To the Summer Mothers
Dear Summer Mothers,
Every June, I find myself searching for balance. Not the yoga kind. Not color coded planner kind. More like the kind I used to teach my middle schoolers about in art class.
Balance is a principle of design and at first glance, it seems simple: arrange things so they feel stable. If you were making a collage out of magazine scraps, you wouldn’t want to glue all of your images in a giant heap because it would tip the scale. You need to spread things out, to some degree, but this doesn’t mean perfect symmetry. A successful painting rarely divides itself neatly in half, and balance does not mean equal.
Instead, we learn that a small, dark shape can balance a large, paler one. A cluster of activity can be offset by a stretch of open sky. The eye needs places to land, but it also needs places to rest. A composition without breathing room feels crowded. & a summer without breathing room feels much the same.
By July, I feel like we’re carrying this wild arrangement of shapes: the camps, the sports, the meals, the appointments, the snacks, the laundry.
(And I cannot imagine how much more complicated this feels for mothers who work during the summer months. How do you do it? 👏 )
Somewhere in the middle of the composition, there’s supposed to be a shape specifically designated for each of us. Yet it often becomes the smallest object on the page.
Lately, I’ve wondered if mothers spend the summers participating in a kind of residency program. You know how artists sometimes participate in Artist in Residency programs? (I’ve never applied or done anything like that, but it sounds dreamy.) Anyways, artists apply for residencies to immerse themselves in their practice. They enter a season devoted to observation, experimentation, problem solving, and making. Summer motherhood isn’t so different. For a few months, many of us step into an (even more) intensive study of caretaking. We step up our daily roles as transportation coordinators, conflict mediators, snack distributors, swim instructors, schedule managers, amateur coaches, and keepers of morale. We’re immersed.
The days are long, the work is repetitive, but…woah. Something is being made. (Do you notice it?)
Master artists know that filling every inch of a canvas rarely improve it & sometimes the most important decision is deciding what NOT to add, leaving room for the eye to wander. Perhaps “balance” during the summer is less about fitting everything in and more about protecting a few patches of negative space. It’s not empty, it’s crucial for giving everything else room to breathe. Nature surely understands it, the deep exhale you take as you reach a clearing in a thick forest.
I’m going to make it a priority of mine to step back every 2-3 days and ask: where is the visual weight? Where is the light? Where can I create a little more breathing room? And where, within all of this beautiful clutter, have I left space for myself?
Hang in there, mamas.
Xoxo
