Too many hats

This is an illustration that I’ve done for a children’s book, but it struck me that it was very appropriate to my life. I am trying to wear too many hats! I am trying to be a writer, a cartoonist, a freelance graphic artist, a teacher, a mother, a wife, a daughter, a friend, a gardener, a, a, a — it’s all too much. I keep on trying to figure out how I can take some of these hats off and simplify my life. I don’t feel like I spend enough time on anything. Everything’s rushed, compromised, pushed out by other demands.

But perhaps this is what life is like. Creative time is to be snatched at. Tolstoy wrote at the edge of the family dining table. So did Patricia Grace. Raymond Carver wrote in his car to avoid interruptions. Katherine Mansfield’s journals are full of laments at how little time she is getting to write, how disrupted she is by illness. Perhaps we don’t need great stretches of time – perhaps we only need moments of clarity. I do lots of my thinking when I’m not at my desk – when I’m biking, walking to school, stirring the porridge. 

I imagine what I could produce if only I had time. I question why I’m even trying to produce anything in the first place – who cares? I’m never going to be great. Is it my ego that’s motivating me? Or am I just a compulsive communicator? If only I didn’t feel the need to write and draw – then perhaps I could get a job that would satisfy me. I wouldn’t need to do a hundred things to make ends meet.

Anyway, I’m procrastinating – I have something due today. And on Monday. I’d better get back to it. I want to write a comic for my Mansfield project – I just discovered that the painting that hung my grandmother’s wall, the one of my uncle Jim holding his teddy bear cousin Sandra as a baby, was painted by Edith Bendall, Katherine’s one-time lover. I haven’t seen the painting for 12 years but I can see it perfectly in my mind. It’s a portal. It’s a gift.