MOTHERING

I don't like being a mother / climbing mt. everest / perfection

I’m in the midst of a struggle. I don’t like being a mother. I love kids, I love people, I love time alone and I hate being interrupted. I don’t like disappointing people and it’s hard for me to say no.

Mothering, ink and gouache painting from my residency at the Suttle Lodge 2023. I like the way this drawing looks tender and yet the mother has no hands, she’s bound to this mothering.

I hate doing a bad job and I love finishing projects. You know what project is never finished? Mothering. You know who it’s really easy to be critical of? Mothers.

A photo I found of myself and Nicky where I look accurately tired.

I love my son, Nicky, so fiercely. Like heat-of-a-thousand-dragons-fierce or sobbing-tears-of-protection fierce. And yet, he has taken me to my edge again and again, the cliff where I yell, or slam doors or use expletives before I remember he’s only 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 years old.

Detail from Overwhelmed By This One Precious Life, colored pencil, 2022

9 years old is definitely my favorite age, he reads his own books, puts his own dishes in the sink and sometimes offers to help me. He’s beginning to feel less like a dependent and more like a friend. That’s the kind of mothering I can get down with, walking and talking mothering, making projects mothering.

This little animation I made in early 2022 shows a dog spitting out a baby dog. Sometimes I feel like Nicky is the baby dog I spit out, so much like me and yet so different too. He’s my favorite person in the world. He’s the sweetest, the most obsessive, sometimes the most intense, often the most hilarious person I know and he tries so hard to do well, just like me.

I love him and yet I continue to have weeks where I want to throw up my hands and quit this job called mothering. Mothering is climbing Mt. Everest, I am trying so hard to do well, to be good and it feels unattainable. I laugh at myself and say so maybe calm down, Lettie Jane.

I am reminded of this skit by Michelle Wolf about Having It All:

We shouldn’t have it all. We can’t do well in all the places all the time. It’s not feasible and we wouldn’t wish that on our friends or loved ones.

A daily drawing from 2021 of a mother with a child under her skirts. It feels like the person I show up as in public, with my identity as a mother hidden under my skirts.

2 years ago I moved in with my partner. He has 3 kids. I don’t do much parenting of his oldest. We have the casual friendship form of step-parenting where I get to hear some teenage gossip from her once a week on the weekend. The other two I actively step-mother every other week. I love them, they are amazingly sweet kids that my kid gets along with and yet, it’s still a huge adjustment every week.

A drawing that Nicky colored digitally and I colored digitally.

I imagined myself as a mom whose home would have wooden toys and a few legos and my kids would eat lettuce out of our garden. There are elements of my imagined motherhood that I live up to: I love reading to the kids at night, I sing them songs (although I worry that I am influencing Matt’s musically-inclined children with my tone deaf singing). We eat dinner together, we have family game night on Wednesdays. But the reality is much more boxed mac and cheese, chicken nuggets, plastic gun toys and songs from memes than I imagined.

Mothering, a colored pencil and ink drawing from 2020

I know there are some folks who yearn to have kids and haven’t been able to. I know there are some folks who had terrible mothers who neglected or abused them. I know that I am sitting in a privileged place of being a white woman, able bodied, a working artist with a somewhat flexible schedule in a city. I’ve got a lot of friends, therapy, family and physical ability to lean into. This is the best case scenario, and still I have weeks of struggle.

The wild, one-eyed monster of a child in front of the mother eating ramen, physically depleted.

If you’ve read this far with me you may point out that half of the struggle in my mothering is my own expectations. I agree with you. I can see this manifesting in all aspects of my life, I expect myself to be perfect. Which is unfair to myself and to everyone else around me.

The area of my life I am able to grapple with imperfection, to feel some curiosity around it, is making art.

Difficult Is Not Wrong, colored pencil and ink drawing from 2020

And so I’ve got to try again and again and again to practice what I preach. I spend Saturdays telling adults in my art classes that there is no perfection in art, there is expression, there is taste, there is resonance with other people, but in art we are here to notice.

So in mothering, I may not have children eating lettuce out of a garden, but they have eaten artichokes and they know how to play BS. I have yelled at them, but also we have talked about it.

My growth edge in mothering is:

How can I notice more and judge less?

He Speaks So Loud, watercolor, 2019. You can buy this drawing as a print. I appreciate the way this mother seems calm in the face of her radiant (or maybe screaming) child.

There is no quitting this job I don’t feel like I’m very good at, but there is a lot of learning in 9 years of showing up to work, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

I want to end this newsletter with an and now I’ve got this figured out but honestly this is a note from halfway up Mt. Everest, when I don’t know if the top is my kid is in high school, or my kid has a job, or my kid let me move in instead of sending me to a retirement home.

This is a metaphorical note from middle of dance floor, when I’m barefoot and someone broke some glass and someone else is crying, but Shakira comes on and so I decided to keep dancing.

This is an actual note from my bed on a Sunday when I hear my step-sons say Daddy twenty times and I think I should help but I don’t, and I’m writing a newsletter, goddammit.

With love and gratitude,

xoxo, Lettie Jane

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Media Share:

• Maybe I’ll keep sharing bubble gum hits from the 90s and we will pass the point of no return, when one or two of you thought I had music taste and now you know that I really don’t:

• Our Ulna Studio drawing party at the Bluffs was even more fun than anticipated:

  

• Allison made me an incredible necklace this week that we traded for and I wish I could live in a barter economy.

  

• Sarah Levy’s art show was incredible, she’s got more feeling in one of her eraser lines than a Lars von Treir film.

  

• Hank Willis Thomas stunner at the Jordan Schnitzer collection:

  

• I rearranged my studio this week:

  

• Lego tea party I made with the kids this week: