Mid-June is a special time of year in my family; my Mother's birthday falls within the same week as Father's Day, so we tend to observe both days as a package deal celebrating our parents. So, since it's a special time of year for me, here's a personal story — about creativity, and creative expression, and how to encourage it and help it to grow.

We've all seen commercials for whatever household cleaner is on sale, with the horrified mother finding her children happily drawing on her nice, clean walls, right? But, not to worry! With a quick spritz of whatever cleaner she's selling, she can wipe the wall clean of her child's drawings and all is right with the world.

One afternoon, when I was young — very young (but old enough to know better), my sister (who is older than me, and so who certainly was old enough to know better) and I entertained ourselves by drawing on the nice, white walls of our playroom with crayons. After some time, our Mother interrupted us, and we were horrified... we both had that immediate, sinking feeling of knowing we'd done something terribly wrong, no matter how much of a good idea it had seemed at the time. (We were known for having good ideas that turned out to be less than good, like the time we discovered that we could decorate a lightbulb with crayons — always with the crayons! — as long as the light was plugged in and the bulb was good and hot.)

She took one long, assessing look at the wall, and said quietly, "You don't want to do that." And then turned around and left the room.

There was no point in running. And there was no way we could hide what we'd done, or fix it. It was right there on the wall in Crayola colors. So we waited, silent and shamefaced, until she came back.

And she did come back — with paintbrushes and her own precious stores of oil paints. She sat down between us, and we each had a paintbrush, and we spent the rest of the afternoon decorating that wall.

I grew up, and that playroom became my bedroom and we eventually painted over the childish figures — with a truly regrettable shade of pink, but that's another story, and yet another time when my Mother allowed me to make my own creative choices. But I can still remember what those images looked like... there was a princess, of course, because there was always a princess. And birds, and trees, and a big brown wolf with six legs.

I remember that story whenever I see a commercial like the one I described, where the perfect TV mother wipes away her child's creative impulses in order to preserve her pristine white walls.