Since becoming a parent, how I interact with ‘the arts’ has changed. With two children under four, it has become more demanding and participatory—cutting out shapes and patterns using scissors (with a safety grip), making sure the crayons are put away (nightly), helping create puppet shows (and doing our best to avoid glitter). This is, of course, the domestication of art, of it becoming ‘craft’, and in a private rather than public sphere, often without an audience other than immediate family members. Here, I am a step away from being a critical viewer even as I continue my paid labour as an arts worker in literature.

I am grateful it has brought me back to a more innocent, and paradoxically deeper, view of what art might be, of how to make meaning from music and theatre and dance and cinema, especially when no one is watching. It is more difficult to be cynical about ‘the art world’ when your children tell you that you are doing well. It quiets the inner doubt, even though it matters how wonky the rainbow is, whether the unicorn’s horn looks like a carrot, and if this cardboard shape really is a seahorse or a snail. It nourishes me and my partner even as our eyes feel like falling out at 1 am (and 4 am and 5 am, sometimes even 7 pm). It balms and soothes us too, heals us from the grind of family life even as it is part of it, is a respite from cleaning dried Weet-Bix off a high chair, from folding up literal mountains of laundry, from having to vacuum so often that the battery never seems to charge properly. Art becomes life-giving in this context. It is also woven in and out of other conversations, just like it was before parenthood, with books and shows and songs just being in our household alongside food and tennis balls and whatever else. There has been a break and a continuation in art’s meaning in all our lives, some of whose are new to this very world.