Cultivating Creative Community
All by Towles Kintz
Where was the mystery I’d felt as a child, the anticipation and excitement? The flicker of hope in the candlelight of our Christmas Eve vigil? In the midst of stockpiling my childhood traditions of Christmas joy and imposing them on the life of my new immediate family, I seemed to have signed up for more than my spirit could handle.
And then Peter began collecting little things.
. . . so much of what Doll taught me had to do with working around missteps — my own, and others’ — with flexibility and grace. And, posthumously, that she’s redefined the meaning of hospitality for me, so that I think of it not only in its traditional sense, but also in the day-to-day as I “host” my children, their friends, my husband, and our friends and family. Doll cared for and catered to her guests. She hoped to spoil them with the best of what she had to offer — a thing that, when translated, came down to great love and a capacity to supply equal amounts of comfort and whimsy.
It all seemed almost like my own, that was true. But as early romance gave way to marriage, I realized that it is one thing to be from somewhere, to know it by heart, and another to adopt a place or have it chosen for you. My marriage chose Atlanta for me, and I was then adopted by my husband’s many circles of friends. Yet until our last year or so there, though, I had an indistinct feeling of being on the outside looking in — someone who belonged more by association than creed.
The shift happened slowly — over the course of the past five years as we added three children to our number and I found it more and more difficult to gather the energy to think clearly past 7:00 p.m. But it is unfair to blame entirely on parenthood the erosion of my thought life and the absence of any aspirations beyond surviving today. Perusing design blogs, Pinterest recipes, and perfectly staged photos of a stylized life is just easier than doing the real thing, and it always has been.
Like so many of life’s other challenges — the marathon worth running, the job worth doing well, the piano sonata worth mastering — motherhood has taught me, as nothing else has, about process. The work of raising young children is no less essential or foundational than the tasks my younger, childless self wanted to rush through. I can’t neglect my children’s play time or resent their basic needs and still expect to have great relationships and conversations with them when they’re older, any more than I could have skipped writing the beginning of this essay and had the end come out the right way.
On the other side of anxiety, I always feel a mixture of amusement and renewed lucidity, secured by a corrected sense of what is and is not reality, grateful that I can see the truth plainly. Unlike my husband, who gives me incredible grace in this area, I regard the part of my brain that believes in the anxious and ridiculous with impatience and disdain. As a writer, I am grateful for my imagination, but when my anxiety is at its worst, I wish for the rational, calculating mind of an accountant or a doctor.
Reading was an escape, but not an unhealthy one. It didn’t enable me to deny my grief or the strain our family was under. It didn’t distract me from my children or make me wish for another life. 
I am too early on this journey to say what will come of it — whether or not my artistic insecurities or competitive aspirations will show up again and steal my joy, or if I can reconcile the fact that there will be days when I read nothing of worth, when all I do is play pat-a-cake and write grocery lists, and days when I read well and with purpose, when I write (even if it is just a sentence) something that makes me proud and reminds me who I am.