My Need for Order Isn’t Always Great for Creativity

Photo by Dragos Gontariu on Unsplash

Just above my friend’s kitchen sink on a narrow window ledge are potted basil plants and a small jar of paintbrushes in water. The water is clear and I imagine this isn’t a temporary spot for these art supplies. I think they live here all the time. Easy to grab if creativity strikes one of her three girls and clean brushes are required in an instant.

Perhaps they are there in case my friend feels the need to paint at any given moment. There is no need to pull out the painting bin or the art supplies box. They are right there, ready to use.

This is a silly detail to notice except, in my house, I put the paintbrushes away.

My boys and I did a bit of water-coloring recently. But once the activity was done, I put away the paper, rinsed off the tools, and tucked everything away out of sight. Cleaned countertops. Order prevailed.

I have always been this way, long before motherhood. But it is in parenting that I have noticed the limitations in my need for order. Or rather, I have seen the value of a different kind of order in other homes where instruments and craft supplies and books and games are piled on surfaces, awaiting the work of imagination.

In this house where the paintbrushes are out, there are violins on a keyboard if a musician feels the call to play. They are in a hallway, a common area. Easily accessible.

This reminds me of another home I visit often, where my husband once picked up a flute resting on a small table and began to play scales he learned in junior high, four decades ago. We all marveled at his memory, which he could easily step into as his fingers pressed the keys. Around the corner there was a small djembe primed for the moment when a beat needed to be drummed.

This is also a house where I sit at the kitchen counter, often waiting for a hot beverage, and without thinking begin to pick up the small, scattered items in various dishes and trays. A hair pin. A tiny ceramic animal. Small bottles of half-full nail polish. A handmade card with intricate designs stamped on the front. The remnants of artistic expression and discovery.

In these homes the children create in a special way because the means for their creations are right there, in front of them, at all times.

When my boys were little, a case worker for my son, who has Down Syndrome, came to visit us to discuss different therapy options. As she settled into our couch, she looked around and asked, “Do kids live here?” Perhaps she was meaning it as a compliment. I heard it as an indictment. Or maybe it was an opening to her internal critiques of her own space.

“My daughter’s things are everywhere at our house,” she said.

I can’t not have order. Sometimes my mother and I say this is the German in us. And we are very German. Order is connected to the stability of my soul. But it has its drawbacks.

There are extra steps if my children want to create. In their early years, I would often bring out the wooden train container or the Lego crate. I would set up stations for playing. Some mornings I would tape butcher paper to the refrigerator, an easel for my son, who relished the messiness of the colors.

Creativity did occur, but within certain bounds.

And then, we would bundle up all the toys and pieces and paper and put it all away, out of sight, in a closet.

I am trying to recount this without judgment, although how much of mothering is there without judgment? It is what it is. I am who I am. But I am aware of how much I enjoy sitting in my friends’ spaces where the air crackles with the possibility of making something new or remaking something old.

The other day I asked my friend if I could make a bracelet. I had attended one of her art workshops where we stamped letters into metal bracelets and I wanted one more.

But when I arrived, we didn’t go to her art station or special art corner of her house. We plopped down on the garage floor behind a couch amidst all of the projects and supplies for other things. As she set out our tools, her youngest wandered in.

“You want to make a bracelet with us?” my friend asked.

And her daughter crouched down next to us and began to hammer, the scene so familiar to this eight-year-old. When we finished, we put away the bulk of the things and then my friend set the box on a nearby stool, perhaps to revisit if someone else in the house wanted to make a bracelet later, or if another friend called to ask if they could come create.

With turning 50 on the horizon, it is unlikely that my need for order will change. I am squarely in middle age and most of my tendencies and habits have formed and crystallized.

But I am thankful for the beauty in my friends’ homes where I am welcome to come settle in and create with all the assortment of things.