Seriously, stop what you’re doing for a second and concentrate on one thing: Your job as parent.
You work hard at your job, very hard. You give it your all. You think about it constantly, perfecting it every day.
But really, is it a job? Do you get paid? Do you get steady vacation time? Any real time off, even when the kids aren’t around? Do you have a boss? Do you get performance reviews? Do you attend meetings or examine flow charts or org charts or pie charts?
I contend that it’s high time we stop referring to the job of parent, to the job of homemaker. We are artists, plain and simple.
We, as parents, craft our children, using nuance, adjusting them with great emotion, and improvising in the moment. We are artists, creating our children’s lives, just as Billie Holiday created “Summertime” and van Gogh created “The Starry Night.”
I strongly urge us, as parents, to hold the banner of Artist high, to hold it with pride, to hold it with utter conviction. And to invest in ourselves, to invest in the artist that we are, to experience fully our Art, to live fully as Artists.
[tags]parents, parenting, job, art, craft, artist, respect[/tags]
Painting ingeniously crafted by Vincent van Gogh during the early summer of 1889.
3 responses so far ↓
A. L. Hatch // Jun 25, 2007 at 6:13 am
Love it!
Stu Mark // Jun 25, 2007 at 11:11 am
Thanks! I dig your writing as well.
Abel // Jun 25, 2007 at 9:06 pm
Parenting is an art in the sense that you can’t apply what you learn across your children as every child is different. To me, parenting is still a job in the sense that it’s a job needs to be perfected along the way. However, it’s not a job in the sense that the payoff from parenting is much much better off than our “job.”
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