope they’re never the heaviest focus that the greatest study of all is pushed aside–freely transforming ideas, making what we’re born to make, unearthing and expressing the hidden treasures that are buried inside us.
Give them math manipulatives and reading strategies. But please don’t forget the paintbrushes, the googly eyes, the blank journal pages, the platform to bring their own unique treasures to their work and the world.
In the meantime, we honor and celebrate the practice and products of creating at home, our kitchen the current laboratory for this great study–my camera on the counter, a heap of colored pencils on the island, a coloring book, a journal, a stack of scrap paper, a crayon scribble on the wall, and my current favorite–a green dinosaur with one googly eye and three handprint scales taped to the front of the refrigerator.
