“Bike”

While on our way to BlogHer, The Girl drew her first representative drawing. She drew this, stood back, pointed to it and with a HUGE smile pronounced it “Bike!”

She was so proud of herself. I thought how wonderful it would be to be like that. To have no inner critic saying “it’s not very good” “I can’t draw” “It doesn’t really look like a bike.” And the 10,000 other things my inner critic would say.

When is the inner critic born? At what point in our lives do we start feeling that our art (or work, or anything) isn’t “something” that it is not “good enough.” Is it just me, or do you feel that way too?

In my last post* I wrote that it was scary to post it. It was scary because my inner critic was saying “you are NOT a poet” “this is VERY amateurish!” “What is up with the punctuation?” “this is dumb, you should delete it.”

I’m trying to tell my inner critic to go away, or at least pipe down a bit. The Girl loves to draw, and derives nothing but joy from it. She doesn’t care that it’s not perfect. (Although, speaking as the mother, it IS perfect.) She just does it. That’s how I want to be.

I might write posts about nothing. I might write stories. I might write more poems. But, I will write. Like The Girl, I will stand back and say “I did this! And no one else can do it just like that.”

And on a purely bragging note … don’t you think that to understand the concept of representative drawing at 17 months is pretty good, or am I just the mother?

*and sorry to the people who read me via bloglines because I messed around with the last post a few times making you think I had a new post. But look, now I really do have a new post!! Woo hoo!