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Creation Stories
By C. Delia Scarpitti
Web Exclusive
Our bedroom is littered with stacks of lined paper, wire-bound edges curling across the top. They are all covered with marker and crayon drawings - some, of people with curious expressions, others, abstract with whorls of distinctive fingerprint colors. Many of them say, "To: Mom", and each is emblazoned with "Caila" along the bottom corner. This mark is the one that remains fixed. Faces can be magenta or lavender, trees can arch sideways through space, but there must always be "Caila" on the corner. She slips these self-proclaimed masterpieces beneath the door when I am soaking in the steamy blue bathtub, and she is supposed to be long since asleep. I sneak into her room and kiss her, "Thank you. Now, stay in bed," I say. "Okay, Mom, I will," she answers, and usually does. In the morning, invariably, she will come to breakfast with papers beneath her arm, that which she created, but was unable to share from the narrow confines of her mattress.
"Let me tell you the story of this one," she begins, rattling off on a saga while I present the baby with his oatmeal, and place a bowl of cereal within her reach. But, I listen - even as I am washing day-old dishes and slipping a shirt over her brother's head, I am hearing her. That seems to be the point, in many ways. Though there is pleasure for her in the creative process, the real joy lies in sharing it with others. As a struggling writer, I know where she is coming from.
The first poem I wrote was at five years old, precisely the age Caila is now. It rhymed (didn't all poetry have to rhyme?) and was about my family. I still have the small yellowed paper hidden away in my underwear drawer beneath mismatched socks, cancelled checks, and the old nursing bras I cannot yet bear to part with. I filled volumes of journals with girlish dreams and doubts, and later, with adult desires and heartbreak. Poems, stories, and memoir scenes litter the boxes in the back of my closet - some, twenty years old, "grown-ups" now themselves. I haven't done anything with them, though, aside from labeling and bundling the drafts and diaries by date, and sentencing them to a lifetime with the dust mites.
With Caila, it is different. The refrigerator is laden with magnets and her sketches. We fill fine gilded frames with her work and supply paper, canvas, and pencils. We look at Picasso, Matisse, Kahlo, to discuss technique and whether or not "we like it". I have narrowed her Kindergarten field down to a couple of schools based, in part, on their art programs.
I do not do this because I believe Caila will become a professional artist as a young woman (although currently she plans to live as an illustrator with eleven children and two husbands, to wear only the color blue, and to raise snails - an artist's life, if ever there was one). As an avid reader, and voracious scientific-naturalist, she may be in a highly technical field one day. My daughter may even evolve into a young-Republican who leads the backlash against Feminists and our "misguided propaganda". I am open to all of this - the bohemian with callused artist hands stinking of linseed oil, or the French-manicured C.E.O. in a Chanel suit. But, for now, Caila fancies herself an artist, and so do I. She makes concentrated effort in this area, and I take her seriously. Some of her work sincerely moves me on aesthetics alone, but I do not bestow her with the label of "prodigy". What I am providing for her is a much more fundamental desire of creative people everywhere - an audience.
When I wrote my first poem, I didn't really know what to do with it. My mother read it, smiled with her eyes wrinkling up at the corners, and resumed stirring in her shiny black saucepan. I wanted more. When my father came home, he read it aloud, admiration deepening his voice. He commented on the rhyme scheme, "That must have taken some doing," he said. But, it hadn't really. The poem seemed to fall out of me almost by accident. Thus, my mother was always my first reader, patient and ever supportive, and my father became my first critic, curious about my process and progress. He respected my work, though he questioned it as well. As I grew older, he started slipping quotes by writers he loved into our conversations and asking me what they meant. On the occasions when I see him, he still does this. Presumably, now, it is because I have a college degree proving my ability to interpret great work, and because I write myself.
There was a space my parents crossed somewhere in the past, when they reached open to literature and encouraged their child to do the same. Both of my parents fostered this - my Mom by reading us line after line, and my Dad by drawing up deep ideas and connecting them to us. There was always that philosopher-critic in him. Usually, he tried to ignore it. But, then he'd stand back from repairing the hole the dog had dug under the wire wall around our house, sweat dripping down his bare back; he would shade his eyes with the hollow of his palm and casually quip, "Do good fences make good neighbors?" thinking of Robert Frost all the while.
I stumbled through my college-lit seminar entitled, "Modern Ireland: 1760- Present", because that entire semester revolved mainly around James Joyce, one of my father's favorite writers. Some days, I would bolt from the room, bleary-eyed, and splash water on my face in the bathroom, trying not to cry at Joyce's alienation and abandonment. My father and I, and a large part of my writing voice, had already been estranged by then.
For a brief space of time, he had encouraged me. But, he also talked about the lives of the Great Ones - all male - and how I'd be saddled with snotty-noses and dirty diapers as a mother. I stopped showing him my work during adolescence. He was commenting more on my jeans - too tight, or my hair - too ratty, and everyday he told me to, "snap out of my dream-world" in a venom-laced voice. I retreated further into my books, my journals, where I wrote him out of existence on the page and, sadly, fate nearly did as well, in my life.
Like so many fledgling writers, I sought only to be heard. I majored in English Education in college, because I decided to immerse myself in the writing of others. My own was inadequate, misunderstood. I would become a teacher, not a writer, which was just an unrealistic fantasy born of my childish mind.
"You can write books on your summers off," my mother soothed, and I signed up for my education with a profoundly jealous soul. Summers off, I reasoned, I can write then, and be surrounded by the "Great Ones" during the rest of the year. I felt guilty to want for more than that.
When my daughter was born, shortly after, the restless dream finally died in me. I couldn't spend hours in a cafe writing. I was unable to attend writers conferences and retreats. It quickly became impossible for me to devote my day to the fine art of revision. I was studying the rhythms of a newborn child, the cycles of crying, the series of moments, mouth to breast, desperately feeding, the stolen segments of sleep. She survived off of me. I was consumed. This was not the imagined life of a writer.
"Snap out of your dream-world. You are nothing special," spewed a nasty thing inside of me." My daughter was tangible, smelling sweetly of baby shampoo and infant flesh. To someone, finally, I was as essential as breathing. I put my pen away. I was making a difference in real life. I did not write again for over three years.
I raised a daughter instead, graduated from the university with my logical degree, stayed married, birthed baby number two into the wide world, landed a reputable job as a college educator, and mainlined literature like a black-eyed junkie. Then, one day, my little girl looked me dead in the face and announced, I am an artist, Mommy."
"You do make excellent pictures," I said, "the colors are so intense.I love how you put them together like that," I smiled. I think my eyes crinkled up around the corners even. But, fortunately, she was not me.
"Thanks, Mom but, I mean it." I don't just "make excellent pictures; my brain is full of them. Millions of them!" She twirled around the room dizzily, "All because I AM AN ARTIST!"
And so, it began - the museums, the technique work, the interest in variable styles, the piles of brightly decorated papers, the pennies donated for supplies, the surrealist masters tacked to the playroom wall. Being an artist's benefactor has been more exhausting and expensive than I had imagined. This is not a path I would have willingly chosen, but her fiery creativity sparked something dry and dormant in me and, I've gone up like kindling. There are still moments where my own creative process is excruciating, and that hateful critic inside of me reawakens. "This is ridiculous, you canÃt be an artist." "You are too young/too old." "There is too much competition." "You will never have enough money to live, why don't you just teach it instead? You aren't any better than anyone else; what makes you think you can be an artist anyway?"
This voice speaks to me as a writer, and seeks audience with my daughter. So far, those words haunt me, but die on my lips. She will certainly develop her own inner-critic. Days will pass, and she will languish in the shadows of self-doubt and longing. This is at the heart of all creation, that blank space of time when everything is empty, when the entire canvas has gone black, when words fail, and say nothing. That a voice will plague her with bouts of insecurity, however brief, is a given. Much of the world's best art has come in response to just such discourse. But, of this I am also certain, my child's inner-critic, digging viciously into her confidence, will not ever have my voice.
Today's art session is a study in sketching and shadow. Caila sits in our office with pencils and erasers, darkening her fingertips with graphite. A still-life, a composition motif, a joyful cry, "I have made the most incredible masterpiece!"
She bounds across the room arms outstretched, eyes alight with discovery, artist heart bleeding empty. I put my pen down, and juggle the baby onto my other hip. I look at her, her brother's blue eyes, and my journal lying open on the kitchen table. I answer her honestly, as always, "So have I."
C. Delia Scarpitti lives in Delaware with her husband and their daughter and son. She is on the adjunct faculty of Delaware Technical and Community College, and has attended numerous creative writing workshops and seminars. Each day spent with her two children provides a new opportunity for artistic pursuits, and her third, due in July 2003, is already working hard to teach yet another inspired resource rhythm.
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