I don't know when I became this person. As a kid, I was messy - like not the type of kid to leave my toys out here and there, like beyond recognition messy. My hair was always knotted and all over the place - my mom was endlessly threatening me to chop it off (and she did one time), you could rarely ever see the floor in my room, my books had crayon and marker scribbled on all the pages, I wrote on everything (literally), I always had food somewhere and sometimes it was only the smell that made us catch it, my clothes rarely matched (until I was in my teeny-bopper age). I just didn't care. I was too busy. But, over the years, I don't know how or why, I started becoming kind of...anal. Everything in it's place, neat and tidy. I'm not to the point where I freak out and yell if things are moved but I have some internal anxiety I chose not to share with the world. I hate scribbles; if I mess up on writing one of my 1000 lists, I will restart instead of crossing it off. This is my biggest hurdle - I can handle a mess on my desk (for a little while), I can handle the dishes not being done (as long as I don't have to look at it for too long), I can handle the laundry basket piling up (again, as long as I'm not looking at it) and I can handle crumbs here and there. It's other things like writing - it has to be neat and tidy at all times; painting - it can't look like a child did it; scrapbooking - although it's supposed to look this way, I can't stand it looking cluttered; binders - they can't have loose paper and so on.
I am telling you all this because, as a mother, I struggle with this a great deal. My son is almost 5 - this in itself has two issues - he's almost 5 and he's a boy, which means, he's not super tidy (in anything) but most of all - writing, painting, gluing, sticking and so on. When we do crafts - and I'm sure I'm not the only parent who struggles with this - I have an idea of what it is supposed to look like, and my fingers literally itch when it doesn't turn out the way I'd hoped.
Here's an example: At Easter, I searched on Pinterest for some cute crafts we could do. One of them was using a bingo dabber to paint little construction paper eggs and a basket also made from construction paper and then gluing the eggs to the back of the construction paper so it looked like the eggs were in the basket. Not too hard, right? Well, my son had other plans. He bingo dabbed the eggs until you could barely tell what colour the construction paper was - fine, I can live with that. Then, he decided he wanted to finger paint the basket instead of using the bingo dabbers. OK, I can handle that. But THEN, he decided he wanted to glue the eggs to the FRONT of the basket. I mean, what basket have you ever seen where the eggs hang off the sides rather than INSIDE? But, it's OK, I took a deep breath and I let him glue it on. After all, it was his creation.
It probably seems funny, something so trivial causing me stress like that, but I know for a fact I'm not the only parent who has ever struggled with this. When my son was in preschool, he would come home with these beautiful creations - on Christmas, he came home with a wooden cardinal with a feather glued on by a glue gun to the bum area. Looking at it, it was easy to tell that the only thing my son did was place the feather on the glue - there was no way he used the glue gun and there was no way he painted the wood because it was perfectly painted in red with a little black beak and black eyes. Another time, for Easter, he came home with a bunny made of two paper plates - one for the body and one for the head, a picture of himself as the face and cotton balls evenly spaced out all over the body. So, who did this? My son was too young at that point to use a glue stick properly, and if he'd done the cotton balls, they wouldn't have been so perfect. What probably happened was that he did a few and his teacher or aid filled in the rest.
When did this happen? When did we decide we were more concerned about what our kid's crafts looked like than the actual "doing of the craft"? Right now, I am trying to emphasis my son using his imagination (he's always complaining about needing someone to play with because he doesn't know what to do - use your imagination!), so when I sit him down to do a craft, is it right for me to tell him that he can't put something where he wants to put it because it may look funny?
Here's another example of how I mirco-managed one of his crafts. In our old house, we had this looooong hallway wall I had no idea what to do with. Again, I'm not a huge fan of clutter, so I needed something simple but long enough to cover most of the wall without it looking bare. I was cleaning the basement one day and I found a 15x15 canvas we got our son to paint on when he was 2. We were bored, went out and bought a canvas and some real acrylic paint and allowed him to "create". It was basically a giant brown blob. I had an idea! Why don't I get him to make some canvas art for the wall? We can do three and I will spread them apart and it'll look like some famous abstract artist did it (afterwards, we actually did get a few compliments on it from people who didn't realize it was actually done by a 3 year old haha!). But I realized I needed to figure out how I would do it without ending up with 3 canvases of brown blobs. It would be a lesson in primary colours! One canvas would be blue and yellow, one would be yellow and red and the other would be red and blue. So no matter how much he mixed it all together, he would up with pretty colours (again, they actually did turn out really nice - they're still hanging on the walls). I was pretty proud of myself! I ended up with 3 really nice canvas paintings my 3-year-old son did that I didn't have to freak out about and micro-manage. I ended up bragging to a friend of mine about how smart I am, and she laughed, saying, "OK, there, Ms. Controller." I didn't take offense, but I thought it was funny that she said that. I hadn't felt like I'd been controlling at all. But it's so hard for me, as I'm sure it is for other parents, to let your kids just create when they are doing something that is meant to be a gift or to hang or to show off. Why is that? Are we damaging our children when we do this? Do they even notice? Do they appreciate the suggestions or do they just want us to F-off? If we suggest too much, are we making them feel like what they do isn't good enough? At what point does their craft become our craft? At what point are we projecting our image of something onto theirs?
Well, I can tell you, my son notices it and he just wants me to F-off. This past weekend, my husband and I got him a used wooden playhouse. It had a door in the middle that split in two, two windows on the side with flower boxes, and a weather vane with a rooster on the roof. As we drove it home, I was madly scrolling on Pinterest looking for different ways to spruce it up. I kept asking my son what he wanted to do with it, but he wasn't really sure. All he knew was that he wanted to play in it. I started showing him pictures - one of them was red and white and looked just like a barn, one was peacock blue with a bright yellow door (that one was my favourite), and he eventually decided on the red, calling it his farm. OK. I was good with that. We could paint the roof black or brown, paint the "siding" red and all the other little details would be white. It would be SO ADORABLE! Neither me nor my husband had a house like this when we were young so, to be honest, my husband and I were probably just as excited as our son was.
The next morning, we set off to get the supplies we needed to make it look adorable. I bought a tiny little roller so my son could help but we had rules - he had to LISTEN and he wasn't allowed to paint willy nilly. But as I said it, I asked myself why? Why could he not paint willy nilly? We got along for a while, and it was a lot more work then I thought it was going to be. He told me he wanted to paint the door red, which I had planned to do but the door has these cute little black iron handles and hinges. He wanted to paint them red, too! I said, no, no you have to leave those black. "But why, mommy?" he said. "It's my farm!"
And he was right, it was his farm. Why could he not paint the handles red? At the peek of the roof on both sides, there are these plastic pieces that look like vents - they were a really yellowed colour from age and I had planned on either leaving them or painting them white. My son said he wanted to paint them red. At first, I disagreed. "No, we should paint them white." I told him. "But why, mommy?" he said again. "It's my farm!"
So I let him do it. But as I let him paint red what I had anticipated would be white, I was filled with so much anxiety! It was ridiculous. Yes, I had anticipated the house looking a certain way, but for what? Who was I planning on having over to his house (that I can barely fit in) for tea and crumpets? Who would be seeing his house? Besides the people on my Facebook (because obviously I was going to post a "before and after" photo), it would just be a bunch of 5-year-olds who really don't care if it's red, black, white, brown or rainbow coloured. I found myself following behind him wiping up the driblets he was leaving from his roller, evening out the streaks and the lines and for what? Yes, it would bother me to look at it if it was streaked or shotty, but, again, it was his farm. Not mine. He should be able to do whatever he wants with it, right? Yes, we should teach him the importance of being thorough and ensuring he is doing the job to completion, and taking pride in what he was doing, but other than that, I should have had no part in it whatsoever.
Thus, after 5 years of being a micro-manager, of hovering, or holding my breath hoping he will glue the thing in the right place, of "suggesting" he put something somewhere else, of telling him the red paint was for the star potato and the blue paint was for the heart potato, I realized, FINALLY, it's his. If I want a perfect-fucking-Easter basket, I should make one myself. And I can tack it on the wall, with my name proudly displayed and show everyone how perfect mine is (totally ridiculous). But then, that would defeat the whole purpose of the entire activity, right? I want him to use his imagination, I want him to be proud of his accomplishments, I want him to use logic and problem-solving, I can't be there all his life to make sure his notes are clear or his Bristol board project isn't cluttered, all I can do is watch and give him actual suggestions (not demands) if it is going to affect his grade, because that is the only time I should have anything to do with his creations. Other than that, I should sit back and marvel at what he's doing. He's creating. And creating, to me as a writer, is something invaluable. It's something he will carry with him his entire life and may help him in times of crises. And by helping him, by micro-managing what he is doing, I am taking that ability away from him. And that's not fair.
So, from now on, I will repeat this to myself over and over until I no longer have to: IT'S OK IF MY KID'S STUFF LOOKS LIKE SHIT.
And you can, too. Try it.
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