Being creative is such a joyous part of life. There’s something about it that draws our attention inward, fostering an artistry that doesn’t often get to come out. Our children are such happy people, perhaps in large part due to the constant promotion of creativity in their everyday lives. Nothing makes us happier than highlighting their imaginative spurts like putting a fresh drawing on the fridge or filming a lost-in-the-moment rendition of a new song.

The beauty is that we all hold creative desires. Unfortunately as adults, we push them aside to make room for our other priorities. We need to recognize that these desires are priorities themselves.

As our minds grow and time passes as mothers, so do our responsibilities in every day life. It can be exhausting to even cross off the mental to-do list running through our heads each night. It’s a seemingly never-ending cycle of waking up, working hard to provide (may that be at work or at home), thinking, thinking, overthinking, and then going to bed. Needless to say, most of us are tired and stressed.

Priorities shift as we age, this is a common fact of life, and self-care falls to the wayside, but it’s something that needs to be brought to light. The struggle is that we’re not making time to foster creativity in ourselves as we do in our children.

We get caught up in setting realistic expectations and ensuring we have a stable job or something to fall back on over our creative desires. Perhaps these are notions you’re familiar with because they’ve been engrained in most of us for our adult lives. But for our children? It’s dream big, reach for the stars, and never stop believing.

Surely we can all list a multitude of creative activities that we consistently promote to our children. Some that come to mind are drawing, painting, writing, singing, and dancing. Just like that. We typically set aside time each day for our kids to partake in at least one of these activities, but we never realize the impact they could have on us too. Creativity works wonders! It brings so much joy; writing down our thoughts or playing an instrument, for instance, can make our imaginations soar.

There can also be creative aspects to our jobs and in our everyday intentions, but I’m talking about creativity for the sake of being creative; simply emphasizing the process over the outcome. Colouring to relish in the beauty of different hues, signing to rejoice in your own voice, dreaming to trust your instincts. Isn’t this the same thing we want of our children? We should want it for ourselves too.

We should allow ourselves the room to be practical in everyday life and creative at the same time. Having a stable job, but also taking the time to carve out what it is we love. And I get it, self-care and nourishing creativity for us mothers is no easy feat, but it could mean doing what we love while we set time aside for our children to do what they love; simply using the same time to be creative ourselves. Perhaps next time you’ve set up a colouring station for your toddler, you also set up a journaling station for yourself; or the next time your child’s in their swimming lesson, you can take the time to sketch.

Creativity nourishes us in ways that are hard to explain, promoting growth and cultivating good health in all of us. It’s a joy to behold how it affects our children, so may we have the insight to realize how it can affect us in motherhood as well.

Words by Melissa Curman

Photographed by Paris Hawken

Muse. Rebecca Burrows