Want to know a not-so-secret?
I am pretty sure I never would have become an artist if I had not had children. When my first baby turned one, I painted some birds for her with a (VERY) under-utilized watercolor kit. I painted them because she liked birds and I wanted them at her first birthday party.
That's it. That's the story. That's how this started.
But then it turned into something more. It turned into a chance to find something that I never even knew was there in myself. My first baby is an artist too. And once I had my second child? She only ever knew us as people who created art. She is, unsurprisingly, quite the artist too. (You should see our walls. Ha…)
Both my kids have only ever known me as an artist. They never saw me questioning how or when someone “can” call themselves an “artist” or whether I was creating “real” art, or “good enough” art, or art people would “like”. Like I have said before to them (and I mean this with everything I've got): if I am telling them they can do anything, it's my job to prove to them that I believe I can too. And they have never struggled with the title “Artist” or calling me one, or (most importantly) calling themselves one.
Because they know it's part of who they are. Just one more thing I have learned from them.
So, like I remind myself almost every day--if you spend time telling anyone that they can have the moon, I hope you're out there every day showing them how you reach for the stars.