Shortly before my daughter was born I typed something along the lines of “ how to be an artist and a mother” into Google. Funny how Google has become a Magic 8 Ball of sorts… and I felt myself willing the collective to tell me everything was going to be OK — yes of course you can do it all! — no, you won’t completely lose yourself to this little being — knowing full well that life was soon going to be drastically different.
I was under no illusion that my days or my time would be the same. I was excited, but also afraid… Mainly, because at 36-years-old there have been so many things that have felt out of reach professionally, and soon, I knew I’d have a whole new competing job title — one I had absolutely no pre-requisites for.
I don’t really know what I hoped to find… but I don’t remember discovering much of anything at the time that made me feel very relieved about juggling creativity and motherhood. In fact, I think what the Google Gods unearthed that day was pretty depressing.
My daughter has now been here with us for 6 months, and oddly, in these last 6 months, I would argue that I’ve been more creatively productive than I’ve been in many other seasons of my life. Yet, one of the most difficult things I’ve experienced during this transition is not only juggling creative pursuits with raising an infant — it’s not simply finding time, but time itself.
My initial fear was losing myself in motherhood. Strangely (or not-so-strangely), I feel braver and more capable in many ways, but also more afraid for different, and more unexpected reasons.
I am braver than I was because bringing my daughter here was the hardest and most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced, which has left many of the things I worried about previously seem pale by comparison. But I am also more fearful because I feel like it will all slip through my fingers.
On a difficult day a couple months ago, I queried Google again with a similar musing, and this time I found a true gem from the New Yorker titled, “Being an Artist and Mother,”an autobiographical comic by artist Laura Weinstein.
I found myself both laughing and crying with her insights, which felt nearly identical to my own experience.
Image Credit: New Yorker, Laura Weinstein
She seemed to understand the simultaneous exhaustion and yet overwhelmingly obsessive desire to document this experience… the experience of becoming undone and remade again into this new person all while caring for a brand-new human who is so rapidly changing. Together, my daugther and I are morphing at what feels like lightning speed and I find myself fighting to hold onto this time…
How can I capture the subtleness in her growing movements… the density of her little body shifting forward in her highchair to look at the snow falling outside the sliding glass door…
Or how heavy her cheek looks against her dad’s arm when she falls asleep.
Often, I find myself wishing there was a pause button so I could earn myself just enough time to absorb, but also to reinterpret. I think most artists feel this sort of insatiable desire to extricate their realities. To transpose and transmit our human condition. But when you’re mothering and mothering becomes part of the experience you want to express the question is…
Image Credit: New Yorker, Laura Weinstein
And then to top it all off….
Image Credit: New Yorker, Laura Weinstein
I had hoped to attain certain things before my daughter was born, and yet I’m finding that since she’s arrived, this very predicament: the making and capturing, the desire to hold onto something that can’t possibly be held, is changing my process and how I make art as a whole.
This month, on the Letterbox, my Patreon account, I’ll dive into what the creative process looks like for me today. I share some of my personal work, and offer a sneak peek into my visual journal.