On one little blue box, a fully booked calendar, and the specific guilt that likes to dress itself up as professionalism.
(Writen on the night of July 9, 2026)
The pajamas are near the top of my bag. Under them, folded in beside a spare charger and a paperback I told myself I’d read on the ferry and did not read on the ferry, is a small blue box. Zip all the way around, palm-sized, the kind that came with something I ordered on eBay ages ago and never got thrown out. I take it out. Inside: a handful of plastic dinosaurs and one Minecraft figurine, all of them Kinder Egg toys. (Not a sponsor.)
I sit on the edge of the hotel bed. My son packed this for me. Or for himself. Or possibly for the weird third thing that sits between those two options when you are two years and nine months old, and you are not entirely sure why your mother is putting pretty clothes into her suitcase.
I take a picture of the whole assortment and send it to my husband on WhatsApp. He replies LOL-ing, of course (do kids even say LOL these days?).
I laughed for maybe two seconds. Then I put the bag back where I found it lest I lose any of the precious little dinosaurs in it (I know my kid would never forgive me), and I opened my laptop and answered the email that had been sitting there since before the exhibition opening.
Here is a fact about this trip that is not particularly flattering. I have been on my calendar, more or less, from seven in the morning to nine at night that entire day and had a full day scheduled the following day. Every minute was accounted for.
Day one: an interview with the artist whose show was opening that evening, video montage for the reel we’d send out afterwards, two client calls (one with a gallerist about a potential collaboration, one with a regular client who did not, in strictness, need me to be on an island to take the call). The opening itself: the smile, the standing for several hours, the small talk that is not actually small if the person you’re doing it with might place a work with a real collector.
Day two: a semi-unexpected coffee with an artist who happened to be in town — one I’ve been trading emails and voice notes with for months and had, until the day before, mostly given up on meeting in person this year. And in the twenty-minute buffers between all of it, the tasks that don’t need me here specifically but that I’m doing anyway. Answering the email. Writing the caption. Sending the invoice. Checking yet another box.
The internal argument goes like this. I am away from my kid. Being away from him is expensive, both emotionally and mathematically, because I only have so many nights in the years where he still wants me to lie down next to him until he falls asleep. If I’m going to buy those nights back with work nights, the work I do while I am here has to be worth something. It has to be dense. It has to be more than what I would have done at my kitchen table between the bath and the story. Otherwise the exchange rate is off, and I have taken his dinosaur figurines out of his hands for nothing.
I know how this sounds. It sounds like guilt. It is guilt. The specific feeling of it, though, is the part I want to be honest about. It isn’t the sharp kind of guilt. It’s the creeping, dutiful kind that presents itself as productivity and is difficult to argue with, because on paper it is producing something. It doesn’t tell you not to work. It tells you to work harder, so the trade-off is defensible. It is very good at masking itself as professionalism.
I do this work with people who are also parents. Artists, mostly, and gallerists and museum staff. Enough of them that I have started to hear the same sentence come out of very different mouths. A painter told me, without any embellishment, that she had put away her practice for years while her children were small, and that she was only now BEGINNING to work again.
A father I work with (a sculptor, two kids) does something I have come to admire and quietly emulate. He works late into the night, after both are asleep. And on the days when he has them by himself, he brings them into the studio, and gives them a corner and works on the things that are safe to do beside a small person: drawings, layout notes, correspondence. He doesn’t describe this arrangement as heroic. He describes it as arithmetic. He simply has the hours he has in a day.
I want to be careful here. I don’t want to say women in the arts feel this more than men. What I want to say, because it is what I have observed and what I have felt in my own chest, is that when it does show up in women, it tends to arrive already fluent in the language of self-cancellation and guilt.
My painter friend did not describe her years “off” as a break from her career. She described them as a period during which her career, for perfectly reasonable reasons, was not in focus. The father with two kids doesn’t have that vocabulary. He has a different one, in which the hours are shorter, and the work still counts.
I’m not going to pretend to know why. I have theories, and my theories bore me. What I know is what shows up in my inbox.
The art world is unusually good at extracting this from us because we came into it on purpose. You don’t take this job if you don’t already love it more than is wise. You don’t stay in it if the love for your art or art in general hasn’t survived a couple of bad years. The love is not incidental. It’s the thing that makes the work good and the thing that makes it possible to keep going on terrible or, if you’re lucky, average pay. And it’s the thing that makes it difficult to draw a line between who you are and what you do.
Which means that when a small child cries in the hallway because he doesn’t want you to go to the exhibition, part of your brain does something that people whose work does not run on love are able to do more cleanly. It does not say: this is my job, I’m sorry, I have to go. It says: this is who I am, and I have to reconcile that with also being his mother, and I will do it, and I will pay for it later in ways I can’t immediately comprehend.
It is now the middle of the night on the second day. Tomorrow I will check that the little bag is in my suitcase, on top this time, so it comes out first when I unzip it at home. I will hand it to him. He will look at me, he will look at the bag, and he will not understand what has happened, and he’ll then run off with his favourite dinosaur. In two weeks he won’t remember any of this. I, however, will remember all of it — the crying, the little bag, the twenty-minute buffers I did not need to fill and filled anyway — for the rest of my life.
I don’t have a way to end this that would make it easier for me or for anyone else who is reading it because they, too, kissed their small person on the head at six in the morning and got on a ferry, or sat in their car. I don’t think there is a way. I think the honest thing is to say that the little, blue, dinosaur-filled box is my the desk, and the laptop is closed for the night, and one of those two facts is going to matter more in ten years, and I am mostly certain which one.
If you’re another parent working in the arts — or in any field where your work is, inherently, a part of you and is closer to a calling than to merely a job — I’d love to hear how the little bag of toys shows up in your life. Comment or reply. I read everything. (This is part of a longer thread of thinking I’m working on, about what a sustainable career in the arts actually looks like.)