Did Hardship Drive Creativity

Memories of my mother

Photo by Pascal Meier on Unsplash

My mom was a very creative person. Not in the same way as my dad, though. I think she was more creative out of hardship. Her life was a difficult one, growing up durning the Depression. Many had a hard life durning that time. She was not unique, but creative. In her early teen years, she cleaned people’s houses for five cents a day. The people that employed her had very large homes and my mom would work almost a whole day on one house (this was before vacuums). Large tapestry type rugs were drug out of the homes, hung on clothes lines, and beat with wicker rug beaters to clean them. Beds were stripped and made and the laundry was taken home to my grandmother who washed, dried, and folded it before returning it to the house. The family pooled money to buy flour that my grandmother made into bread. Afterwards, my mom and my aunt loaded the wagon and peddled the bread to make more money. The flour came in sacks, made of a light weight cotton, printed with flowers and stripes. My grandmother would make dresses for my mom, aunt and herself.

This is not a unique story. Most people survived this way durning the depression. If you’ve not read it, The Grapes of Wrath gives us a better understanding of what people did to survive. My grandfather was a skilled carpenter. With banks going bust and homes being abandoned, it was hard to find work. He was often contracted to demolish buildings. Sometimes he was hired to work on a foreclosed house by one of the few existing banks at the time. He would do repairs and make the house better. The bank would sell it to someone who had money. He also worked on commercial buildings. These were long jobs but with little pay. My grandfather did not shrink away from work so the family had to move many times when he learned of work in another area. The family moved from Ohio to Florida to California and to Oregon. They survived.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

My mom had to develop skills to survive and this built her creativity. She was a wonderful cook and most of what she cooked she invented. She learned some Italian cooking from my paternal grandmother. Her mom was a boil-it-until-it’s-gray cook, but could make the lightest biscuits, pies, and noodles. My mom did not get that aptitude, though. Mom could also sew almost anything she put her mind to without a pattern. I still wonder how she did it after watching many times. She loved to embroider on pillow cases, table clothes, and curtains.

Mom never attempted to paint, unless it was the walls in our home. My dad would say that the rooms were shrinking because Mom painted them so many times. We’d come home after long days in school and my dad’s work, and rooms would be changed. Once, when I was in junior high school, I arrived home and she had moved an entire interior doorway seven feet to the right. She was in the kitchen, retiling the counter tops and my grandfather was hanging doors on a new pantry created by the old doorway as if it was a regular afternoon. It was ingenious. A pantry just the depth of the doorway with shelves and two doors. The room had been painted and dinner was on the stove. I just knew that Dad would blow a fuse. He did not like change and all my mom ever did was change things. She would get an idea and by dinner time it was complete.

One day, I was just leaving for school when she confronted me. “I want to paint your room. What color would you like?” There were many paint cans sitting around the room.

“Oh, I don’t know. How about white with pink polkadots?” I left for school, knowing that what I suggested would not happen. The idea of pink polkadots was crazy and I figured that the room would be just pink. I really didn’t care, so long as my Beatles’ posters were not torn.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

When I walked into my room after school my mom was on a scaffolding like Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel (that artist was not short of creativity). She was painting polkadots. She had also gone to the fabric store and found material with rows of flowers with alternating rows of polkadots.

So, did this creativity come from hardship? Was this something that forced creativity for survival? Did I learn how to become creative from my parents? I did not have the hardships that my mom and her family went through. How did I get to be creative? Was it learned or just in me? Hop over to the new thread to weigh in.