Hello from month 2 of being a mum.
Things are mostly still digested in fits and spurts at the moment, or thruups and bloops if you want to be aquatic about it.
“While female humpbacks communicate in “thrruups” and “bloops,” only males sing in the haunting tones that travel so well through the depths, and there is debate over whether they are more like singers in a seductive boy band or rivals in a rap battle.”
It felt like the perfect time to bring back:
The other night, as I crawled into bed at 8.15pm, embodying no semblance of my former childless self, I said to Raviv:
“I no longer exist. I existed so hard, I stopped existing entirely.”
Which makes almost no sense, but the point is: I’ve been thinking a lot about my identity recently, and how to exist now I am also existing for someone else. When we first had Max, as I fed him at the wee hours of the morning and zombie walked through the day, it felt like my old identity had died, and I found it hard to believe it would ever come back.
I was so absorbed in being Max’s mum it started to feel a little unhealthy for both of us. I no longer read, drew, thought thoughts. The only music I listened to was the new pop song: ‘Tooshie Diaper’ (original music and lyrics by Raviv Ullman and Julia Pott).
I posited to a friend that perhaps your crush persona informs your parenting persona. My crush persona is that I have no chill. Here is a poem I once wrote about crushes:
My parenting persona seemed to be following a similar trajectory. If I was out i’d look for reasons to bring up Max, if someone asked me how I was I would text back a photo of Max, and at night, after Max went to bed, I would look at pictures of Max. I’m sure it’s all very common when you have just birthed a child from inside of your body, but my brain was starting to feel a little rotten - and I didn’t want a rotten brain to raise a rotten Max.
And so, I’m using todays ‘Hits’ to softly explore this new identity.
I stumbled upon this Culture Study post, drawn in by the title “I went into Motherhood determined not to lose myself in it,” and resonated so much with the instinct to compartmentalize motherhood.
So what could a feminist woman who knew she wanted kids, and was lucky enough to easily connect with her first kid, but didn’t want to be rendered unserious or uncool by motherhood do? My solution was to love my kid, but build some kind of imaginary firewall between my mom self and all my other selves. No “mom juice,” no “mom friends,” no new moms groups, etc. No doing anything “mom” or identifying as a mom, internally or externally, outside of my relationship with my son.
What I soon realized is that maintaining a firewall between my “mom” self and the rest of my self was making motherhood much less interesting. The rest of myself was being so challenged — psychologically, spiritually, philosophically, creatively and intellectually — by caring for my son. But I resisted it, and tried to keep care small because nobody had ever told me care could be so rich and interesting; nobody told me it could be filled with as much productive friction as all those other epiphany-seeking things I did in my youth including long hikes, psychedelics and meditation retreats.
Eventually, I stopped and let the experience of motherhood be big and seep into my big messy self, my big messy existence, and I began to enjoy it more. And, I must emphasize, I didn’t let motherhood be big in the traditional sense that motherhood is big: I didn’t stop working; I didn’t stop aiming for a 50/50 co-parenting arrangement with my husband, elusive as that can be; I didn’t suddenly devote myself to a particular parenting style or think parenting is something one can perfect; I didn’t give up other interests or abandon other identities; I didn’t primarily identify as a mom and value that identity more than others. (Not that the last one is a bad thing at all! Why shouldn’t motherhood be a primary identity for some?) Instead what I did is let my mothering self inspire and inform all my other selves. It was about motherhood as a form of identity expansion rather than colonization.
Yes! Much like my David Hockney print now shares a room with Max’s muppet babies lightswitch my identity could share a room with motherhood.
And then I started seeing examples of that everywhere. Exhibit a: This photograph in the New York Times which made me deeply excited for Max to hold his head (and a crayon) up. (Apologies, I did not note who the artist is - please feel free to comment if you know and i’ll add it in).
Sarah Beth Morgan’s redecorating of her kid’s playroom.
This interview with the brilliant founders of Cold Picnic in NY Mag showing that they professionally frame their kids drawings
And Daniel Lavery’s writing: “I am losing the war on the dogs that want to lick the baby.”
I then tried it out myself, in the gentlest form possible - drawing Max. And I found that drawing Max soothed us both. I know when someone draws me it gives me mad ASMR so perhaps it’s the same for him.
As a mental experiment, I signed up for a 2 day ceramics workshop hosted by the dreamy Ruth Easterbrook at Still Life Ceramics. I posted about Ruth in a previous edition of The Hits so it was fun to go witch hunting <3
It turns out I wasn’t ready to be away from Max for that long and my anxiety went through the roof but ya live ya learn, and now I have the knowledge of how Ruth makes her gorgeous pieces. (I used that knowledge to paint stationary, wobbly sleep deprived faces and flowers):
We went on our first overnight trip with Max last week to the near perfect Best Western in Santa Barbara where I drew this still life by the pool.
Santa Barbara was cooler and windier than LA and the smells were new and I felt myself coming back to life again after our 2 month stint of newborn chaos. I finally had enough brain power to browse substack, and discovered Ok, Perfect, a near perfect graphic design blog that has me drooling so hard I have shorted out my keyboard.
And amid all of this I realized that I don’t just think Charlie XCX is singing ‘I’m so Julia’ - those are the actual lyrics. I was however imagining that the beginning lyrics are:
“I went my own way, animator. I’m your favourite reference baby.”
But for the sake of my identity, i’m going to keep singing it that way.
Loved this edition of The Hits. What’s life without making silly songs to sing to little ones as we try to maintain our sanity and levity?
Omg Max is so adorable ❤️