How blessed we are. Clients have started coming in again and for some reason, even with the constant chaos in our little abode, I find the time to think of concepts to satiate them. Here are the great things about my job which I've only just started to appreciate:
a. You don't actually have to graduate to be a graphic artist
b. You can Photoshop to death your own pictures quite well to make yourself passably attractive even just in cyberspace
c. It doesn't matter whether you're in Timbuktu or in the bowels of Negros Oriental, you can still work for as long as you have a PC and Photoshop
d. You can make your child's own invitations during her parties. No ugly morphed bodies of your face, Poj, in a Pooh or Dora the Explorer body.
There are still so many advantages of being a graphic artist. And for a time, I thought I had to give all these up. This time in September last year, when you were 3 months old, I had just resigned from my full-time job so I could take care of you. I thought I'd give freelancing a try and for some reason ,clients came to me anyway even without credible references. Unfortunately, I just couldn't cut it. I was missing one deadline after another. I didn't know how to handle my time. And revisions were so difficult. I just couldn't meet clients because I was breastfeeding you and all. I found it hard trying to compartmentalize my being a mother from my job especially since you were just a few feet away from me when I was working. It was a difficult time, financially and just about all other aspects.
But see, the higher beings really do have everything planned. You had everything in plan too, I think. Because when I had to give up designing for a time, I was forced to pick up my other love which was writing. I always said to friends that all I really wanted to do was to write for a living, didn't matter if it was for a tabloid or a TV guide. I just wanted to write. And here you were, testing my abilities, making me look for ways to make that dream come true. Whether by choice or circumstance, writing came to be even if I did have to divide my writing for work and my writing for creativity's sake.
So now, I'm stuck in the in-betweens again. I cannot choose between one or the other. And I don't even want to try. Here's another dream of mine I'm sharing with you. This was inspired by your birth too, actually. I plan to make graphic apparel for babies. There are moms like me out there, I'm sure. Looking for apparel that are the antithesis of babyish, not wanting to let their kids drown in baby pinks and blues.
The brand will be called Hodgepodge (no surprise where that came from). It's an extension of visual poetry in clothing. By the time you'll be old enough to understand it, I hope to get it up and running. In the meantime, here's a preview:
And the world had found new terms of worth
He laid down on the sunburned Earth
And raveled a flower and looked away
--Play?Play?-- What should he Play?
--An Interpretation of Pan With Us from Robert Frost's A Boy's Will
As far fetched as you can
For Dreams aren't made
Solely on Structured Plans
Draw me a Dream
Make it over the Moon
And keep that dream as far from
the reality that comes too soon
to amaze me. It beats the world.
It beats the yearning out in play
It beats just how it should
On this humid February Day
Play. Play. Always Play.
I love you. Always and always.
Mom
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