Breeann Adam: Floating Through Possibilities
What does creativity look like for you these days?
In a traditional sense of the word, creativity these days looks like me loving writing, cross-stitching, and making photo albums. I do these things in the little chunks of time that I can grab throughout the day. When I was a child, I put the concept of creativity in a box. I thought of creativity as exclusively making art in various forms: drawing, writing, sculpting, beading, sewing, etc. I’d hear some adults around me say about themselves, “I’m not creative,” and I assumed they meant they weren’t talented with crafts or didn’t enjoy doing artsy activities.
Then, when I was in my twenties and child-free, I expanded my thoughts of creativity to include activities like cooking, teaching in my classroom, building a community in a new town, and imagining career possibilities. I now realize I was still excluding so much of life that is creative.
Since becoming a mother in my thirties, my view of creativity has expanded to include most of what I do during the day. I see many aspects of parenthood as intensely creative: puzzling together a schedule and juggling logistics for my family; making my children’s birthdays magical and fun; inventing new family traditions and forming family values; figuring out how to best meet my children’s emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual needs; crafting new bedtime routines that are positive for everyone; organizing spaces in new ways to make them functional and calm; finding just the right gift for a loved one; managing work and a personal life amid a family circus; deciding what the heck to make for dinner! All creative tasks.
Ultimately, creating my family was an out-of-the-box creative process in and of itself: my husband and I fostered, then adopted older children, and then birthed a biological baby - in that order. In most social circles, that is not the traditional order to creating a family, but it was the path we chose for our family. This decision required being open to making a family in a somewhat unconventional way. I love that we created a family through foster care, adoption, and biology. I feel incredibly creatively fulfilled when I think about how we built our family.
“Hope. Like the way hope isn’t classified as one of the eight basic human emotions, but it’s an invisible thread in our shared human DNA. It binds our wounds and holds us together as ourselves and to one other. It links us from who we were to who we are to who we can be. When the world, politics, evil, and disaster try to shred us to pieces, the mysterious and indomitable spirit of hope keeps us alive. Hope is holding vigil, lighting candles, and reminding us we’re here. We’re still here, dammit.”
From Breeann’s essay Reason for Living #7: Witnessing Humanness
What do you hope your kids will learn about creativity from you?
To be honest, my kids are the ones continually teaching me about creativity. My middle son makes the most incredible Lego creations and plays with his toys in fun ways I would have never thought of myself. My teenager loves to make jewelry and experiment with self-expression. Even my baby teaches me that shoestrings, backpack buckles, and whisks make the best toys! I hope my kids are always creative and living their joyful passions.
I believe most people are creative as children, but as we become more aware of what others think and more fearful of judgment as we age, those creative expressions can shrink. I suspect somewhere along the line, those adults who said about themselves, “I’m not creative,” probably felt judged or belittled somehow while creating, and so they stopped believing they could be creative.
If I had one thing I wanted my kids to learn from me regarding creativity, it would be that every person is made to create. How every person creates is what differs. Painting beautiful scenes, knitting warm blankets, composing music, building houses, parenting children with unique needs, coming up with new ways to connect with a partner, singing, meeting a need in the community in a fresh way, crafting a home into a welcoming space, and bringing new ideas into the workplace - the possibilities for creativity are endless. Finding what possibilities resonate with your unique soul and then chasing after them with reckless abandon is what matters.
If you could give everyone a small treat, what would it be?
If I could give everyone a treat, I would buy them their favorite drink and snack and take them floating on a double inner tube in late July down the Clark Fork River in our little town of Missoula, Montana, USA. I’d listen to them talk about whatever they wanted to get off their chest for the several hours it takes to float down the river and take any secrets they disclosed with me to my grave.
Two of my talents are listening well and secret keeping, and I also wish everyone in the world had a chance to float through Missoula, MT, in late July. (Missoula is where the movie A River Runs Through It takes place, if that gives you an idea of how beautiful it is). If you’re floating on the river, everything is right in your world, even if just for that small pocket of time. There are few things I love to do more.
Breeann Adam is a writer, church office administrator, and former special education teacher. Through foster care, adoption, and biology, she is a mother to many. She has three forever children, ages 16, 9, and 9 months. She wrote tiny books by hand as a child and snuck them onto her elementary school’s library shelves. She is writing her first (actual) book amid nap times and late nights. Breeann’s work was featured on ’s Substack. You can read her essay here. Bree’s own Substack is Just Write Mama.
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