Kids' art classes provide many lessons for moms

I watched another mother have a complete meltdown over a finger-painting project last week.

While attending my daughter's weekly art class, I noticed the mom next to me getting increasingly frustrated. Her 18-month-old daughter was apparently not smearing the paint just right or placing the foam stickers where she wanted, because this mom kept uttering statements such as, "I've had it with this project," and "No that's not right. I am so over this."

She even swore once because a foam butterfly sticker smudged the paint.

Umm … it's a toddler's art class, lady. Calm down. Take a deep breath. Remember that this is only going on the fridge for a week. Settle down.

Watching this mom lose it over finger paints made me sad for her daughter, who was too scared to do her own art project. I'm no mother of the year, but in this instance I felt glad that my own daughter's painting was just how it should be — a complete mess.

I hadn't meddled in her finger painting skills or guided her foam sticker placement. Her painting looked like the work of a 3-year-old. It was messy, creative and unrecognizable as anything.

This is how all of my daughter's works of art end up — a greenish-gray color derived by mixing all the paint together into one unrecognizable blob. I've resigned myself to her unique creative vision, and I try to be supportive of her artistic ambitions.

I smile and nod when she tells me the spider-looking thing with eight legs is a drawing of me. Her little sister always resembles an amoeba.

I bite my tongue and tell myself that she'll learn from these initial artistic attempts. I know she'll learn from her mistakes, and maybe I can even nudge her in the right direction. I encourage her, for example, to put the nose on her daddy's portrait below the eyes instead of on the forehead.

I have even been outright lying to her by telling her that yes, those random circles and lines on the paper do look like a cat.

But I recently realized that my vision is just as shortsighted as that frazzled mom in art class.

This revelation occurred when my daughter came to me with a paper this week, and there it was — a cat. The circles she had been practicing for months were there — two little ones for eyes inside one big one for a face. The lines she had been working on were there, too, only now I could see that they were actually whiskers and the squiggly line was a mouth.