Messy and Messier

An entire afternoon lay flat - KABOOM! - in front of me. A grateful shock of a gift where my Princess was whisked away for the afternoon by her wildly doting grandparents. Any second now, they'll drive up the driveway and my solitude will disappear as suddenly as it was granted.

My hours of 'Lisa' were spent in my studio. Spent, squandered, frittered away on mixing dirty aqua veils of paint, only to be hurriedly wiped off with an old, bleached cotton kitchen cloth, and then smeared over with thick, chalky gesso in a kind of embarrassment that I was painting but not present --- messing {and there I was faced with an interruption, of which I seem to be perpetually besieged: a not uncommon affliction of the work-at-home mother. I am again in my studio, exactly a week later, and again - struggled to be completely 'in the now', again - messing. The painting of Layla I started last week which sang to me of a tenderly rendered portrait in chalky whites and graphite linework and smudges is now an opaque blue mush the colour of disappointment. Now I turn to words because my hands, eyes, brain and heart have mutinied each other in a childlish little rage that I don't quite know how to fix. Perhaps it was that I wasn't alone in my studio. That the little soul in her little part of my studio was sing-songing streams of questions about squishy play-dough and dirty water and where could she throw the water away and can I use this brush, Mommy, and when can I paint too? But perhaps more than that, my glaring lack of solitude is to blame for the anxiously petulant rebellion of my heart to create? I resolve, at every single one of these junctures, that I will stay up at night to paint after Layla has fallen asleep for the night. But always, I fall asleep beside her, her eyelashes, sweet-plump velveteen cheeks and heart like no other, are my lullaby that hushes my heart to say: 'This is your art. She is your art. Rest now.'}