Well this is a loaded question isn’t it? Unfortunately, not my title but the title of an awesome documentary I just saw on women artists. Check out www.whodoesshethinksheis.net. Just recently I found myself defending my artist to a gifted, female photographer. I was happily second shooting for her in Hawaii. Anyway, we were shooting this wedding in Hawaii….It was gorgeous, the couple was gorgeous…..I like to call this scenario “shooting ducks in a barrel.” So, I was trying to tell her that I was a goddess photographer and not a soccer mom. She gave me a once over and pointed to my crocs, my Capri’s and most incriminating of all, my necklace made of photos of my kids and said have you looked in the mirror lately. And, don’t you drive a minivan, and doesn’t your daughter in fact play soccer? Yeah… but, well… Okay maybe she had a point.

This film challenged all that. Just where do we as women, get off, trying to do art, mothering, marriage and god knows what else? Society tells us that we can’t have it all, we have to choose. I know I assumed a soccer mom couldn’t be a cool artist. Well, didn’t we all learn what happens when we assume…. You can still drive a minivan and have something to say. “Who does she think she is?” follows the lives of 5 different artists navigating their muse, family, and life in general. My absolute favorite was this Mormon mother of 5 in New England that made these incredible sculptures from clay. She couldn’t have appeared any more normal. Jeans, t-shirt, quirky glasses and nice highlights. I can’t even imagine handling 5 children and then finding the time to make the most outrageous creatures often with several heads birthing other creatures with multiple heads. Then the film showed a clip of her ten year old daughter saying, “It would be nice, if when my friends came over these things weren’t in the dining room.” It was just fantastic that these objects came out of this woman. Her story was unfortunately one of the only ones with a seemingly happy home life.

The first thing my girlfriend said to me when the film was over was that she wanted her friend, an actress to see it. Also, it was a shame that all the women in it were destitute or divorced. I actually didn’t notice that part at first…but that’s just me… glass is always half full. What I noticed first, is the amazing work these women were producing. Also, how strong they all seemed. I particularly related to the fact that they always had a drive to create but it was somehow magnified after childbirth. I have always considered myself an artist… but it wasn’t until I had my kids that I truly got it. Got how important it was to create for myself. Maybe the act of creation itself flicks the switch. I remember watching my brother and his wife when they first had their twins…. and thought, wow this is it… this is what it is all about… kids, family. This was before I had my own kids. It is just that they had longed for them for years and now they just felt so blessed. It was a beautiful thing to witness. I knew I always wanted to have kids but it was more like something I was going to get to eventually, after the list of other things I was doing. I don’t mean that to sound callous. I cannot imagine life without kids, without my own precious children. But, I also can’t imagine life without creativity and art. It is like birthing a baby. It is a long process that is very intricate, many things can go wrong. But, in the end it is so right, and couldn’t have happened any other way.

So who do you think you are? Are you a soccer mom with a camera and a vision? Embrace it, be the best damn artist, mom, spouse, friend, woman you can be. Nurture it. Follow every whim. Write down your ideas. Assign yourself projects. Rub shoulders with other artists. Go on a play date with yourself. Read a book, journal, jog, knit… whatever it is find time to express yourself because if you don’t you will feel less capable to handle everything else that comes with….life.