Sacrifice and change are two words that are synonymous with parenting. I strongly believe in order to parent well–in order to really be present for your kids–you have to become a different person than you once were, and you have to sacrifice.
I don’t mean you need to be different at the core, or that you need to deny yourself of who you really are. I mean that your time gets unevenly divided, weighing much heavier on time with your children, than personal time. That is, if you want to be a direct part of your child’s life, then you must minimize the amount of time you defer to family, friends, nannies, day care or baby sitters.
So what I am grappling with lately is how loving and being with Anjali affects my creativity.
On the one hand, Anjali is a direct result of my creativity. She is the being that Madhavi and I lovingly created and continue to shape daily, as well she recreates us and continues to shape us!
The flip side and reality is that my musical creativity is suffering. When Anjali is napping, or anytime I have free time, I turn to my creative space and find that my musical libido is a bit tired. Let’s face it, all of me is tired. Being a parent is exhausting!
I am not completely dried up. I am performing regularly. I just haven’t written a new song in a long time. Perhaps I’m just out of practice, or maybe it’s because my relationship with the world is so different now that I don’t know how to express myself through song like I used to.
All I know is that Dave, my bandmate and friend, once called me a musical gremlin. Remember the movie Gremlins? Pour some water on them and a dozen more gremlins are spontaneously created. Well, Dave would say that great songs popped off of me just like gremlins. I can tell you that Anjali spilled water on me at least a few times just today, and I still have no new songs.
Admittedly, the “free” time that I have been afforded in the last nine months has been put toward creating other income via a new business. Certainly, that has devoured my energy. I mean, it’s hard to feel inspired to write a song after spending a few hours building a website, creating a digital product or generally doing everything I can to get a business off the ground.
I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. After all, they’re just songs. On the other hand, the songs that I have written over the years feel like extensions of myself. I breathed life into them because I truly felt something. So that makes me think: ‘My god, WHY DON’T I FEEL SOMETHING?!’ I feel lots of things throughout my day. Isn’t something going to inspire me to plunk something out on the piano or guitar, sing a melody and put some lyrics to it?
I turn back to a book called The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.
In this book, Steven Pressfield, author of The Legend Of Bagger Vance, talks about doing the work you are meant to do. He urges you to treat your art like work. You have to go to work everyday and just do it. One day you may eek out a bunch of crap, and another you may tap into the muse and genius flows.
Either way, you do your work and that is how your overall body of work or art is created, not by sitting on your ass waiting for inspiration to strike.
I know this to be true. I remember a great time in my life when I was writing every day. Granted, I was not a parent and I was single. I had this Mitsubishi Eclipse I bought from a friend for $250. It had no radio, no CD player and no tape player. I didn’t crowd my mind listening to music or “news.” Instead, I wrote music.
I had a tape recorder (this is just before digital recorders were a mainstay). I would sing melodies and lyrics into that thing, sometimes developing whole songs on a long car ride. Other times I would take the ideas home and finish the songs at a keyboard, or record them on an 8 track recorder (this is also before I had my computer studio set up). I still have those tapes. Every once in a while I will find one and listen to it, half embarrassed by how rough the ideas were, and half amazed at how inspired I obviously was.
I don’t think I need to get rid of my I-Pod or car stereo. I don’t think Madhavi would appreciate it either, since we share a car. Anjali would definitely hate that, as she loves to listen to songs over and over again in the car. I do think, however, that it’s time to get back to work. It’s time to stop blogging now, and hum, sing, tap, play piano…Whatever it takes to buzz myself back into writing rather than just playing music.
I may end up writing about going on the swings or excitedly seeing airplanes in the sky. At least I’ll be writing. I think if I allow myself to start there, I will eventually tap into my muse.
