With summertime here and the kids home all the time, the balancing act of parenting and working has become extra exciting. I may be having show in two weeks (or not) and my in-laws are arriving at the same time on the condition that we have air conditioning (which we don't.) So there's art mess everywhere on my end and wiring and insulation everywhere on my husband's. Josh and I are both quite independent workers who tend to get committed to our own projects and "hole up" with them. Where does this leave our kids? Er...somewhere?

These recent pictures show my kids in a lonely, desert-like landscape with layers of sky and sand present in each image. I realize that I deal with a lot of personal guilt over how much I leave them to their own devices sometimes, and there's that element in these objects. One of my kids lives largely in his imaginary worlds, which I think is wonderful. He still invites me into these make-believe spaces and when I have the energy to join him I am treated to fragments of his inner vision. My other child is very tied to her real environment (and me. She mostly wants to be me.)

Right now I'm really juggling and am not sure how to do this. There seems to be no resolution.

Our 1860s house came with only four closets--the "Cape Ann" kind that have a narrow door, a shallow back, but strangely deep sides where it's easy to stuff things and consequently lose them for years. Even when organized they are far too cavernous and dark to access regularly or easily. We had such a closet in our bedroom, but it was only large enough to store Josh's clothes so I stored mine in a spare dresser in the bathroom. A few years ago over summer break I designed a system for our room that would suit our needs--the right amount of drawer space for both of us to fit all of our clothing at all times, the right amount of hanging space, shoe storage and sweater storage, plus a shallow mirror closet. Josh took a month and demolished our room and built the unit from scratch. It is perfect.

Over the past month, I have been agonizing over writing my artistic goals. I've tried writing them out in list form. I've tried writing them out in prose form. I've tried putting some into my calendar so that my phone sings me little songs at random times and I look at it to see a message to "email contact today!" which I immediately ignore with a little shudder. It's not that I have difficulty creating work. It's that I haven't been able to dig in and find that one particular goal that will make me pursue it with, say, the determination that I recently used to locate the ideal white linen summer dress. (Even when I found said dress, I stalked it for a week to make sure it was all that I wanted it to be. It is. I'm a great stalker.)

What I think I'm missing is not a goal, but a dream. The fact that I continue to make art when the circumstances of my life are demanding and fight me with almost, but not quite, the same strength with which I fight them, means that there's something I want out of all of this. My friend Grace would say that it's because I'm a scorpio, and scorpios bury themselves in the deep darkness and only come out when they're ready to sting. Maybe. That actually has a ring of truth to it. It's like there is something forgotten and important at the back of my closet and I'm going to need to pull out everything to find it. The closet door is now open and the mess is annoying me every day.

It won't be long now.

(I apologize to the likers and commenters on this original posting. I accidentally deleted it and had to find it in Google cache.)