Lace Scarf

She Had a Rich Creative Life

I began this series a while back and got sidetracked but now I’m picking up the thread again.

In the first two parts of the series we took a look at why productivity is so much more satisfying than maintenance, using Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s definitions and understanding of ‘flow.’

In the previous posts, I suggested that part of the reason Ma was happier was because she spent more of her time on production and less on maintenance than today’s moms.  Here I’d like to suggest that Ma Ingalls was happier than you because she had a pretty hefty dose of creativity and artistic expression ‘baked in’ to her life.

I’ll just start out by saying that I think that creativity is something we’re all born with and that we all have an innate desire to express.  I’m not necessarily talking about the need or desire to express some esoteric truth by creating some magnificent work of art of sublime and ineffable beauty.  It’s really much more basic than that.  The creative impulse I’m talking about is whatever it is that propels human beings to make stuff.

And Ma spent lots of time making stuff.

She helped build the houses that her family lived in.  She grew the food that she then prepared or preserved to feed them.  She made nearly every article of clothing that they wore.  She made curtains for the windows and the quilts for the beds.  Heck, they even made the beds and the mattresses!

This was all part of the ‘productive’ work that Ma did to make sure her family had the basic necessities of life: food, clothing and shelter.

It was hard work, no doubt, but I have to think (and the books certainly lead us to believe) that when she finished sewing a dress for Laura or Mary, she was pleased and satisfied that her efforts had resulted in something both beautiful and functional.

Anyone who’s ever knitted a scarf, finished a quilt, made a painting, thrown a pot, or baked a loaf of bread from scratch knows this feeling.  It feels really good!  Making stuff is not only fun it is deeply satisfying.

Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow can shed a bit of light on why creative activities are so satisfying.  For one, they usually engage us physically, mentally and emotionally.  Often creative endeavors involve learning new skills or solving new problems- hitting that sweet spot where ability meets challenge.  And I have to think that creating something functional and or beautiful just is intrinsically satisfying.

Ma had ample opportunities throughout the day, week and year for many different kind of creative endeavors.  She planted her garden in the spring, made jams and preserves in the late summer.  She bought fabric and made new clothes for the girls in the fall and knit socks by the fire in the winter.

This was just part of Ma’s work.  A sanctioned and expected part of her routine.

And yet in our current situation, the need for moms to make stuff is virtually nil.  Having the basic necessities of life available for purchase means that we don’t have to make things.

The efficiency of mass production means that it’s nearly always cheaper and easier to buy something than to make it ourselves.

On one hand, this is great.  As I mentioned in the previous post, I can’t imagine having to knit all my son’s socks.  At the rate he outgrows/loses/puts holes in them, I could never keep up.   Bring on the bag-o-tube-sox!  But I think there has been a cost that we haven’t really noticed.

Trading ease for satisfaction

These days, creative pursuits such as knitting or sewing one’s own clothes, or even baking a loaf of bread can easily be seen as a luxury.  Something optional, expendable and perhaps even self-indulgent.

Because these activities are no longer necessary, they’ve been relegated to the status of ‘hobbies’ or recreation.

In other words, something to be done after our ‘real work’ is done.

As a result, moms often have to carve out and defend a space for their creative pursuits.  And let’s face it, with all the maintenance work that never ends, carving out this time and space isn’t easy.

How can I justify sitting on the sofa knitting a scarf when there is a whole pile of laundry waiting to be folded and put away?

Even when women choose and are able devote a fair bit of time to crafts of any sort, these aren’t integral to the continued good functioning of her family.

It’s the frosting on the cake, not part of the cake itself as was the case for Ma.

My point is that we have lost easy access to a rich source of potential satisfaction that comes from creative pursuits of all kinds.

The fun of playing with colors, textures, tastes and techniques.  The challenge of trying something new: a new recipe, pattern or tool.  The sense of accomplishment that comes when you can hold it up and say, “Look what I made!”  The connection that comes from sharing our creations with others.

It’s not that women (and men) don’t still make stuff.  Of course they do.  But instead of being integrated into the regular routines, it happens on the margins.  Instead of being respected and honored as necessary contributions to the family’s welfare, the creative efforts of modern moms are seen as something she does primarily for herself.

Let me be perfectly clear that I’m not advocating a return to the pioneer days.    I really don’t want to have to make my own clothes or grow every vegetable I want to eat.  And I definitely recognize the stress that some moms feel when they don’t make every meal from scratch, or sew their kid’s Halloween costumes.  I have no interest whatsoever in adding to the collective mommy guilt out there!

But I see the effects on moms everywhere of not having enough creative mojo in their lives.  Feeling guilty for taking a trip through the yarn store- well that’s no good either!

Fortunately, the remedy for this is fairly simple:  just make something.   Make a pot of jam, a simple sundress, a scrapbook for your family.  Paint an old night-stand for your kid, or knit a scarf.

What have you made lately?  How did it make you feel?  Please share in the comments!

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In which we discuss why if  your life is all about maintenance, it will suck!

This series is inspired by the well-known Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  As a young girl, I read and re-read these books countless times, seeing life on the prairie through the eyes of Laura and Mary.  Sometimes their lives seemed so different from mine:  I couldn’t imagine life without electricity, or the fact that an orange could be so exotic and rare that it was a special Christmas treat.  And of course some things were so similar.  Being the new kid in school can be hard, and it seems like there’s always some obnoxious Nellie Olesen around to contend with.

Reading these books with my son, I now find myself fascinated by the woman Ma Ingalls must have been.  Although the basic work of tending to children and the household have remained constant for ages, Ma’s life was so different from my own.  She repeatedly moved her family to the very edges of civilization.  Along with Pa, she grew most of what her family ate.  She made their clothes.  She faced the illnesses of childhood without the benefit of vaccines or medical care nearby.  Her contact with family and friends was sometimes frequent and sometimes quite limited.

And yet, she doesn’t seem to suffer in the ways that I see moms, particularly stay at home moms suffer these days.  Her physical circumstances were much more difficult than those that moms today face, and yet, Ma Ingalls (at least as portrayed in the books) does not seem to experience the kind of existential angst that the moms I know often do.

I’m not really interested in a debate about whether women had it harder ‘back then’ or whether women today who live in circumstances analogous to hers have it harder than privileged women in developed countries.

What interests me is looking at why women living in contemporary society seem so much less satisfied with our lives than women of earlier generations and other times.

I have a few thoughts- and maybe you do too.

In the previous post, I wrote about how Ma Ingall’s life had more productive activity and less maintenance than today’s moms have.  Today, I want to spell out in more detail just exactly why a life filled with maintenance is not likely to be a very satisfying life.  In fact, if your days are filled with nothing but maintenance, life will really suck.  Seems obvious- but if we dig a little bit into why this is, we can come up with some remedies.

To do this, I’ll go back to the work of Mihaly Csikszemtmihalyi on flow.  We’ve all experienced some level of flow at some point or other.  It’s that feeling of being ‘in the groove’, ‘in the zone,’ acting intuitively and responding to the emerging situation with perfect awareness but without conscious thought.

Just for a moment- think about a time you experienced something like this whether it lasted moments or hours.  Maybe you were painting, or absorbed in making jewelry.  Maybe you were cruising down the slopes or climbing a mountain.  Maybe you were brainstorming a killer fundraiser and the ideas were just popping like popcorn.

These experiences can come to us in a wide variety of contexts.  Artists and athletes are especially likely to talk about these moments, but they can happen anytime we are fully engaged- mentally, physically and emotionally- in what we’re doing.

In his extensive research, Csikszemtmihalyi identified several common elements of flow activities.

• They have a clear goal or set of goals with a fairly clear set of appropriate responses or moves to get to the goal.
• There is immediate feedback so you know how you are doing.
• They engage our skills (physical and/or mental) fully in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable

With these criteria in mind, it’s easy to see why sports might lend themselves to flow states easily.  Playing a game of tennis or chess, you have a defined goal and a set of rules to follow to guide your actions.  You know immediately how you’re doing- whether that last shot was a good one or not.  And assuming you’re playing someone who is at or slightly above your own skill level, it will take all you’ve got to prevail.

Being in the grip of the creative process can also be a flow state.  The words, images or notes simply flow with no effort on the part of the artist.  Artists speak of losing themselves in the process, the song singing them rather than the other way around.

But flow can happen in business or educational contexts.  When you have a big exam or presentation due there’s a similar opportunity to meet a challenging situation with the best your mind has to offer.  And when you get the results- whether it’s the grade on the exam or the contract from the client- you know you’ve succeeded.

What seems so distinctive about these experiences is that our thoughts, actions and emotions are all in alignment.  It’s not like we’re doing one thing, and thinking about something else.

Maintenance = Low Flow

Thinking about what’s actually involved in maintenance, it’s pretty clear that the conditions of flow are not usually in place.

No clear goals

When you consider the work of housekeeping, it’s easy to see that there is no clear set of goals with an identifiable endpoint.  For one thing, housework is never done.  The laundry basket never stays empty for more than a couple of hours.  Ditto the sink or dishwasher.

It’s like that old Nike tag line:  There is no finish line.  No top of the mountain.  No contract signed or project completed.  It just goes on and on and on.

No clear feedback

Another thing about the work of moms that makes it so hard is the lack of feedback.  I wrote a bit about this here, but the point is that it’s often damned hard to see that what we’re doing makes any difference in the grand scheme of things.  And sometimes the feedback we get is downright contrarian.

Say your teenager is pissed because you’ve grounded her for missing curfew.

Does that mean you’re scarring her for life or that you’re doing a good job as her mom?  It will be years before you know- if you ever really know!  The feedback loops on parenting are not at all transparent!

No Challenge

And then there’s the biggie as far as I’m concerned: the gap between skill and challenge.  Part of what makes flow states so remarkable is that they call on skills and capacities we didn’t know we had.  And for my money, there’s really not much that’s more satisfying than that.

Here may be the biggest difference between Ma Ingalls and today’s moms.  I’m not saying she wasn’t a smart cookie- because she was.  But moms today have had so many more educational opportunities than she had, and so many more helpful appliances, that the gap between our skills and the challenges of maintaining a household is greater than ever.

On occasion you may need a degree in tech-speak in order to record your favorite TV show, but generally speaking housework does not call on our greatest capacities.  It may be physically taxing, but it is highly repetitive and offers virtually no intellectual challenge or reward in and of itself.  It may be somewhat emotionally rewarding, knowing that you’re providing a clean and pleasant atmosphere for yourself and your family, but the work itself is not really conducive to flow.

And if the vast majority of your time is spent in maintenance activities- life might get to be a bit of a drag.

So what’s a modern mom to do?

Reduce maintenance

As discussed in the previous post, one of the reason’s Ma’s life was more satisfying is that she spent more time being productive and less time doing maintenance.  This suggests that one possibility would be to reduce the time required on maintenance in our own lives.

This is a favorite of ‘home management’ experts everywhere, and for good reason.

Part one of this bit of advice is usually something like lower your standards.  Well this might help some moms, but the truth is, my standards really can’t get much lower.  The bathroom gets cleaned about once a month whether it needs it or not!  And the beds get made when I change the sheets.  My kitchen is the one place that is kept in pretty good shape, but that’s because I’m in there preparing meals three times a day.  But still there are some days when I have to clean up from breakfast before I can make dinner.  Or vice versa.

The second piece of advice to decrease time spent on maintenance is to simplify your life, by which they usually mean getting rid of a lot of the crap you have.  The idea is that if you have fewer bathrooms to clean, fewer clothes to wash, fewer toys, books, pets, cars, bedrooms, etc… there’s less to maintain.

This seems fine as far as it goes, but honestly, for me and most of the moms I know, it only goes so far.  Yeah, I can clear out the clothes that don’t fit anymore, and take the books I’m not likely to read again to the library, but I’ve still got a house full of STUFF, and I don’t really see that changing drastically.

So if you’ve gone as far as you can in decreasing the amount of maintenance you do, what else can make it less onerous?

Play with maintenance

If you read Flylady or similar books, one of their favorite pieces of advice is to use a timer for each of your various household chores.  I have used this method with some success, and so agree that it can really help.  But let’s think about why for just a minute.  One reason is that no matter how disagreeable the task, you can probably stand to do it for 10 or 15 minutes.  And if you really focus, many of the every-day things that have to be done can be done in this small time frame.

Understanding the conditions of flow gives another possible reason that this strategy helps.  Namely, that it narrows the gap between skills and challenge.  Making the bed, or unloading the dishwasher are not especially challenging tasks, but add a time constraint, and now things get a bit more interesting!

(If you haven’t tried this, it works with kids too!  Challenge them to “Beat the Clock” and you’ll be amazed how fast the legos get swept up.  At least until they catch on to the game.  Then you might have to offer incentives!)

Finding some kind of immediate feedback mechanism can help as well.  When we moved to Colorado, I needed a new vacuum cleaner.  The one I got has a ‘dirt detector’ feature that supposedly tells you when the carpet is truly clean.  It has lights on it that start out red (super dirty) changes to yellow (moderately dirty) and finally to green (clean).  It sounds like such a goofy thing, but I enjoy vacuuming much more with this little bit of feedback.  It lets me know I’m actually moving in the right direction.

Transform Maintenance

Also known as The Martha Stewart Strategy.

I’ll have to admit, for many years I just didn’t get Martha or the women who read her magazine religiously.

But now I do.

The ‘cult of domesticity’ is actually a fairly effective way to transform what could be seen as the drudgery of maintaining a house into an expression of one’s aesthetic vision.  It still doesn’t help with the most repetitive and dull tasks such as cleaning the bathrooms or doing the laundry, but having a nice place to do the laundry, and lovely smelling cleaning products would certainly upgrade the experience.

Taking this even further, for many women, their homes become a living work of art.  Carefully considering just the right combination of paint color and fabric pattern might seem trivial, but it might be exactly the kind of challenge that calls a woman to exhibit or develop her skills.  If you consider your home a 3D canvas where you can arrange (and rearrange) things you find beautiful or meaningful to your heart’s content, it makes dusting the knick knacks a little easier to bear.

The same strategy can also be applied to meal preparation.  Some nights it’s all I can do to get something on the table that will keep body and soul together until morning.  Other times, cooking is a great creative process, whether it’s trying a new recipe or playing with color, flavor and presentation.

These are all ways to make what are necessary maintenance activities into something much more satisfying.

Back to Productivity

One strategy many moms employ, especially as their children themselves don’t require quite as much maintenance, is to shift some of their time into production i.e.  generating the energy (usually in the form of income) their family needs to survive.  The conditions of flow are certainly not part of every job every day, but the presence of clear goals and procedures to achieve them, the promise of receiving some kind of feedback on your actions and the possibility of using one’s skills or even developing new ones to meet interesting and novel challenges are powerful reasons to seek employment outside the home.

There’s also the possibility of production within the home.

Think about the reasons for  the upswing in all kinds of home crafting.  Women making their own jams and jellies, scarves and sweaters, slipcovers and shower curtains.  Not because they have to.  Not because it’s cheaper or easier (it’s very rarely either!).

But because it’s fun.

As fast as my son wears holes in his socks, I can’t imagine having to knit every pair the kid wears.  But I can tell you that the hours I spend knitting are much more satisfying than the hours spent sorting and folding laundry, never mind looking for that eternally missing sock.

It is much more satisfying to knit a sock than to wash the same damn one over and over and over because making a sock is productive.  It brings something into existence that wasn’t there before.  That generates energy.  Tending to the socks that already exist- that’s maintenance.

But is this actually productive or is it leisure?

Ma made jam because she had to.  It was the only way to preserve the summer harvest so that her family could eat through the winter.  Ma made her families clothes because she had to.  There was no mall up the road.

On one hand, I’m so grateful that I don’t have to grow everything my family needs to eat, or to make all my son’s socks!  On the other hand, these very satisfying activities have been stripped of their respectable place in our lives.  When I sit and knit, I’m acutely aware that there’s something else I ‘should’ be doing.  My knitting is recreation and so there’s a tinge of guilt that accompanies my knitting that I’m sure Ma never felt because her knitting was productive.

Next time we’ll take up the notion of leisure and what the quality of our leisure has to do with the quality of our lives.

Meantime- what do you think? Is maintenance necessarily low-flow?  What helps for you?

Please share in the comments!

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And so begins another series.  This one is inspired by the well-known Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  As a young girl, I read and re-read these books countless times, seeing life on the prairie through the eyes of Laura and Mary.  Sometimes their lives seemed so different from mine:  I couldn’t imagine life without electricity, or the fact that an orange could be so exotic and rare that it was a special Christmas treat.  And of course some things were so similar.  Being the new kid in school can be hard, and it seems like there’s always some obnoxious Nellie Olesen around to contend with.

Reading these books with my son, I now find myself fascinated by the woman Ma Ingalls must have been.  Although the basic work of tending to children and the household have remained constant for ages, Ma’s life was so different from my own.  She repeatedly moved her family to the very edges of civilization.  Along with Pa, she grew most of what her family ate.  She made their clothes.  She faced the illnesses of childhood without the benefit of vaccines or medical care nearby.  Her contact with family and friends was sometimes frequent and sometimes quite limited.

And yet, she doesn’t seem to suffer in the ways that I see moms, particularly stay at home moms suffer these days.  Her physical circumstances were much more difficult than those that moms today face, and yet, Ma Ingalls (at least as portrayed in the books) does not seem to experience the kind of existential angst that the moms I know often do.

I’m not really interested in a debate about whether women had it harder ‘back then’ or whether women today who live in circumstances analogous to hers have it harder than privileged women in developed countries.

What interests me is looking at why women living in contemporary society seem so much less satisfied with our lives than women of earlier generations and other times.

I have a few thoughts- and maybe you do too.

In this post, I’d like to consider the notion of ‘productivity.’

Have you ever heard a mom (perhaps even yourself!) say, “I just haven’t been very productive lately.”

Chances are, if you have heard or said this, it wasn’t the gloating of a woman who’d just been on vacation, or who had just finished off her third box of bon bons.  More often when I hear (or say) this, it’s with a tone of discouragement or frustration.  The women who utter these words have usually been running around crazy busy, doing stuff like mad, and yet, at the end of the day/week/month, they aren’t really sure what they’ve done.  But they are pretty sure that it hasn’t been productive.  And whatever they’ve been doing, it definitely hasn’t been satisfying.

I hear these concerns about ‘productivity’ a lot.  I hear them on the playground or in the parking lot just chatting with other moms.  I hear them from nearly every woman I’ve had the privilege of coaching.  I even hear them addressed in some form or fashion in nearly every woman’s magazine out there.

I used to think that this complaint was part of the way that women tend to devalue our own work.  Feeling like what we did wasn’t important, even though it was essential for the sustained functioning of our family and community.

With that framework, I’d encourage moms to really take a look at what they actually did and give themselves a little credit.  Given just a little nudge, they could usually see that they hadn’t really done nothing, and that at least something had gone better because of their actions.

As far as it goes, it’s not a bad strategy, and it almost always helps– at least some.

But I see now that it really doesn’t get to the heart of the issue.  The lightbulb came on when I saw clearly the distinction between ‘production’ and ‘maintenance.’

The bad news:  You’re NOT being productive…

One of my finds at the book sale from a few weeks ago was a little book by a guy with a big name.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the landmark book Flow has a followup: Finding Flow.

In this book he talks about how people spend their days and where they are most likely to find the sweet spot where we are fully engaged, mind, body and will, in whatever we’re doing.

According to Csikszentmihaly, when we’re not sleeping, our time is divided between the activities of ‘production’, ‘maintenance’ and ‘leisure.’   As he defines them,

Productive activities are what we must do to generate energy for survival and comfort.

Maintenance activities are what we do to preserve the body and its possessions

Leisure is what we do with time left over from the first two.

Leaving leisure aside for the time being, let’s take a look at production vs. maintenance.

Using these definitions, we can see that much of what Ma Ingalls did during her very busy days was in fact productive.  Taking the most basic of human needs, food, clothing and shelter, we can see that she was instrumental in producing each of these.  She planted, tended, harvested and prepared the food that fed her family.  She made most of the clothes that they wore.  At least once or twice, she helped Pa build the very houses they lived in.  Much of her day was spent in this kind of ‘productive’ labor, securing the survival and comfort of her family.

In addition to her ‘productive’ labor, the Ingalls family certainly had some maintenance to do.  As far as ‘maintaining the body,’  I think of this as making sure people get enough food, water, sleep, and that basic health and hygiene are looked after.  Ma made sure everyone got fed, tended to when sick, and had a bath on Saturday night.  She mended their clothing and with the help of the girls, kept their homes neat and clean.

We read about Pa taking his gun down and cleaning it in front of the fire every night.  Tending to the animals was no doubt a big job and an essential part of preserving the possessions of the family.  But simply because they had relatively few possessions, there was less to maintain.

Reading these books today, I don’t think that Ma had an easy life, but she had a good life.  I get the sense that she ended her days tired, but satisfied.  She had been productive.

Now consider what your own life looks like with these distinctions in place.  For stay-at-home moms in particular, not much of our time is spent in generating energy for survival or comfort.  These days, when food comes from the grocery store and not the garden out back, money is the energy that is used to produce this necessary ingredient for survival.  Similarly, keeping warm requires not the effort of chopping wood, but money to pay the electric bill.  And while I know plenty of moms who knit or sew, I don’t know any who would even attempt to produce enough to clothe themselves or their children.

Our days are filled with maintenance.

Let’s start with the maintenance of the body.  On the one hand, human physiology hasn’t changed since the pioneer days.  We still need roughly the same number of calories each day, and the same amount of sleep.  So you might think that the time and energy required for this piece of maintenance would  remain constant.  But this doesn’t seem to be the case.  For one thing, our standards of hygiene are certainly higher.  Though my son would love it, the tradition of the Saturday night bath won’t really cut it these days!  Roughly daily showers or baths is the norm for adults, with more flexibility for kids.

Maintaining the body also means that moms are usually in charge of keeping track of the medical and dental appointments- something that Ma didn’t have the luxury of .

And while the Ingalls family certainly never needed to make time to go to the gym to stay fit, our sedentary lifestyle means that we have to exert a little effort to exert ourselves.

And don’t get me started on the stuff….

While the Ingalls girls had two or three dresses, we have walk-in closets bursting with clothes to be kept clean.  Even if we don’t wear half of them, energy goes into preserving them.

Laura and Mary had one doll each.  I’m guessing cleanup time was a no-brainer in the Ingalls household. It’ a total cliché how much stuff today’s kids have so I won’t even go there except to say that it takes energy to maintain it all.

And what do we even need to say about the maintenance our homes require?  It never occurred to me as a girl reading these books, but as an adult I realized that Ma never had to clean a bathroom!  She had two rooms to sweep, one plate, bowl and cup per person to wash and one treasured china doll to dust.  Our houses are so big and so full of stuff that they need constant tending just to prevent entropy from completely taking over.  Nuff said.

There is one form of maintenance that Csikszentmihalyi doesn’t mention but I think is worth including in the work that moms do and that’s the maintenance of relationships and communities.  Remembering birthdays and sending cards and gifts for all those special occasions.  Checking in with the friend whose husband is sick.  Soothing the tensions that arise between family members, friends or colleagues .  All that volunteer work for the school, scouts, church, etc. These are all ways in which our efforts help preserve the communities that we belong to.  Sometimes we write off having coffee with a friend or hanging out on Facebook as ‘goofing off’ or wasting time, but it could also be seen as building or sustaining relationships.  And these relationships are essential to our own sanity (which is why we sometimes feel selfish or indulgent!) but they are also an essential contribution to the continued good functioning of our community.

Probably because it involves people and not stuff, this kind of maintenance is usually much more enjoyable than doing the laundry or vacuuming the carpet.  And yet, perhaps because it’s enjoyable, we don’t seem to consider that this too takes effort.  Goodness knows there are folks who are a bear to find gifts for.  But we do it anyway.  We think carefully and lovingly about them and even if we end up with a gift card, we make sure it’s from a place we think they will like!  Bridging differences whether it’s within the family, or a turf battle at school takes finesse, compassion and lots of solid thinking.  It may not look like much from the outside, but it takes real work to keep communities from falling apart.  And this is what we do.

So no, you haven’t been productive

The punchline here is that on those days you feel like you haven’t been very productive, chances are you’re right.  You’ve been busy.  You’ve been working hard.  But you haven’t been producing, you’ve been maintaining.  And while maintaining is an essential function if you want to preserve what you have, it’s not sexy or glamorous.  And it turns out that it’s one of the least satisfying ways to spend our time.

Bummer huh?

Tune in next time to find out why maintenance is so unsatisfying, and what we can do about it.

Meanwhile, I’d love to hear what you think.  Does this resonate with you?  Let us know in the comments!