A Mother Fully Alive

Three acts of creating in the margins of motherhood

“The glory of God is a human fully alive” Irenaeus

Act One: The Garden Designer

I went from spending my days outside, breathing fresh air, observing fascinating flowers, and creating beauty across a five acre landscape, to being stuck in a dark townhouse with a premature baby who didn’t know how to eat or sleep. 

Obviously, there are a lot of factors that went into the season I will refer to as my dark night of the soul. The undiagnosed postpartum depression I absolutely had aside, the feeling of dark clouds constantly hovering over me was fueled by a distinct lack of creative outlet. I couldn’t see it then, but God was preparing to clear the sky and turn on a light.  

Once we moved out of Chicago and back to our home town, the clouds began to lift. We soon got our own home and I felt almost myself again, but clouds of discontentment were still hovering. I started talking to God about my desire to work with plants again, and before I knew it, I had a handful of people come to me with yards begging for fresh plants and a new design.

I remember the first time I left my baby at home to go to a client’s house for a design meeting. I was terrified and exhausted. I felt like an imposter even though I had a degree and experience to argue the validity of the feeling. I had barely slept, but I forced myself to put on real clothing and leave the house. After talking for two straight hours about all the ideas I had for this person’s landscape, I came home “high on people juice”, as my husband calls it, and with my creativity cup overflowing. What followed were nights at my desk sketching out designs and looking up plants, and days willing my baby to sleep his entire nap time so that I could have a few more moments to work. I would strap him in his Ergo carrier and walk the aisles of the nursery, continuing to paint landscapes in my mind. When my second son joined our mini landscape crew, plant runs included a wandering toddler and a baby strapped to my chest. I have photos of them both in my SUV literally covered in plants. There is a video on the computer somewhere of my oldest son holding up a plant catalog and calling it my plant bible. They knew me as mom, but they also knew me as a woman who had other passions.  I wove landscape design into my days of mothering toddlers, filling the small spaces of time with creative effort. More than once, I regretted taking on more clients than I could handle. Even so, I cherished the rhythm I had found in giving of myself to my family and also over to the creative gifts God entrusted me to steward. It was in marrying my callings that I began to feel fully alive.

Act 2: The Watercolor Calligrapher

In eighth grade I failed a social studies exam because my teacher couldn’t read my handwriting. I distinctly remember the shame washing over me as I was handed my first red letter F. Fortunately for my GPA, he let me re-take it for a better grade, but the shame of failing at something as literally elementary as legible handwriting has stayed with me my entire life. 

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My freshman year of college I had a plant biology class with an extra lab credit. (I will spare you the descriptions of horror when looking at a nematode under a microscope.) My teacher for the lab was an actual textbook illustrator. He wrote everything on the chalkboard in perfect calligraphy. One day he came up to me in class and said, “Sara, I think you should learn calligraphy.” Beside the fact that I felt singled out and partially creeped out by the attention this man was giving me, I was fully skeptical that he understood just how bad I was at writing words. He assured me that it was actually because I had such bad handwriting that I should learn the art of calligraphy. He never really explained it further than that, but he mentioned it often. I left the class and didn’t follow through with his advice.

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My past failure undoubtedly fueled my determination to will my hand to paint words well. I wanted to take the beauty of what I saw and read and make it sing on a page. There has always been a deep desire in my heart to use lines and form and shades of color to make something out of nothing. My favorite artist growing up was Georgia O’Keefe and her striking abstract florals. My favorite artist to follow on the internet as an adult was Ruth Chou Simons. She also painted flowers, but did so alongside beautifully written words, and while mothering five boys. When I saw what she accomplished in her art so seamlessly stitched into her motherhood, I felt electrified with the possibility that I could combine the two in my life as well.  I studied her work obsessively and felt another part of me come alive as I attempted to paint like she did. 

I belabored the thought of opening up an Etsy shop with a friend while our littles played together in her living room and babies wiggled in our laps. Encouragement was thrown at me as our children threw toys at each other. I was so afraid of trying and failing that I almost didn’t try. I didn’t have the experience, the money, the time, or in my mind, the talent, but I began a watercolor Etsy shop anyway. What started out of the desire to give thoughtful gifts to my friends became a years-long passion in creating beautiful paintings out of words. It was an overflow of my bible studies, my longings to connect and encourage, and my desire to be used to glorify God beyond changing diapers and picking up toys. I was tired, but I knew there was a part of me begging to be poured out onto a blank page. I’m so glad I took the leap. In the words of Ashlee Gadd in Create Anyway, “Maybe one of the best things we can do is embrace the idea that we are unqualified, because then we leave room for a bigger leap of faith.”

Some days, especially early on before I was selling my art, I would set my toddler up with play dough at the table and practice painting calligraphy across from him—both of us pursuing our craft together. In the glory days of my watercolor side hustle, my children went to bed conveniently early. If I had a large painting I was working on, I would say goodnight to them at 6:30 pm as my husband finished the bedtime routine, and continue to paint, giving myself back pain and headaches, until 11 pm when my drooping eyes and tired hands begged me to stop. I would be transfixed on the white watercolor paper, holding my breath as I made each intentional stroke needed to form a single letter. I would sketch and prepare a massive painting with a hundred words, and come to my desk for ten minutes at a time throughout the day to paint a few letters. I hired a babysitter for a few hours every other Wednesday for a season so that I could go to my favorite coffee shop and paint uninterrupted. Those afternoons were refreshing and rejuvenating to me during a time when my health and heart needed creative medicine desperately. 

I began teaching watercolor calligraphy classes almost monthly at a local art shop in my town. After teaching myself to paint, I was thrilled to teach others.

The nights I taught, I would quickly finish making dinner and then pack my teaching bins and make myself presentable. While I was sad to miss out on the evening with my family, I also knew that what I was leaving the house to do was working out a creative calling on my life. As my husband was managing bath time, I was telling groups of women that they were made to create, and create we would. I got to watch their smiles bloom over their progress on the blank page and hear their laughter over their mistakes. At the end of every class, I had them hold up their creations for a photo. The pictures were for me to remember how creativity can so easily multiply. It was a visual reminder that as I heed my call to create, it gives other women permission to heed theirs too. We are all so much better off when we do the things God designed us to do. 

Act 3: The Writer

The pandemic blew up a lot of things, one of which was my resolve to keep trying to sell my art. Somewhere between my inspiration to learn how to paint in (2015) and my best year yet (2019-2020), I lost some of my spark. I know it’s possible to make a living doing something creative that you are passionate about, but when the world shut down and I no longer had the constant need to paint for classes and clients, I felt room to breathe again. I dove into creatively spending all my newfound free time with my family. I was part of the sourdough bread crowd, except mine was gluten free, which is both more sad, and more difficult to make. We spent a lot of time outside hiking as a family, flexing our awe muscles at everything God created. I navigated how to parent and be my children’s virtual school homeschool teacher, and I was really bad at it (just ask my oldest son who gets wide eyed with terror at the mention of ever homeschooling again). Once school reopened and both my boys were there full time, I started working in children's ministry at my church. There just wasn’t time to create anymore, at least that's what I kept telling myself for two years. 

This past fall I began to feel the clouds roll in. They weren’t overhead or anywhere near as dark as my first early days of motherhood, but they were beginning to loom in the distance. 

The “writer seed” was planted in my heart my first year of middle school. I had a teacher who put the idea in my soul that writing was something I had been made to do. The more I wrote, the more I began to believe her. After years of writing random blog posts when I felt inspired, and dozens of instagram captions, I fancied myself a writing hobby. Similar to how I felt the nudge to begin painting and calling myself an artist, I felt the nudge to begin writing more seriously. The small seed planted decades ago, finally begin to grow. I was casually asked to film a video about how being in nature with my family helps me remember that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever for a women’s event at my church. I not so casually wrote an eight page essay that I partially memorized and partially read off camera. Maybe it was the way the videographer paired my words with shots of me hiking with my boys, or maybe it was just how much the truth of what I wrote was the actual heartbeat of my soul—but watching that video and hearing my words out loud poured fertilizer on that small green shoot of creative writing possibility just beginning to grow. 

This is where Exhale creativity came into my life. 

I am now wrestling with words after bedtime (which is way later than during the second act), in the morning before my kids wake up, on the days I don’t work while they kids are in school, and everywhere in between. The looming clouds are long gone and have been replaced by a brilliant horizon of possibility.

Last night I sat out on the deck typing this essay, fighting to get words on the blank page in between yelling at my children and our neighbor kids to stop performing dangerous tricks on the swings. One eye on the page, one eye on the children. Half a brain crafting sentences, half a brain processing danger. This is how I’m leaning into my third act of creativity in the years of raising upper elementary kids.  

“You have permission to make beautiful things in a broken world as a testament to God’s grace mightly at work in you.” Ashlee Gadd, Create Anyway

I occasionally ask myself why I'm laboring so hard some nights, writing and rewriting sentences to make a story about motherhood beautiful. What is the end goal of all this effort? 

The answer I found consistently through every act of creating in the margins of motherhood, is that I'm called to create as a beacon of God’s creativity. I am his daughter, and he is my adoring Father. He has given me permission—no, the charge—to go tell the world about what he has done, as creatively as possible. It is for his glory that I will never settle for being less than fully alive.

Thanks for following along as I bring myself to the blank page every day during this season of motherhood. I will continue to show up here with this quote by Callie Feyen in mind,

“(God) Here’s what you gave me, here’s what I did with it.”

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Create Anyway".