Creativity Is In View

Today is Mother’s Day. 

It’s 8:39 a.m. and as far as I know, everyone is still sleeping.

I’m taking a little me time in a week that had very little of it.  This week I was in New York Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.  Tuesday was for a business event, traffic and timing were off, and I decided not to go to the event as I was missing a good part of it by the time I would have finally parked, etc.  Instead I took Rachel to dinner.  I was frazzled and she was trying to get through her last week of finals.  We chatted and enjoyed a meal but it wasn’t our best night.

Thursday, on the other hand, was one of my favorite nights so far this year.  I’m new to New York Women in Film and Television and took Rachel to the Designing Women event, which honors make-up, hair, and costume artists.  The emcee was Kristen Schaal and presenters included 2 of my favorites, Tina Fey and Steve Bescemi.  The forum was mid-sized;  I think there were about 300 people there, and we were able to talk with Tina Fey briefly, which was fun.  We were able to talk with Kristen Schaal for a bit longer when Rachel opportunistically stopping her to chat in the hallway.  Kristen was, by the way, truly lovely.  Rachel had seen her at the UBC and was a big fan, referencing her favorite joke that Kristen had told.  We snapped some photos, and would have had some good ones had I not spazzed on the iPhone (again) and only came away with Kristen talking with her head down to a nose and some blonde hair.  (Kristen seems to be about 5’10’ and Rachel is about a foot shorter.)

Kristen Schaal with Rachel's Nose

I was so energized being around all of those creative people.  The award recipients are all amazing artists with such passion for their work and the world around them.  The creative high lasted well into the next morning.

Friday afternoon I talked with a business owner who is starting to do more with WebTV.  I was really jazzed up about his ventures and excited for him. 

Friday evening, after lots of commotion and more traffic than predicted, Marc and I had dinner at The Left Bank on Perry Street in the city with Ruth and Len.  It was a truly wonderful evening.  They are a delightful couple--the conversation was all over the place and fun, the drinks (sidecars for me) were perfect, the food was delicious, and we even shared desserts that we passed around the table until they were all gone:  rhubarb crisp, olive cake, and maple syrup tart.  With a parking garage right across the street, really, it couldn’t have been any better.

Saturday was uber stressful.  We had to move Rachel out of her dorm and there was a street festival on 2^nd Avenue, which made navigating to her street tough.  When we finally go there, we parked in a no-parking zone and what I thought would be one trip down the elevator with a cart turned into 3.  Thankfully Ali and Marc came in his car and were great in helping get it all done.  I stayed with the cars in case we were forced to move them.  I was very agitated the entire time, between the cryptic skywriting going on over head, the angry yelling (that I later learned was for a movie being shot up the street--out of view but not out of earshot), and being in a no-parking zone (good girl syndrome).

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Then came the trip to Caldwell to Lisa Palombo’s studio, no easy task when your navigation system has a sense of humor.  After a few loops on the GSP we were finally there.  I had wanted to purchase paintings of hers for a long time and now she is working in acrylics and doing some smaller pieces, so I purchased a large poppy painting called Desire 2, and a smaller print, Independence.  Lisa is getting the larger one framed for me and I can’t wait to have it in my home.  Marc bought me a beautiful framed print of a blue vase with red poppies in and around it.  I’m looking at the prints now, they’re on the desk across the room from me here in the study.  It will be great to look at beauty every morning even when the view outside isn’t nature at her best.

Today Rachel, Wil and I are going to Monmouth Park, a family-friendly racetrack near the shore.  It’s a beautiful day, and I love watching the horses run.  Hopefully the weather will hold up—when I was younger and scientists were predicting the climate change we’re now experiencing, I remember them saying we would have highly changeable skies, and now we do.  When I was younger, it would be beautiful for days on end, not a cloud in the sky.  Now it seems that no longer is the case…sunny one minute, clouds and rain the next.

It was a challenging week from a work and scheduling perspective, but a wonderful one in terms of renewing my spirit and energy by being around creative people who share their ideas and passion.  I need more of that, much more!

P.S.  It’s 9:57 now, they’re all up, and it’s chaos!  My brother called to wish me a Happy Mother’s Day and I couldn’t even talk to him.  See previous post about it getting quiet around here.  J

It’s Getting Quiet Around Here

As a woman with more than a career—I run an interactive marketing company—raising two children has been bit of a challenge, and I’ve loved (almost) every minute of it.  But lately, as things get prematurely quiet, I find myself projecting ahead to when they’re going to be even more silent.

The spring before my daughter, Rachel, went off to study at NYU Tisch in NYC, I was admittedly very anxious about her going off to school, and living in the city “alone.”  My nervousness seemed very out of portion to what was coming, and I assumed it was a wicked combination of the normal, first-child-off-to-college-my-world-is-going-to-change blues AND that my 4’11’ not-really-aware of her surroundings little love was going to be living in the city on her own.  It seemed just when she and I were getting along so well, she was heading off without me. 

For the weeks approaching her graduation, I went on quiet crying jags when no one else was around.  I thought I’d be blubbering at her graduation ceremony, but, strangely, on the drive to the ceremony, everything came flooding out in a monologue that gave Rachel and Wil some great material to cart out whenever a laugh is needed.  In a 5 minute straight rant, that started with sarcasm, ramped up to yelling, spurted out in a string of 4-letter epithets, and concluded in all us laughing as tears streamed down our faces, I let it all go.   From that point until I dropped Rachel off at NYU in August, not another tear was shed.

I cried a bit on the way home from New York, but that was to be expected….

The surprises started soon after that.

The child who had announced with believable bravado (she was an actress before a writer, after all) that she was not coming home until Thanksgiving, though I was welcome to visit her in the city if I wanted to see her, suddenly started showing up at the train station every weekend, homesick, sad, and having a really hard time adjusting to the city.  Not only did she stay all weekend, she came home during the week, too.

So the time I thought would be spent with my son, just mom and Wil, suddenly was being split, again, between the two of them.  And it wasn’t fun time.  There was a lot of angst in helping Rachel to be brave, get back on the train, and suck it up.

And then, in the midst of all of that, Wil suddenly had a girlfriend.

And the time with him that was already being taken up by his friends, now was stretching out and being consumed by time with his girlfriend too.

Don’t get me wrong.  I loved having Rachel around, though I did my best to keep her focused on staying in NYC and toughing it out so she could build a life and her own network of friends there.  And don’t get me wrong about Wil—I’m mature enough to know that he’s doing everything a now 17-year-old guy should be doing, and his friends and girlfriend are really wonderful—I love them all.

Well, the next surprise was that Wil decided to get a part-time job.  So my time with him has shrunken even more.  Down from 50% of the time due to shared custody in the divorce to 50% of that because of friends and girlfriend, and now another 50% of that gone because of his job a the local grocery store.

So, as I said, it’s getting kind of quiet around here.  And what everyone who had kids before me told me is absolutely true.  It all goes soooo fast. 

One minute they’re clinging to you and you are their whole world.  The next minute they venture off on their own and they circle back to you as home base.  And the next minute, they’re living the lives you prepped them for all along—all the sacrifice, all the lessons, all the examples, all the love—and, well, it’s suddenly kind of quiet.