Potting

I took a sleeping pill one night and then made the happy mistake of getting online and buying stuff. The next morning it turned out that I had bought myself eight pottery classes for three hours on a Monday night. I thought about canceling just like I think about cleaning the hard to reach windows upstairs and of course never actually did it and promptly forgot all about it. Then Steve came home from work one Monday and gave me this funny look and said, "Is that what you're wearing to your pottery class?"
"Pottery class?" So, I jumped in to my dungarees (this is a clothing blog so I'll tell you that dungarees are exactly what you're supposed to wear when sitting at a potters wheel unless you're planning on being the Patrick Swayze character in Ghost in which case you can go shirtless) and motored to class, leaving my Dearly Beloved in charge of our hysterical two year old and oblivious five year old.

Now to be fair, I have done a pottery class before so I knew what to expect, sort of. Except this time, we had a new teacher who had the people skills of a Customs Officer. Every single thing I said to Margaret (not Maggie, but Margaret) was met with a blank stare.
"I thought we were only allowed an ounce of pot."
Nothing.
When my clay pot fell to pieces on the wheel I announced, "Ah-ha! Now the student has become the master."
Nothing.
In fact, nobody in the classroom found me amusing at all which only took me about three classes to realize and finally quit trying, by which time the class had halved in size.

And this is precisely the point at which things became really relaxing. I don't know how things are in your town or country or home, but I live in an atmosphere of intense parenting competitiveness. In my little world it's not uncommon for every mother within a half mile radius to crane their necks when you open your picnic to see if you have packed enough anti-oxidants and organic free range carrots for your children. If you pick up your phone to make funeral arrangements for your dead sister while pushing your child on the swing at the park, someone will take a photo of you and write a very long moan on facebook about how parents are no longer present for their children. It's a fierce game of mothers-against-mothers out there and the only defense is to surround yourself with like-minded people who know how to return fire during a drive by criticism from a parenting busy-body.

It's exhausting and I'm looking forward to the day we all realize how unreasonable it all is and return to parenting like our parents did, which is to say, hardly at all.

In the mean time, there are pottery classes. A room filled with women all doing their best to make something out of nothing. All mothers, all learning to do something they have never done before and mostly finding the result to be completely different to the product they set out to make. In this room where the wheels spin and hum, where we all have our heads down concentrating ever so hard at our own task, it is not possible to criticise each other. When Donna's pot spins in to a lump of curved clay beneath her hands, there are sympathetic words from all of us because we all know we're one wheel spin away from making exactly the same mess. And when you have your hands on the clay and the wheel is pushing you around and making you doubt yourself and then suddenly your hands grow stronger and your arms tighten and for once you have a real idea of what it is you're making and you can feel hope that it'll all turn out fine and you let out an involuntary happy squeal, it is then that you'll feel a room full of women sending you their best.