Colouring outside the lines

I thought it was only my husband who was cultivating a household full of nerds - prepping them for a lifetime of geeky pursuits and school yard crucifixion.

And admittedly he has played a major role.

Case in point:

1.       The Ranga’s OBSESSION with Star Wars. He has only ever seen snippets of the movie, but can still re-enact pivotal scenes using Mega Bloks, plastic golf sticks as lightsabers, and a fake pumpkin as an explosion (flip one over and believe it or not it actually looks like one). He can name all of the characters, and can be found meandering around the house dressed as Darth Vader, draped in a quilt and wearing a bucket on his head.

2.       Miss C’s anal artistic endeavours. Pineman and I both have creative backgrounds. However, I am not the one who paints armies of miniature figurines and teaches the kids bizarre colour names.  Miss C dropped a pencil from our back deck the other day and when I asked her which colour it was so I could go and look for it, she responded with, “snake leather bite”. 

“What the hell is snake leather bite??” I demanded of Pineman who nearly collapsed with laughter (obviously some nerdy in-joke) and replied with, “I think she means ‘snake bite leather’”. Because that sounded far more reasonable!

Anyway, The Ranga banging on about how he can only be addressed as Han Solo, coupled with Miss C’s eternal meltdowns about people using the WRONG colour for faces and everyone colouring outside the lines, got me thinking.

If my children are this anal/nerdy/obsessive then perhaps there is more than one gene pool to blame. So I took a good hard look at myself and this is what I discovered…

I was not cool at school – maybe not the lowest common denominator - but certainly not far off. I played in the school band and sang in the choir. I took part in school musicals (anyone who has seen Glee will understand what that did for my reputation). I represented the school in debating for the annual interschool ‘sports’ visit (yes, in my mind it was a sport). I lived across the road from my high school and my dad was one of my teachers!

Amongst other achievements, I used to have to get up in front of the whole school to accept an ‘attendance award’ each year. Yay for me, fellow students – I have been to school Every. Single. Day. This. Year. Oh, and in case you hadn’t noticed, that’s my dad who just kicked someone out of the assembly.

Any wonder I never had a boyfriend?

And while everyone at university was wrestling in a jelly pit or sculling beer from a communal yard glass, I was in the library conducting research for my assignments. Need I say more?

But what I have found is that years of achievement in my youth has lead to years and years of underachievement in adulthood.

I have hopped from job to job to job, never knowing what to do next, never staying long enough to climb any ladders, terrified of failure, terrified of success.

I have realised that the types of people who truly succeed in life are the ones who are not afraid to push boundaries, take risks and dream big. The types of people who truly succeed in life wear thick raincoats to weather all manner of storms.

I am not that type of person.  My raincoat tears very, very easily, and I’ve never been a big fan of drowning.

I continued to ponder all of these things recently whilst attending Miss C’s school orientation session.

What do I want for my daughter as she embarks on this new and formative part of her life? We are so painfully similar in some respects that it’s excruciating to watch.

I keep telling her that it’s okay to make mistakes and there are different versions of ‘right’. But I’m not sure I truly believe half the stuff I tell her.

I want to let her know that there are so many pathways to achievement. That she has so many options. That failure is not a catastrophic event.

I want her to find something she is passionate about – anything at all – and not be afraid to pursue it.

I want her to feel like she can colour outside the lines, jump in the jelly pit and scull from the communal yard glass (or maybe not the latter – it just sounds naff!)

I want to send her to school armed with a bulletproof vest and the world’s thickest raincoat, to weather all the storms.

I’m not sure what ticks away in that little mind of hers - but when the previously anal artist presented me with a picture of a rainbow coloured mouse recently and said, “I’m going to start doing my art differently because it’s art” – I thought: perhaps the raincoat I’m sending her with is thick enough?

Mister Maker has a lot to answer for!

I understand the value of kids and The Creative Arts. I really do. I studied music, art, and drama at school and have been known to break out in spontaneous song and dance numbers when the mood strikes me.

My husband (otherwise known as Pineman due to a questionable haircut that left him resembling the fronds on a pineapple) is not particularly dramatic but is incredibly musical and artistic, so I realise we must accept some responsibility for our kids’ artistic temperaments.

However, I think someone else needs to take some responsibility for our children’s manic craft episodes, and that is a British television show host who sports a zany vest, has crazy eyes, and fashions crafty things out of inanimate objects from his ‘doodle drawers’.  He paints, he sticks, he glues, he cuts, and somewhere in the middle of the program he wakes up some shapes that jump down from a shelf and sing, “I am a shape…la la la la”. 

He is Mister Maker, and he is an enabler!

At one stage my kids were so enamoured with Mister Maker that we had to record the show daily. They even assigned a shape to everyone in the family, and if I happened to be in the room at the wrong time, I had to be a square.

But it’s the way their little eyes light up when they see a ‘fake spilt milkshake’ being created using pink paint mixed with glue or a ‘donkey puppet’ made by sticking two boxes together and then plastered with paint, pom poms and googly eyes, that incites me to throw all easily accessible art products on a Very High Shelf.

Apologies in advance to my high school art teacher, but the three core reasons for my disdain for children’s Visual Arts are as follows:

Visual Arts are messy.

During The Ranga’s recent pre-school orientation session, he gravitated towards the painting table, and with a furrowed brow, started furiously striking the paper with the intensity of Vincent Van Gough. He layered and layered and layered and added A LOT of water from the rinsing cup and produced the masterpiece, ‘Anakin’s Footprints’, which looked suspiciously like his previous series, ‘Stars and Rope’.

Later when trying to wrangle two wet paintings, a backpack, a pair of shoes and the rescuing of The Ranga from a giant bindi patch, I copped the full force of a dripping ‘Anakin’s Footprints’ in the face; which brings me to my next point…

Visual Arts are hard to transport.

As much as I adore pre-schools and day care centres for allowing my children to creatively express themselves without my presence, they really need to consider leasing trailers.

Miss C recently brought home FOUR egg cartons containing the inside padding from a bra (apparently beds for her dolls), two paintings, two drawings and two cardboard boxes covered in paint and glitter stuck together with an empty paper towel roll and some painted yoghurt containers (apparently a boat).

And once when it was pouring rain, I had to haul a saturated Ranga, a pair of sodden thongs, a handbag, a backpack, seventeen drawings, and a pair of cardboard and cotton wool bunny ears. Plus, Miss C had to trail behind toting an umbrella, a wet painting, and a toy chicken in a basket made out of an egg carton and a pipe cleaner.

Trailer anyone?

And sometimes the art just keeps on travelling with us…like Miss C’s paper doily people who have to be strapped into the car and attend her ballet lessons.

But possibly art’s most heinous crime is its prevalence!

Visual Arts are like The Plague.

My kids never stop creating and it’s like some insidious disease that has infiltrated the house.

Despite my best intentions to follow the advice of every parent and magazine and book with their ‘great ideas’ about displaying/storing/using children’s artworks - turn it into wrapping paper, take photos of the art and make a photo book, create a crafty display wall (which would involve me creating craft to store the craft!), frame it - to the parent of the prolific artist, it is all bullshit!

I have saved some, framed three pieces for Miss C to hang in her room, stuck them to the fridge, made numerous, subtle trips to the recycling bin, and yet we are still destined to be like one of those families who have to be rescued by a bulldozer and a team of cleaners and a television crew because we have horded so much crap.

The moral to the story…

I can tolerate The Ranga’s made-up songs about Star Wars characters to the tune of Train’s Save Me San Francisco for ten straight minutes, followed by a cry of, “Mum, I can feel another song coming on”.

I can even tolerate Miss C dressing up in a petticoat I wore as a flower girl in a debutante ball when I was nine, coupled with an old bikini top, and dragging herself along the ground pretending to be Ariel from The Little Mermaid.

But the next time I hear the theme song to Mister Maker, please allow me to rock in the corner and silently weep.