A Wife Takes Care of the Details So You Can Do the Work You Love
Last week I picked up a book called Daily Rituals ~ How Artists Work. For the past year, I wrestled with how to find time for my art projects which revolve around making collages.
A few years ago I deliberately set aside Wednesday mornings, but when my part time job went to full time status (in 2012) my schedule went to hell, especially the parts of my schedule meant for me-time.
I rarely meet a women who doesn’t struggle with getting everything done, much less finding time for exploring her creativity. I still find it challenging to put time in my schedule just to relax and enjoy shapes, colors and texture: that’s what I loved about my Wednesday morning collage time.
Keeping the right brain alive and well is one of our most valuable jobs. It’s important to look at your weekly schedule at least once a year (this time of year) with fresh eyes and review how you manage your time and what’s missing in your life. Does your schedule include time for joy? self-care? play?
Daily Rituals examines musicians, writers and philosophers, as well as visual artists, and what routines they follow to be productive and creative.
Three takeaways from the book are:
- Creative people have daily routines. Whether they work all day or only for half an hour a day, creative people eventually find the right time of day or night when their creative juices are juiciest and that’s when they work.
- Making art, whether you are a painter, sculptor, writer or musician, requires solitude.
- It’s very helpful to have a wife. Many descriptions of the daily rituals are short, so we don’t get to see the kind of spousal support that helps creative people succeed. When the information is there, it is pretty clear that having a wife makes it much easier to keep your focus on your passion. Sigmund Freud is a good example: his wife laid out his clothes and even put toothpaste on his toothbrush, saving him time and the trouble of thinking about these mundane details. Often the wife’s job was to keep the children from making noise (that was one of the responsibilities Thomas Mann’s wife handled so he had the peace and quiet necessary to write). Proust had a live-in female servant who “wordlessly” delivered a specially-prepared breakfast every morning, brought hot water bottles to keep him warm, and, when summoned, sat and listened to him talk about his work.
A Wife Needs A Wife
In 1971, Ms. Magazine published an essay by Judy Syfers called, “Why I Want a Wife.”
These are some of the reasons why Judy Syfers wants a wife. A wife will:
- Go to work which will allow her (the writer) to go back to school and become economically independent;
- Keep track of things, for example, kids’ doctors’ appointments as well as her appointments;
- Take care of the kids: make sure they have everything they need, like clothes, friends, and rides, and be home when the kids are sick – even if it slows down the wife’s own career;
- Shop, cook, clean, iron, and organize things so she (the writer) can find what she needs quickly and without expending too much effort;
- Quietly understand when the writer needs to take off and spend time by herself.
That’s what a wife does – errands and chores – and that’s how a wife behaves – understanding and nurturing through it all.
After reading about how artists work, it’s clear to me that to take even a half day on a Wednesday, I do need a wife, someone who will run out and pick up more milk which we finished this morning; take the dog, who is standing by the door giving me pitiful looks, for a walk; and call the electrician to come and fix a problem that we can’t fix ourselves; and the list goes on.
But I don’t have a wife. I do have a husband and he also needs a wife.
So I guess we will have to do without the milk tomorrow morning and the dog will just have to wait an hour or two and those ancient fluorescent lights will just keep flickering until the wife arrives.
As for me, I am recommitting to my Wednesday morning collage time. I’m going to hang out with my right brain for a few hours and see what happens.
How about you? Are you going to look at your schedule with fresh eyes for 2015? Is there something that brings you joy that you have neglected this year? Will you make a commitment to yourself right now to put yourself, your own precious divine self, at the center of one of your daily, or at least weekly, rituals?
Action Step
Imagine having more personal time for self-care, support for your creative right-brain interests and more joy in 2015. If you don’t believe it’s possible for you to have more of what you want without guilt, let’s set up a complimentary, confidential breakthrough session, just the two of us looking at your schedule with fresh eyes. Email me and I’ll schedule some time for us to talk.
To Your Success!
Not that it’s impossible, but setting aside time for a “room of one’s own” is exceedingly challenging when you are saddled with children.
In my gratefulness prayers, I constantly give thanks that I never wanted children and that I didn’t buy into (to paraphrase Adrienne Rich) “compulsory parenthood”.
I am so extremely grateful that (outside of my day job) the only person I have to negotiate my personal time with is me. It befuddles me to no end why anyone would ever want children. Ball and chain 24/7, 365 until they’re 18. No thank you, I have a life – and a very full one at that. 🙂
Yes, yes, yes, YES!!!!!!
We all need support.
And a promise to ourselves to make creativity a regular occurrence.
My turn right now!
I need to take time for myself this year. I love being creative but rarely give myself the time to do so. This is something I will work on starting now.
I was a wife once, but not anymore. A mother too, but my kids are now older than I am. It truly IS hard, if not impossible, to carve out time for one’s own creativity when one is the wifely and motherly head of a family, especially in our society in which the nuclear family of mom/dad, mom/mom, dad/dad and children is an isolated unit. And now I’m retired; writing songs, writing poetry, writing a thesis, playing guitar. I have a lovely boyfriend and I don’t own a house. Yet I STILL have a hard time carving out my solitary, creative hours, which makes me think that the external responsibilities of children, pets and electrical repairs (real and pressing though they are) might not be what’s keeping us from our creative time. There is something internal, at least for me, that prevents me from saying “no” to the thousand things I do to fritter away my creative time. On December 26, I’m going to hunt down whatever it is. Fear? Thinking I’m undeserving? Not understanding that I can be loved for who I am instead of needed for what I do? One can be too responsible and too nurturing of others, I think. One can fail to prioritize oneself. But in this case, awareness of that fact may not be curative. I’m curious as to what is underlying all this.
I agree with you that there are multiple reasons why we stop ourselves from expressing ourselves whether it is through music, words or art; from taking time for creativity; and from taking risks with our ideas. When someone else can handle the details, like dealing with broken plumbing or shopping for holiday gifts, there is the gift of time, and time is real factor in expressing creativity. There are also the rules we’ve internalized over our lifetime, fears, lack of support – there’s no one answer for everyone. I have found that awareness is one of the key steps to change…awareness makes room for choosing. I have struggled with prioritizing my work, my writing, myself for years, and it is only through the first step of awareness that I can stop my automatic response to postpone taking care of myself first. For me it’s a very old ingrained response and I change it, one day at a time, through noticing it and making a different choice. Thanks for writing!