A Car Seat for Tiger

“Mommy, come outside,” my four-year-old begs. “Come with me and watch my sunflower grow.” He tugs eagerly on my hand as I laugh. 

“Oh, buddy. Flowers don’t grow that fast.” We impulse-purchased a sunflower grow kit from Target a few hours before while his big brothers were at school. He’d pushed the seeds into the soil minutes ago, sprinkled some water on top, and carefully carried the tiny galvanized silver bucket out to the back porch, setting it in the sun.

He runs through the house ahead of me and, in his excitement, nearly trips. He thinks he’ll see instantaneous growth, like the color that springs forth from his WaterWow! books as soon as the paintbrush touches the surface. If only it was that easy.

I join him on the porch, where he watches expectantly, waiting for the seed to sprout. 

“It’s going to take a while,” I tell him. “We’ll have to water it and put it in the sun every day for a few weeks before we can see it grow.” Ignoring me, he gets eye level with the dirt and stares. Watching him, I think of the ideas germinating in my head. There are things I know I want to write about—essays I wish I could sit down and write straight through, start to finish today—but the thoughts surrounding them need tending, nurturing, time to grow.

~

The notes of my alarm sound and I fumble in the dark for my phone, hitting snooze. Ten minutes later, the alarm sounds again. The scent of the coffee brewing downstairs has wafted up to me, beckoning me out of bed. Slowly, I ease myself out from under the covers and reach for my glasses. Tiptoeing downstairs, I try not to wake anyone, and wince at each creaky stair.

I fill up a mug with hot coffee, setting it on the table next to the couch. Grabbing my stack of books and a blanket, I light a candle before I settle myself into the cushions. 

Picking up my pen, I begin my morning routine. First, my Question A Day journal. After scribbling an answer on the lines, I move on to my prayer and gratitude journal. I skim my prayer requests and write down three things I’m thankful for. Now, I crack open my pink composition notebook: it’s time for morning pages. Three handwritten pages, of whatever comes to mind, as instructed by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. I like to think of them as a creative warmup for my day: sometimes I start by naming what I need to get done, clearing the way for more creative thinking, and sometimes, the earliest drafts of essays, blog posts, and newsletters are scribbled on the lines of my notebook. These early mornings are when I prioritize my creativity. If I jump straight into the demands of the day, my time is often consumed by the needs of others. When I start my day alone, with silence and a blank page, I remember that expressing my creativity is a need, too. 

~

I walk into my older son’s elementary school: I’m here as a volunteer to help my third-grader’s team prepare for the Science Olympiad competition in just a few days. When I step into the classroom, his teacher is giving a pre-competition pep talk. 

“Saturday is the big day,” she’s saying. “And you are ready! You have worked hard,” she adds, looking around the classroom at each student in acknowledgment. 

“You’ve learned new things. You’ve come to school early and you’ve come during lunch to work on your events.” The kids nod in agreement. “On Saturday, you are going to show up and give it your very best,” she continues. “But the other teams you are competing against have been working hard, too.”

She surveys the room. “Whatever happens on Saturday, I am proud of you. If we get some medals—that’s great. But that’s not the most important thing.” She pauses, and I see the looks of confusion on a few faces: what’s more important than winning? “The most important thing is that we are giving it our very best effort.”

A few days later, early on Saturday morning, my nine-year-old and I walk into a local high school. Dozens of Science Olympiad teams are setting up camp: in the cafeteria, outside the school, staking claims on sections of hallway and sidewalk. Our team huddles together for a final pep talk. More and more people stream by, holding bottle rockets and bridges made of pasta and overstuffed notebooks, in case they can find five more minutes for studying. 

How brave they all are, I think. Showing up, ready to put their best out in the world—in front of judges and their peers. How often, I wonder, have I missed out because I was scared to show up? How many times have I hesitated before sharing or submitting a piece of writing, weighing the potential opinions of others against all the work I’ve put in? 

~

There’s a writing prompt I’ve seen floating around Instagram that I want to try. I’ve seen brilliant post after brilliant post from other writers inspired by the same prompt, and I want to join in the fun—but I’m intimidated, too. What do I have to say that someone else hasn’t already said? Will my take on the prompt live up to all the posts already out there? 

I jot down some ideas in my journal, trying out a few different ideas, but nothing comes together the way I want it to. Frustrated, I pick up my phone for a distraction, and my thumb taps over to Instagram before my brain even realizes what it’s doing. I know that scrolling won’t help—I’ll just see even more incredible responses to this prompt and find new ways to convince myself I can’t write anything decent. I scroll anyway. 

I toss my phone down and turn to my computer. Opening a blank google doc, I type a few lines, trying to be clever about the era I’m in—and then delete them all. I’m paralyzed by the “what ifs”: What if I post something and it’s horrible? What if I post it and no one double taps that little red heart? At the heart of it all, what if I’m not good enough to be a real writer, after all?

~

I’m wandering through the art museum with a friend for the annual Art in Bloom fundraiser, where florists design arrangements inspired by pieces of art in the collections. We ooh and ahh over the gorgeous flowers throughout the museum, stopping to read the placards explaining the thought behind the arrangements, and studying the art that inspired them. We see a small crowd gathered around a woman, who is answering questions.

At first, I think she’s a museum employee or an event volunteer. But when we get a little closer, we realize she’s actually the florist who created this particular arrangement. She’s telling the crowd about the flowers she used and how she came up with her design. Standing next to her beautiful creation, she exudes confidence as she shares about her process. 

I wonder, do the florists who choose to stand near their arrangements ever get their feelings hurt? I remember times I’ve poured my heart into writing something, only to have it rejected when I’ve submitted it to a publication or ignored when I’ve shared it to social media. I know that flutter I get when I post to Instagram—a little burst of adrenaline when I tap “post,” followed by notes of anxiety as I wait for a reaction: Is it any good? Will anyone like or comment? Am I embarrassing myself in front of the internet?  I wonder how the florists can stand it, waiting and watching as people appraise their work right in front of them. 

~

“Workshop essay,” I scrawl on my to-do list. The deadline for turning in 2,000 words for a writing workshop I’m taking is coming up, and I’m short on ideas. Another participant has already turned hers in, early, and I resist the urge to read it before I’m done with mine; she’s a better writer, a little further along the writing path than I am, and I know if I read hers before I finish, I’ll struggle even more to finish my own.

All day, I think of essay topics. I write opening lines in my head as I’m driving my kids to school, and stop to jot notes whenever a thought hits. Still, nothing is coming together like I want. 

With twenty-four hours until the deadline, I tell myself I just have to write something. I force myself to sit at my desk, trying to ignore the squeak of my hot-pink chair as I shift around to get comfortable. “You aren’t leaving this spot until you have a first draft,” I tell myself.

The next day, I type, delete, retype a note to the other workshop participants to go along with my essay. I want to preface it with qualifiers—very rough draft, wasn’t feeling inspired, ran out of time. I want to start over, come up with something good to turn in. But then I recall the wise words of Anne Lamott from one of my favorite books on writing, Bird by Bird. “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”

I erase all the qualifiers and attach my document. “Here’s what I have,” I type, then hit send, pushing away my fear as I remember the bravery of all the elementary schoolers at the Science Olympiad competition. If they can put their work out in the world to be judged, so can I. Another memory surfaces: my youngest son, watching the dirt to see his seed sprout. His sunflower needed sun and water to grow; this essay needs feedback from my peers. 

~

“Mommy?” my six-year-old middle child pipes up from the back of the minivan. 

“Yeah, bud?” I reply, driving our familiar route home from school. 

“My tiger really, really needs a car seat,” my son says emphatically.

“He does?” I ask.

“Yes,” he giggles, as if I’ve asked a ridiculous question. “Can we make him one?”

“Sure,” I say. 

A few minutes later, we pull into the garage. My first-grader races inside, heading straight to the spot where the craft supplies are kept. I follow behind, grabbing an empty shoe box I’d been meaning to throw in the recycling bin and a roll of duct tape. I’m not sure exactly how we’ll create a car seat for this little tiger, but my mind is already racing from one possibility to the next. We sit down at the kitchen table, spreading our supplies before us. I catch the look of excitement and anticipation on my son’s face: it’s the moment when the possibilities are endless and the joy of creating is pure and simple, before you’ve hit any roadblocks or frustrations. It’s the way I feel when an idea comes to me so strongly, so powerfully, that I have to stop whatever I’m doing to get it down—on scrap paper, on the notes app of my phone, in a voice memo, whatever is available to me at the moment. 

Thirty minutes later, my son is proudly “buckling” his stuffed tiger into the car seat we’ve created together. He carefully pulls the ribbon through the hole we’ve punched in our shoebox-and-duct tape invention, securing the tiger in his spot. Beaming with satisfaction at seeing his idea come to life, he quickly forgets the little hiccups we encountered during the process—the duct tape that folded over on itself, the ribbon we cut to the wrong size. I smile, recognizing how I, too, forget the moments of frustration once I’ve completed a project.

~

There’s a box sitting on my bookshelf. It contains a five-year diary from the late 1940s that I picked up at an antique shop, a Social Security administration pamphlet on Taking Care of Your Baby from 1945, several postcards (the senders and recipients are both foreign to me), a handful of old photographs (of whom? I’m not sure), and a few index cards with ideas scrawled on them. 

I have a digital version of this box, too: a Trello board with links to articles that have grabbed my attention: Atlas Obscura, The New York Times, anything that fascinates me or sparks an idea. There are favorite quotes, lines I’ve written that don’t yet have a home, and things I’ve observed that I want to remember, like the time I saw two men hanging out in Adirondack chairs at the very end of a sidewalk that ends abruptly, one that runs alongside a busy road. 

There’s only one qualification for making it into this box (either the digital or physical version): the thing in question has to kindle a creative fire in me. 

I don’t take things out of the box often. I’m more likely to add than remove, and the contents sit patiently, waiting for the right time. 

Like Julia Cameron says in The Artist’s Way, creativity is a spiral path. The time to unearth the contents of the box will come. One day the demands of small children will fade, and I’ll be able to focus on something for more than a few minutes a time. These things I’ve collected will have their time to shine. 

But today, I can’t sit down and write for hours or spend weeks trying to decipher the spidery handwriting penned decades ago in the five-year diary. More of my ideas are left unfinished than finished and most of my thoughts are interrupted. So I trust that the small ways I can nurture my creativity today—the chapter on writing I read in the carpool line, the half-written essays that may never see the light of day, the small ways I am practicing showing up and sharing my art—I trust that these seeds will one day blossom. 

What I can do, today, is grab a blank index card off my bookshelf. There’s an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head for weeks, but I know I don’t have the time to commit to pursuing it right now. I don’t want to lose it, letting it slowly get buried under grocery lists and school calendars. So I write it down, making the letters small so I can cram as much as possible on the card. I finish writing and give the index card a final glance, making sure that my notes to my future self are clear, then tuck the index card into the box on my bookshelf. 

I start to walk away, then pause and turn back to the box with my idea safely nestled inside. “I’ll be back,” I say. “Maybe not today. But one day.”