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.