duggaresque...part deux

I'm always a little nervous when I find those rosy places in the blogosphere where nothing is ever messy and the world is just dang skippy all the time, and lest anyone get the wrong impression from my last post that my artsy little sweet-spot of a home is all peaches and smiles, I submit to you Duggaresque...Part Deux.

Have you ever visited a real art museum? Well, yeah, me neither, but let's pretend for a minute. The halls are lined with inspiring works of imagination from some of the great minds in the craft over the centuries. Statues stand, loftily and perfectly, somehow above the sometimes-chaotic crowd bustling around below. There are no boogers here. And no wet paint.

Okay, now then, for a bit of perspective, have you ever visited a children's museum? You go over to the super-trendy 'art station' to have the kids create something, only to find that some hungry little "artist" has already made off with the tips of every single broad-tipped marker in the building, probably having eaten them and chased them down with glue or tempera paint, and obviously the green glitter, which also seems to be completely empty. And what's this? Oh, how nice--fingerpaint in puddles on the floor, and now on your shoe, and somehow up your pant leg, and suddenly all over your hands and the diaper bag and the baby and your hair. Nice.

Maybe the scupture station is a little more well-organized, so you make tracks (literally--remember the paint on your shoe?) over in that direction, only to find that the glue-glutting kid from the first station found out the hard way that those items don't sit so well in the stomach and somehow the cleanup crew has missed his not-so-little technicolor masterpiece now oozing into the carpet, you know, for posterity to enjoy, since it's full of glue (ooh, and that pretty green glitter!) and rapidly becoming one with the floor. Maybe they'll give it a name and make it one of the permanent exhibits, if the administration hasn't set aside funds for new carpet in this sort of event. But we were talking sculpture, weren't we? Ahhhh, modeling clay. Since the manufactureres of this staple of childhood creativity haven't yet discovered a way of keeping the colors from 1)bleeding 2)mixing or 3)smearing all over every surface they touch, at least without making the whole compound so toxic that you need a decontamination shower after opening the package, you try your best to interest the kids in the gummy-lump of poop-brown clayglomerate before you. Somehow, the best you or they can manage to come up with resembles strongly a zoo display of wild animal scat (those little pellets are from African pygmy deer; that big lump? Supposed to be a giraffe, but doesn't that look just like Siberian wolf scat after its latest meal of boneless mouse wings?)

I think of the Duggar's little television-world home in kind of the same way as that art museum: we don't see the mess, only the masterpiece. Nevermind that Van Gogh got so frustrated that he whacked off his own ear (I'm sure Michelle Duggar never has those kinds of days); and you think that Jackson Pollack started out by slinging paint at his canvas? Anyone care to guess what happened if the great sculptors of antiquity suddenly found themselves with a one-armed Venus because of one wrong chisel blow? They'd stick it back on with wax mixed with some rock dust, pack it up quick and ship it away to the buyer, and pray that a sunny day didn't come along too soon! Isn't that a bit like the TLC show, where the snotty noses and puddles of vomit are somehow edited out, and we get to watch a polished, perfect family moving in unison and having-a-very-nice-day-every-day-of-the-week?

My house, on the other hand, is more like the children's museum on most days--we have a lot of fun and we make a lot of mess. Oh, sure, there are some great works of art here, but they're works in progress, and sometimes the chisel hits a little too hard, or sometimes not hard enough, and sometimes we have to pray that the wax will hold. I may not be tempted to cut my ears off, but you can bet that sometimes I want to pull my hair out! And sometimes I've been found guilty of slinging the paint like Pollack and leaving the world to wonder, "What was she thinking??" And on some days, the best I can manage to create feels and looks an aweful lot like a pile of crap.

But there are days, when I take a peek past the hallowed doors of the future imagined, into the day when my dripping, cracking, smearing works-of-art are finally completed, when I have lovingly applied the last brush strokes, smoothed the last surface on the alabaster man, carved my name into the heart of each one, and see a moment when I have offered up my best works to the world, ready to take their places in the hall of great masterpieces. No one will remember the children's museum days when we struggled to make sense of anything, when we all wondered how this art project would turn out, when we wanted to sling paint all over our hard work, and when tears and goobers were all part of the process.

On that day I'll stroll past in silence, admiring the beauty, and make one last track of fresh fingerpaint footprints down the hallway on my way past.

--Teri.