The Blending of Roles
© Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Mother And Child
Njideka Akunyili Crosby
“There is something so relatable about Mother and Child—a vulnerability that often comes from choosing to stay open to the love and the loss that life can bring.”
– Elizabeth Mathis Cheatham
These past few months I have been thinking extra on this role called Mother. How it grows us, challenges us and affects us as creatives.
Recently, the slow drain of this exaggerated domesticity has begun to take its toll on me. Earlier today, as I cringed with each “Mom!” and felt for certain my brain would turn to mush if I had to endure one more Marvel fact, I found myself wondering if maybe Marina Abrovomić had been onto something when she infuriated everyone by saying that ‘one only has limited energy in the body, and she would have had to divide it’ had she had children.
Over the years, I have shared concern—first only to my therapist, then in hushed tones to my closest friends, and now with less guilt and shame—that I did not inherit the “maternal gene.”
While my heart has always been full of love for my boys, I have not always enjoyed the role of mother… nor have I thought the job description aligned very well with my skill sets. These feelings were most poignant when my boys were little, as I found babies terrifying and messy and desperately missed adult interactions and stimulating conversations.
No matter how “maternal”—whatever that actually even means—we are in the best of times, we are all being stretched and challenged these days as parents.
Today, as I found myself spiraling down, worrying that I would never be able to find the time nor energy to ever again form a semblance of a clever idea, I grabbed hold of my trusty tool of research to help me find equilibrium and see all this with new eyes. Gratefully, I quickly found the website of An Artist in Residency in Motherhood—a self-defined, home-based artist residency created by England-born, Philadelphia-based artist Lenka Clayton when her first child was one and a half years old. I got chills and a much-needed perspective shift as I read her manifesto. Through her work with An Artist in Residency in Motherhood, Clayton has not only created art that has been collected by institutions like Crystal Bridges, but she has also inspired mothers to allow all that title entails—the challenges and the treasures… the monotony and the monumental... to "shape the direction of [their] work, rather than try to work 'despite it’”… “to view [the role of engaged mother and serious artist], force them gently if necessary, to inform one another” instead of seeing them as “mutually exclusive endeavors.”
It was during my research that I was also reminded that the amazing Nigerian born, LA-based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby was awarded the prestigious 2017 MacArthur “Genius” Grant while her son was still an infant. That same year, her breathtaking Mother and Child self-portrait entered the collection of the Met. Within the work, seated on a couch, back to the viewer— Njideka gazes at a photo on the wall of her young mother, Dora, holding Njideka as a toddler. Sadly, Dora had recently passed when the piece was made and never had the opportunity to see her daughter pregnant, as Njideka was while making the piece, or hold her grandson.
There is something so relatable about Mother and Child—a vulnerability that often comes from choosing to stay open to the love and the loss that life can bring. While Njideka did not have her mother with her when Jideora was born, I pray she still had someone there to hold him in the middle of the night and send her for naps during the day. And that Njideka had a kind inner mother who told her, ‘Well done, My Love. This is hard and I know you are exhausted. You are also strong and brave and capable. You’ve got this.’
© Julie Blackmon
Currently, my house feels a bit like we are living in Julie Blackmon’s Candy (2007). Bucking the steamed broccoli and frozen walnuts of my childhood, I am embarrassed to admit I have served Lucky Charms four mornings in a row, and lunch today was capped off with gummy worm cake. Honestly, it was all quite delicious and the adult in me had no energy to object. How Julie’s mother found the energy to do anything at all with her nine children is beyond me. The oldest sibling and now mother of three, Julie’s ability to make photos which capture “the stress, the chaos, and the need to simultaneously escape and connect” and to “fuse fantasy and reality” is remarkable… Her works often feel like a much-needed breath of fresh air for this weary mother/creative.
It seems these days, I am being given the opportunity to loosen my grip on the old, excruciating story that to be a good mother requires abandoning oneself. The myopic belief that there is not enough of me for my children and my work. Instead, I am learning slowly and often clumsily to blend this role of mother with my art and my passions. To let them shape me and each other.
Some days I fail miserably… Yet, more and more, I am finding the courage to try wiser next time.
Today, the best I had in me was to add clementines to the menu, to allow J.K. Rowling to mother us all for a bit within the magical worlds she created while her children were still young, and to suggest we brush our teeth extra well at bedtime.
Tonight I write. Creating is always the thing that brings me back to myself, replenishes my soul and makes me a far more loving and patient mother. Luckily, I remember that sometimes.