Create Anyway: Creativity in the Margins of Motherhood: Ashlee Gadd

When we tend to the creative gifts and talents that God has planted in our hearts and really created for his glory, when we tend to that work, it makes us better mothers. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most.

I'm Shelby Abbott, and your hosts are Dave and Anne Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is Family Life Today. So we're talking about thriving today in motherhood. And I know that you have said many, many times when we had littles, you felt like your life was sort of over.

I think I said to you, like, I've lost my life. I don't even know who I am with three little boys that were five and under in the house. There is a part of me that felt like, I guess I need to take my gifts and just pack them away for a while.

18 years, 20 years. Because as a mom, you're overwhelmed and a lot of us are working or we're homeschooling or we're just stay at home moms. And maybe we've had some dreams.

I think that word even dreaming or passions. And it doesn't feel like there's time for those. Well, we've got a woman in here today who's going to say something different. Ashley Gadd is with us and she's smiling because I think you're thinking that's not true, right? Right.

I'm thinking that's not true. And also, I know what that feels like that resonates. Ashley, you've written a book called Create Anyway, The Joy of Pursuing Creativity in the Margins of Motherhood. So just tell our listeners a little bit what you do, because I think this is a really interesting topic today. Sure. So I'm a mother.

I have three kids ages 12, 9 and 5. And I'm also a writer and a photographer and just kind of a general creative. And I'm really, really passionate about reminding mothers that becoming a mom does not need to be a death sentence for their creative dreams. That was my language, not your language.

But that's what I heard you say. Did you feel that though? Maybe death sentence would be too strong for how I felt. But I think the word I would use is tension. That this was probably the first tension I felt building up inside of me when I became a mother. And I wanted to be a mom my whole life.

Right. You love it. It's a gift, a blessing. A gift, a blessing. I dreamed of having children and being a mom. And even so, when I became a mother, that first kind of tension rising up in me was, how am I going to throw myself into motherhood the way that I want to and also tend to my creative spirit that God very much planted inside of me?

And can those two things coexist? I think that was my first year of motherhood was really wrestling through. Can my art exist alongside my motherhood? Kind of explain, because listeners, if you're a mom, you're going to relate to this, what it felt like as a young mom of that tension. Like, what did you feel like personally?

It felt like a scarcity mindset, I think is where I really struggled was I felt that every second I was spending on my art was a second being taken away from my motherhood. Did you feel guilty? I felt guilty. I felt selfish.

I felt that I wasn't doing anything well enough. That I wasn't giving my all to my art and I wasn't giving my all to motherhood. And I was sort of suspended in midair trying to keep up with the very real demands that motherhood had placed on me.

And also the very real desires that I wanted to cultivate in the world. And so I was sort of stretched like Gumby, I think, both ways. And I'm just guessing again, I'm not a mom, obviously. I mean, dads experience this a little bit too.

But it's definitely different, I think, for moms because there's even the maternal instinct that dads have, but not the same way. But here's my question. Did you feel like that tension usually gets answered, like, got to put the creative away, put away my gifts? I mean, your title is create anyway.

So I know you literally picked each word. You're like, no, even in that moment, I'm saying anyway, create. But was that attention to get to that? Because I think most moms say, okay, for the next five, six, seven, ten years, I'm only going to do this one thing and do it well. And I'm not saying that's wrong or bad. That's often the mindset. And you're saying, it could be a different mindset. Definitely.

And I think there is a very real assessment of priorities there. Obviously, you technically can put your creative dreams on a shelf for five years, ten years. You could do that. You can't put your baby on a shelf for five or ten years. So there is a very real difference, I think, in those two roles and even the priority and the placement in our hearts as mothers and as creatives. But for me, it sort of turned into this kind of like expectation management, you know, of prior to having children, what it looked like to create in my days, what it looked like to write and to take photographs or to do any number of creative things.

It looked one way. And after I became a mother, it looked a different way. And I think part of my journey into becoming such a champion and a cheerleader for mothers not letting their creative selves fall by the wayside is that transforming mindset that you sort of have to go through when you just recognize that creating as a mother does not look the same way that it did before I became a mom. And once I kind of accepted that, I might not have three straight hours to sit down and write, but I have, you know, this little pocket of time here and there and I can still use that. And those minutes still matter.

And none of it is wasted, even though it doesn't look like it used to look like. You write about writing your book on note cards while you're sitting by the bathtub. That's how I started writing this book. Yeah. I mean, can you imagine doing that? No, because I was yelling most of the time. And so I wasn't sane enough to probably do that, but I could have thought of different ways that that worked for me because you're saying that just figure out what that looks like for you.

Yeah. And I think, you know, I've had to let a lot of my own expectations shift and change, and I've had to let go of a lot of perfectionism, you know, creating in the margins, creating on the bathroom floor. It looks different. It feels different.

It's not perfect. I've had plenty of moments where I'm yelling at my kids while I'm trying to write or whatever the thing is. I wrote Cree anyway in the middle of the pandemic and all of the coffee shops were closed and there were days when I had three children in my house, 24 hours a day, my husband was home 24 hours a day.

And some days I would take my laptop out into the driveway and I would just sit in my car in the driveway and just connect to the Wi-Fi. And I would just write sitting in my car parked in the driveway to just tend to that part of myself, which is so essential to my own flourishing. And I think that's why I'm so passionate about helping women figure out how to make it work, even if it's hard and even if it's complicated. Because I just believe that when we tend to the creative gifts and talents that God has infused in our DNA, that has like planted in our hearts and really created for us, for his glory, when we tend to that work, it makes us better mothers. And that's a permission slip.

I just want every woman to be able to hold, you know. What about for the mom that's listening that she says, like, I'm not a creative, I'm a computer programmer. I don't have that like that creative part you're talking about, because I feel like I don't have that in me that much.

But what would you say to that person? She's a creative. Are we all creative?

I mean, in some sense. How would you define a creative? I believe we're all creative because we were created in the image of God and God is a creator and God is creative. And so if we were created in the image of the same God who created butterflies and created any number of wonderful, brilliant, amazing things in this world, we have to believe that we are also creative. And so I gently push back on that notion, but I also want to free women up from connecting creativity to crafting or creativity to being a painter. Like, I think a lot of women have a lot of hangups with the word creative or creativity. And I just want to broaden the scope of what that means, you know.

I can broaden that because here's what I struggled with when our kids were little. I used to think, like, man, I could craft a message or I would take a walk if I had five minutes by myself and I would dream what it would look like to bring women together, to bring a ministry or to meet the needs of women in our community. And so I have this leadership gift. And so my creative side doesn't sound creative. That's why I say that.

But it is. It's part of who God made me to be. Like, how can I draw women together?

How can I stir women's hearts with the gospel? And so I don't think of myself as a creative, but they're this stirring. It's the dreams that God put in our hearts that I think we think as moms that we have to shelve them. And God's whispering. Don't you feel like that?

Yeah. He whispers to that part of us. And mothers in particular are creating all the time. I mean, think about a mom going through one day of her life, creating meals, creating memories, creating magic, creating rhythms. Like, mothers are creating life.

We are creating all the time. And so I think that's such a helpful reframe for women who have hang ups with that word or that word makes them bristle or uncomfortable or I can't own that title or that's not me. It's like, but it is. It's inside of you, you know?

Yeah, you're right. Even I was thinking of the way that I used to teach Bible stories to the kids. Like, I would come up with some way, like, how can I? Her stories are epic.

You're talking about a creator. I started getting my phone out and taping them. I'm like, these are children's books. That's amazing. I've never heard such epic.

And they're hanging on every word. I'm like, you're not a creative. Yes, you are. It just depends how you look at that. I like how you're saying that God's a creative God.

So he has made that and put that into it. But here's my question for you two moms because one thing I've noticed about Ann, I don't know you Ashley, but I'm guessing from what you've said, you can juggle many things at once. Like you're writing a book while you're giving your kids a bath and your husband's probably, whatever.

I could not do that. She's a one thing focus. And you know, this over here is like, I'll get to that next. So is this partly gifting or can you think any woman depending on their focus could maybe do this even if they're more of a one focus, one thing at a time woman? I think personality probably plays a really big role in that. And my personality is one that I do like to juggle a lot of things at once.

And I used to be a waitress and so I'm used to having lots of plates on my arms and I'm, that's comfortable for me to be juggling it all and making it work in the margins. I think other women, they might need a different structure for them. You know, I do think that all women can and should create in the margins of their days because the number one reason I hear from women who aren't creating is that they don't have time. They don't have time and they don't have space. And so when I push back on that lovingly and suggest, well, if you don't have time, you don't have space. Could you give 15 minutes on the bathroom floor with the stack of index cards?

And could you delete Instagram from your phone for a week or a month? Some people can't, but I think there are lots of different ways to make this work for you. And for me, I always come back to this phrase of just expectation management, you know, when we can kind of sit down with ourselves and really assess what is possible in any given season, it's going to look different. And it looks different for me even from when I had babies and toddlers, you know, hanging on my body to now where my kids are all in school for various parts of the day. And I do have different blocks of time than I had when I had a baby and a toddler. And my creativity at that time looked different than it looks now. And I had a different method, you know, when I wrote the index cards on the bathroom floor, I had a one-year-old and it was writing in my car, sitting in the driveway.

And I, you know, part of that was the pandemic and part of it was just the life stage I was in. It's like, I would do anything to be alone for five minutes. And now I have a little bit bigger blocks of time, but I don't have the same capacity or the same time as a mother who has full grown children who are totally out of the house. She has different hours in the day than I do.

And so I think just assessing in every season, what is possible is a good place to start. Hey, I just wanted to take a quick minute to jump in and say, whatever you're going through today, listen to this. You aren't alone. I know that you know that God is with you, but let me add this. Did you know that Dave and I have a team here at Family Life today, ready to pray for you.

And it's this incredible honor and privilege to lift your name up to God. So if you need prayer, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. And here's the easy way to do it. You can text us and we will pray for you. Here's how you do it. Text FLT to 80542.

Again, that's FLT to 80542. And we will send you an immediate text back to let you know that we've connected. And then you can respond to our text with your prayer request. And we will pray for you.

Text FLT to 80542. Talk about the Target parking lot. If you looked at my camera roll right now, I'm not kidding. There would probably be 30 to 40 pictures of a sunset in the Target parking lot. I don't know why God does this. I can't make sense of it, but I swear to you, the sunsets and Target parking lots are more beautiful. Anywhere else in the world.

Before or after you spent the money. I just love finding beauty in unexpected places. I think that is like the mark of a true artist in this world. And for whatever reason, God tends to minister to my heart in Target parking lots. And I often just sense his presence there.

I don't know why. But really, the next time you're at Target, I just want you to go at sunset. Just check out the sky and see what you find. Seriously, you're not kidding. I'm not joking. I wish I had my camera roll to show you right now.

But I'll have to text it to you later. What I'm hearing you say, though, is open your eyes. That's what I'm hearing. It could be Costco. It could be Target. It could be the gas station.

It could be your backyard, but we often don't open our eyes to see what God's doing and creating right around us because we're so myopic in our little world, especially moms with little kids. Actually, I did it yesterday. I went on a walk. She did. I was on my bike.

She's walking. But I was feeling sad yesterday. We've just got a lot going on with people that are sick.

And there's just a lot of things that are out of control. So I was walking. I was telling God, pouring out my heart to him, like, Lord, I'm sad about this.

I'm frustrated or I'm mad. And I said, I just need you to show up in my life. I need to see you. I need something like, are you here? Do you see me? Do you care?

Do you hear me? And I had my camera with me. Phone. This is on my camera. Ashley has a real camera. We have a phone. I take photos on my phone all the time. Those pictures in your book, those are not iPhones. Those are from a real camera. Your book is beautiful.

Thank you so much. There's a quote. I think it's Chase Jarvis who said this, but he always says the best camera is the one you have with you. And so that is my permission to embrace your iPhone photography. So mine is animals. So I walk out my house, there's this tiny little bunny. So I take a picture. I felt like, well, it's nice Lord, you know, just a little, and some people like, it's just the rabbit eating the grass. But for me, it was like, oh, I'm a believer.

Yeah, I believe it. And then I get to the pond and like, there's all these baby little ducklings like, oh, but then the most epic part of the walk is I come down our street and there's the most gorgeous rainbow. And it was, I mean, I show you, I didn't even see it.

Isn't that crazy? I ride my bike. She goes, look at the rainbow. My rainbow. Oh wow.

But you're right. I wouldn't have noticed it because a lot of times when we're in life and we're just walking, our head is down and all we see is this is hard and this is difficult and I'm sad or I'm mad or I'm lonely. But when we lift up our eyes, we see him.

Yeah. And I think sometimes what we do as moms, we just had this women's group and we were like, I was asking, write down the dreams that you've had in your life. And as these women are writing, tears are falling down their faces. And I asked them, like, why were tears just streaming down your face?

And they said, because I've put those dreams away. And what you're saying is... Create anyway.

Create anyway. You're saying you don't have to put them away. Yeah. I think I want to put like a caveat on that, which is to say sometimes God does ask us to put our dreams on a shelf. Maybe you wanted to be a ballerina. Yeah.

You got hurt. Yes, exactly. And so I want to leave room for the sovereignty of God in this equation, but I don't believe that the second we become a mother, we're not entitled to those dreams anymore. I also think God can shape our dreams into something different, but I truly believe that God has put gifts and talents into each of us. And he has created passions in each of us for different communities of people. And so I love really exploring with women. What is the thing you're really, really good at and who are the people you really, really care about?

And finding that intersection. Because to me, that's where creative dreams are born. It's born out of the natural talent that you have and the people that you have a heartbeat for.

And so how that actually all pans out, I think it varies from person to person. But you know, for a long time, I really wrestled with that tension of balancing and I hate that word, but I can't think of a better one right now, but sort of balancing motherhood against the backdrop of those dreams and where I land now is that it's good and holy for my children to see me pursuing the dreams that God has put on my heart. And that's something I actually really want to model for my children, you know, that when God drops the dream in my heart and I go out and pursue it, that that's something they can do. And there's no better way for me to model it than to show them what that actually looks like. And it's important to me that my children see me as a whole person, you know, and not just the woman like schlepping them from, you know, school to extracurriculars, home to quesadillas and whatnot.

I want my children to see the way I light up when I write and when I take pictures and when I create things that just make me feel alive, I want them to have a mom in touch with that side of herself. Is that how you founded coffee and crumbs? Yes. Talk about that a little bit. Yes, very much so.

Yeah. So 2013, I had a one year old. I was not even pregnant yet with my second and I had been writing for a really long time writing online, writing personal stories, writing essays. And at that time, I was really inspired by motherhood and I was looking for places to write about motherhood, looking for places online to submit my writing. And at the time, all that was really out there in, you know, 2013, there was like Huffington Post parents and Scary Mommy.

And you know, some of these other websites that just weren't quite a fit for my personal writing style and the types of stories that I wanted to tell. And so God just kind of dropped the stream in my head of creating a collaborative space online where women can write stories about motherhood, not advice, you know, not $800 diaper bag recommendations, but just stories, really honest, raw, gritty stories. And so I rallied up a group of friends who were all mothers and writers and we started coffee and crumbs officially in 2014.

We just had our 10 year anniversary. I mean, I like the title. I'm guessing this is what you were thinking as well because it's messy.

Yes. So initially my heart for that name was at that time, coffee and crumbs kind of defined my life because I was at home with little kids and lukewarm coffee and crumbs everywhere. But to me, coffee and crumbs represents the beauty and mess of motherhood.

It's the peace and the chaos. Is that why these stories that you've included in your book, did they come from coffee and crumbs? So this was all original to create anyway, but I have been writing about motherhood for 10 years now, publicly online through coffee and crumbs. And I would say that this book, Create Anyway, is really the embodiment of the last decade of my work and what I believe. And I think the more that I've written alongside other women and I've really engaged in helping other women kind of harness their creative gifts into a collective good, it's really solidified this message for me in my heart of how much this actually matters. Because I've watched the art of storytelling really transform women as mothers.

And I want other people to have access to that. How many stories are in the book of these women? I don't know off the top of my head how many are in there.

Maybe eight to 10. I have these little kind of spotlights throughout the book and I really wanted to include that because I wanted to showcase the fact that creativity means different things to different people. And so I'm a writer and I'm a photographer and I talk a lot about that in the book. I talk a lot about writing and I talk a lot about photography, but I wanted to rally up women who are painters and who are sculptors and who make different kinds of art. Because I want to expand that definition of what it means to be an artist and what it means to be creative. So that was kind of my heart and including other perspectives in the book. That's beautiful.

Thank you. And then my last question is, as a mom I remember struggling with, I don't even have time to read my Bible. How do I develop my walk with God?

Because I know you would say that's pivotal as a mom to not forget the importance of our walk with God. Do they go hand in hand? Can they? Because I'm like, do I draw? Do I create? Or do I spend time with God? You know? Absolutely. How do we balance that? And there's that word balance again.

I know. Well, I really love that question because I think spending time with God is spending time with God. And you can spend time with God while you're painting. You know, you can go outside and see a bunny or see a sunset in Target, you know, and worship and spend a moment just like relishing in the extravagance of God's creation. And I believe that is part of making art and that's part of spending time with God. So I don't even think of those things as necessarily separate.

I think sometimes, you know, I will be struck over the head with a story or something that I'm just dying to sit down and write and it feels very like Holy Spirit commissioned. And so I think when we're walking with the Lord, the Lord walks with us in our art and they don't have to be two different things, I guess. You know, you are the blending of the and. You know what I mean, because we always say and, or, you're saying others are the genius of the and. Both and is where I land. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. Because I tend to go one or the other, but to include both, we're worshiping the creator himself in his creation and how he's created us as well.

That's good. It can be difficult to think about creativity as a form of connection with God and even worship, but our God is a creative God as we've been hearing about today. So I love this perspective about embracing the both and-ness when it comes to creativity.

It's really great stuff. I'm Shelby Abbott, and you've been listening to Dave and Anne Wilson with Ashley Gadd on Family Life Today. Ashley has written a book called Create Anyway, The Joy of Pursuing Creativity in the Margins of Motherhood. And I know that you listening right now might be a mother and you feel like, I am living my life in the margins.

How can I pursue creativity? Well, this book is going to help you do that to unlock a deeper sense of fulfillment in your role that God has called you to as a mom. You can get your copy right now of Ashley's book by going online to familylifetoday.com, or you can find a link in the show notes.

Or feel free to give us a call at 800-358-6329 to request your copy. Again, the number is 800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. And you know, we're right here smack dab in the middle of October, and that means that Halloween is coming up. And regardless of how you may feel about the holiday of Halloween, we want to give you an opportunity to be able to communicate the gospel to your family in this moment. So Family Life has created a free resource for you that's a downloadable family activity for you and your kids to do. So basically it includes pumpkin face stencil sheets, a guided script to help your kids talk about and learn about the gospel as you're going through carving your pumpkin into a jack-o-lantern this year. So you can find this free resource at familylife.com slash pumpkin, or you can look for it in the show notes. Again, the website is familylife.com slash pumpkin.

So you can learn how to share the gospel proactively with your kids as you're carving out your pumpkin in just a couple of weeks. Now tomorrow, Ashley Gadd is back to talk about balancing creativity and motherhood. She's going to talk about guilt and the role of play in pursuing creative passions with your kids. That's coming up tomorrow. We hope you'll join us. On behalf of David Ann Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor-supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.