Miss Potter

I treated myself to a movie tonight and watched "Miss Potter", the telling of the life of Beatrix Potter played by Renee Zellweger. I thought the movie was very well done. I had a particular interest in the film because of an ongoing little game Matthew and I play. We pretend that I am Mrs. Rabbit and Matthew is Peter. I use a silly English accent and we retell the Peter Rabbit story complete with the threat that Mrs. McGregor is going to put him in a pie. Matthew laughs and giggles and we play it over and over.

There are so many themes in that movie that could be pulled out and mulled on, but the one that caught me off guard was the desire to be creative. I wanted to have some means immediatly to take ideas of beauty from my head and have them show up in some tangible form.

I love the way Beatrix turns to her art as a means of expressing a variety of emotion and to either escape, or feel more fully, the reality of her life. Steve and I have lamented occasionally that since having children it is much more difficult to find time to create. For Steve, that means time to write music and for me it is working with my hands - gardening, crochet, cross stitch, quilting, sewing.

What I concluded is that for now all that creative energy is going into caring for my family. My creativity has to be expressed in imaginative play, making a meal from "nothing" in my pantry, seeing animals in the clouds, and yes, finger painting. So during this season of life my boys become the tangible form. They are the clay that gets molded and I'll always think they're beautiful!