Among the many surprises of parenthood was the incredible amount of art my boys created. Even more surprising was how much I loved each and every drippy, indecipherable, glitter-laden piece they created when they were first in school.

In preschool, my oldest son crafted alphabet letters into creatures that we carefully taped on the playroom wall, each a mini masterpiece of his curious and growing mind. They brought home toilet paper roll ghosts and valentines still sticky with Elmer's glue that left our hands dyed red for days.

Dutiful new parents that we were, we kept everything, even putting frames up that allowed us to display the most recent few pieces. Our refrigerator, kitchen cabinets, and bulletin board overflowed with crooked hearts, hand-traced turkeys, spaghetti-limbed self-portraits, and the Batman logo, drawn repeatedly during my youngest son's Caped Crusader phase.

I've confessed that I come from a strong genetic line of paper hoarders, and nobody loved a stack of dusty old papers like my Dad. My mom kept boxes of random tokens from our childhood, including some of my first writing projects, my siblings' and my trophies, and various other items documenting our big and small achievements.

I did all I could to fight those urges emanating from that dominant Hoarder Gene, as my sister and I have come to refer to it. I knew I couldn't keep it all, and the piles and piles of art seemed to grow each week exponentially. A few years ago, I sorted through three large storage containers and culled it down to one box of the most significant masterworks. Particularly cute or funny things were kept, and anything from a coloring book or template was tossed. It was a lovely trip down memory lane, watching their handwriting change as they evolved into their own styles. I fondly recalled days when fingerpaints dotted with Cheerios on paper made for a perfect pre-nap activity. I found crumbling Play-Doh creatures imprinted with googly eyes, the original artistic intention lost to time and my failing memory.

Based on the volume of the artwork we'd collected in the first six and eight years of my kids' lives, I figured we'd be set for another few when we'd go through the next toppling-over pile and conduct the same exercise of review and refuse.

But something terrible happened. The river of art slowed to a trickle and recently stopped almost completely.

Don't get me wrong, we are still drowning in paper, but it's all the boring things like spelling tests, permission slips, or report cards. I'm sure I'm supposed to be excited about those things, but if I'm honest, who cares?

Where have the landscapes of castles and dragons gone? The soggy, tilted milk-carton birdhouses? The paper-plate mask treasures tied with white string, eye holes just enough off center to make wearing it and walking at the same time a treacherous endeavor?

My kids go to a fine and performing arts magnet school, so I know they get plenty of art in their lives, but now their projects are Minecraft worlds or stop-motion animation output on video. Creative and fun, but not exactly the same.

And I miss it.

Motherhood is like this: The stages you think will never end, that drive you crazy and cause you to question your abilities as a human, are the same things you miss the very instant you realize they are in the past.

Recently I came across a small stack of art treasures I must have missed in that purge (I told you the gene is powerful). It was like discovering a family heirloom. I sat down and looked through these little gems, crooked handwriting, and wide-arced smiling faces. One was a yellowed paper with "I love Mom" scrawled in red marker. It had multiple push-pin holes on the corners, so it must have lived on the bulletin board for a while, being repositioned and punctured repeatedly. On the back, I'd made a notation with the year. I wrote:

"Lucas, 2016: I made this for you so you remember when you’re mad at me. :( "

It made me sad to think that my sweet little boy thought I needed such a thing, but of course, that's what art should do. It reminds you to love while it breaks your heart.

Just like being a Mom.

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This essay also appeared in the March 2023 issue of FLM - Fete Lifestyle Magazine.