I believe I am the director of iMOM just to have a platform to share all of my mistakes in the hopes that you won’t make them! So here I go again with another confession. This confession is along the same lines as my confession last week about expecting too much from my children.
I have a creative child–an artiste, with an artist’s temperament. Ever since she was a child I have been correcting her on how to clean/arrange/organize her room. She often drove me crazy with her collections of stuff. Her room seemed, to me, to be a living pictorial of her mood. It constantly changed. A place for everything and everything in its place had no meaning to her. Everything had a different place depending on her creative inspiration that day. Sometimes her ideas were amazingly orderly and other times distractingly disorderly.
I corrected that creativity constantly.
Honey, your shoes go in the closet, not lined up under your dresser.
Sweetie, all of your art supplies go in your desk drawers not in shoe boxes stacked in the corner.
I was wrong.
I just didn’t see it–her creative mind fighting to find expression in the space in her room.
And then she went to college. We unloaded her belongings and I left her to take care of some errands for her sister. When I returned I made a discovery. She had a gift–an amazing gift. She saw expression in space that my mind, controlled by rules of order, couldn’t comprehend. And with remarkable speed from years of practice.
Why place a book shelf flat on a wall when it takes up less wall space as a divider between your desk and the closet?
Why hang a mirror perpendicular to the floor when it turns the orientation of your bed into a sofa when hung parallel to the bed?
Why was I so short sited that I stifled my child’s creativity by correcting her ideas for years?
I was wrong and I knew it. And when I read this article on iMOM.com by Gary Chapman I was deeply convicted. He said this:
“We must make sure that we are not correcting behavior that doesn’t need to be corrected. In our efforts to teach our children, we sometimes stifle creativity in favor of conformity.”
This is Emily’s room. She is now my go to girl for decorating.
