Imagine a bird trying to find flight in the wind, constantly flapping until it finds a pocket of smooth space where it can glide. That’s what I feel motherhood is like at the moment. I occasionally spot other mothers in the same flap and know that we are all in this together flying around trying to spread our wings. I have a few frenzied hours in the morning from waking until I drop the boys at school and then when I pick them up until bedtime.

Last week the sculptor took this freshly painted and slightly changed ‘Mother and Child’ piece down to Hay Hill Gallery, London. The other two in the collection both sold and sent to new homes.

 

 

These trips away mean I am managing the showroom and boys, school and home. Juggling the ball(s) and balancing them- aren’t we all. Last week the van broke down on the motorway (not really the fault of the van I might add) it was freezing snowy cold weather on the return journey so the pieces had arrived safely and thankfully he made it home with not too much delay.

With a renewed sense of calm after my weekend without the boys, yesterday after looking after the showroom I took the boys home and started making a healing chicken soup for the boys full of coughs and colds whilst they painted and created in the space around me. This prompting me to pull out all the craft books and papers which were looking a hideous mess in one of the kitchen cupboards out on to the floor. All this seemed manageable knowing the sculptor wouldn’t come back in and trip over it. However, in the middle of this organised chaos the sculptor calls having settled into his hotel room after a train journey which has taken him quite literally all day to get there. As he starts going into detail about the state of the wall papered ceiling and berating the interior decor, my youngest is sprinkling the glitter on the floor, the eldest making yet another animal from card and glue dribbling it all over the kitchen table (desperate measures to have a pet). I am trying to put the rice on the stove and I can feel my newly topped up patience from the weekend child free starting to boil over along with the soup.

After abandoning the kitchen for stories and bedtime I decide not to go back down and stay in the clam of my room. I read too late into the night, get disturbed by endless coughing and get up to see if child is ok, administer cough syrup and kisses. We all wake a little later than usual having had little sleep. I descending to the kitchen which now looks a little like my impression of the studio the day before and I wonder if we all are a little naturally inclined to be messy. Creativity and everyday life in such opposition to the fine finished forms of the sculptures now situated in this clinically neat business entrance where they were delivered last week.