I finished the painting I’ve been working on in the nursery today.
I have my very first grandbaby on the way.
Decorating has always been in my wheelhouse.
I always get called on to help complete artistic projects, and add my flare to things.
While my pregnant daughter put her feet up, I just turned on music and quietly opened the paint.
I’ve been working on a wallpaper-like detail inside the baby’s closet.
I have spent hours there, just like that,
painting a mural that most people won’t even see.
Clothes will be hung there, and parts of it will be covered by other things.
It hit me while I stood there with a tiny brush, working as if each inch was a separate masterpiece, how much refining the details that will be underneath feels like a mother’s whole thing.
I’ve had hard days lately in my parenting.
Nothing prepared me for two teens.
Trust has been broken this week, punishments given, eyes are often glaring at me;
But, still I refine.
I steady my hand, and do my work.
I clean up the edges with the small brush.
I add some detailing.
So many days as a parent feel like those hours in the closet:
Working to make something beautiful, and unique, all while wondering, as the silence almost echoes, if all that hard work will ever be seen.
But just like in decorating, it’s so important to remember that the detail work you do behind the scenes may be what pulls it all together;
Vital to the end result.
After all, it is what you do with the fine brush of mothering that, in the end, makes it all complete.
You might not be able to see it clearly with your nose in the paint, because when you are right up in it, a mural is really hard to see,
until one day you stand back from afar, and you take in the whole brilliant, colorful thing.
We are the teachers of looking close.
We are the eye openers,
the visionaries of things yet to be.
The walls I have painted are so many more than the actual ones in rooms that people have witnessed with their eyes.
There is a different kind of artist in me.
I have painted the rooms of imagination,
belief in self, and faith in things that are unseen.
I can remember one night a few years ago when there was a big meteor shower set to appear.
It was the middle of quarantine, and by the way the girls rolled their eyes when I announced that, tonight, we would be going outside to wait for it together, I could tell they thought it was yet another one of my boring Quarantine Mom things like my walks around the neighborhood, and watching tutorials of watercolor painting.
They had bowls of ice cream in their hands that night as I called them to come out with me.
I can still remember the tink of their spoons in the dark as they waited,
completely unimpressed so far, only glancing up because I told them they had to occasionally.
I felt alone in my vision of things that night; Practically The Patron Saint of Motherhood Feelings.
For months I had worked to hold the family together as the world had swirled in chaos.
I had fought to keep a smile on my face, to show them all the beauty in the world that remained,
to keep hope glowing like a beacon that came from me.
The vastness of the clear sky above me, mixed with the isolation of a pandemic caused me to sense even more that night the feeling of a huge universe out of my control, and a very little-by-comparison, powerless me.
With so many big things in the world feeling hard, and wrong, I needed the girls to still see a simple beauty above us.
As if it would be the cure for it all,
I needed them to grasp onto some sense of awe that night with me.
In their minds, at that point, I am sure it was just another dumb night where their mom made them do something hoping to distract them, and it wasn’t working.
In my heart, though, I held a paintbrush in yet another dark corner, working on a part of their painting that few would see, like I have done for so many other things.
I will never forget the first shooting star we saw that night,
and how then the spoons stopped their tinking.
When the second one came, I just heard an inhale.
After the third one, It came:
An, “OK. That was actually REALLY cool,” from them, and a slow smile from me.
Beauty observed.
My job done.
One painting was complete.
That piece was called
“Noticing the Beauty of Things.”
Now onto the next one with a whole different palette, canvas, purpose.
The work is never done.
Only a mother knows the hours spent detailing.
I have been a mother for 24 years now, and when I sum up the work of it, that is it, in its purest entirety.
We work on the details of the inward parts in the quiet;
The Walls of Character,
the Fine-Tuning of Personality.
Some of the details may be hidden,
seemingly unnoticed,
But, just ask any great artist:
Every tiny stroke adds to what the masterpiece will one day be.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
