Making Mother

10 years ago, a sea goddess made me a mama.

This passionate neurodivergent artist living in a squat on the side of mountain didn’t know how to be a parent. My time was spent painting and frolicking with friends, biking to protests, growing in ceremony, playing in the plants.

I didn’t have the prerequisites I was taught:

• an established relationship with my coparent

• a stable income

• a house/apartment (my make-shift yurt was on land owned and abandoned by some family trust; a site we squatted for 6 years)

• a retirement plan

• family support

• strong mental health

Lidagat’s soul didn’t care. She wanted me as mama, her papi as parent, too. We decided to have her after dating for less than three months. As her papi put it: we could keep doing what we already knew; living as renegade artists in non-traditional shelters in Los Angeles, or we could take a leap into the unknown and try something new.

With moon goddess as our guide, a decade of love and learning transpired with unforeseeable grief, transformation, joy, and medicine. My relationship to the planet shifted. New abilities opened up that came through hosting her DNA in my womb. I became a different person and didn’t know how to grieve that. I became a different person and celebrate my continual transformation while raising our starseed at the edge of societal / climate collapse.

My days were shaped by exhaustion. Sleep-deprivation shifts our ability to regulate emotions. Postpartum depression set in, but maybe that’s another name for not having enough physical, emotional, nor financial support. Maybe that’s another name for the impact of patriarchy on a new mother. It was worsening anemia; the impact of my brain not getting enough oxygen over a long period of time.

Two women elders visited and let me know that I didn’t have to keep giving so much. That I wasn’t getting the support I needed, that I could leave the relationship I felt like I was drowning in and find a way toward happiness again.

Most of my friends hadn’t had kids yet. It was easy to feel misunderstood, alienated, alone. For all the rhetoric about chosen family; it was a small few whom I could count on to show up consistently. Most of them are also mamas.

Mis comadres sheltered me with mutual understanding; we nourished each other’s spirits back from soul-loss in extreme burn-out from over-giving. We trade childcare and swap stories, exchange looks and love.

Then, like now, there were glimmers. Threads of care that would weave me back to myself.

And the making! Caught between sleep cycles, I enter creative space with clarity. Art was and continues to be sanctuary.

Art is liberation, peace, patience, and another birthing; an act of creation that dissolves my identity and links my limbs with those of trees. When I start painting I’m not overwhelmed mother I’m a node in a web of ecosystem response. I’m out of my head and responding to the imprint of habitat. I’m nonverbal and present, dropped in and deeply reverential.

My practice became more non-linear; being beholden to a market and class-driven Art World became less and less of a priority. The making was more directly in service to Pachamama; our Andean deity-guide ~ the same Earth Goddess of many other names in all places. She holds me when I break as she will hold my daughter and her generation to come.

Earth is meta-mother not receiving enough support, her needs ignored by colonial supremacies (human, white, elite class, male, christian) for far too long.

I held in my arms an immediate stake in the future. Yes I was punk, yes bohemian and radical but no, not nihilist. How could I give up trying to leave my daughter and her generation a better future?

To make as mother means incubating ideas for longer and choosing between sleep or creation. I shelter my peace when I can. I left the confines of market and meet art in the world: cloud, river, tree creation. How to sustain these ecosystems sustaining us?

I was told I had to go to the parties and impress the curators and do the drugs with the collectors who would support my art career in LA. I was told I needed to build massive bodies of repetitive work and undersell my paintings (to be flipped) because that’s where my name was at, not where their true value lay.

Seen at NK’s apartment in Mexico City. Why is this 1988 poster from Guerrilla Girls still so relevant today?

That path was incongruent with parenting. The few mama artists I saw make it either had generational or spousal wealth to back them up, or they chose career over child.

I choose Lidagat over and over. I sold paintings in studio and online sales, created DIY residencies and exhibition tours, found tiny places to grip and pull up. A feminist center residency and book publication lifted me when I couldn’t find footing.

I started an online school with a calendar to match hers so I could span time with her during winter, spring, and summer breaks. This is a privilege and also a non-negotiable that pushed me to get ever-more creative in crafting a career. My art and teaching practice have put food on my table for twenty years.

It is often women who collect my paintings, participate in the programs I run. I’m eternally grateful to every person who’s nurtured me~us, this practice, stayed steady.

I follow the spirit of my work, I follow the spirit of my child. I pick her up from school and drop in. I catch pockets to draw and dream and process lichen. It’s all part of the weave of a living practice.

I’ve had a complex relationship to time. Being a steady rock for my girl, being breadwinner, cleaner, care-taker, cook, task-manager means a majority of my weeks feel like triathalons; fitting an intense amounts of physical and emotional labor into a single day while trying to remain as present and grounded as possible. I get scared to ask for help because of how many times I felt let down.

I’ve shown up for my kid when I wasn’t sure where rent would come from next, where my energy could continue springing forth from. I’ve given her stability in spite of the instability I’ve navigated. I model shifting or leaving relationships that leave us drained and unfulfilled.

Our sovereignty matters, our art deserves our attention. We can express through unscripted paths, build our own rules and terms, fulfilling the visions and intentions pulling at our hearts while tending to the heart and body of another.

Sarita feeding Lidagat in-between selling my goods at a community market, Flora y Tierra, Long Beach, circa 2017.

All this, knowing my privilege and position in Empire grant me a safety that Black, Indigenous, migrant mamas don’t have. The ones in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, those in internment camps, separated from their children right now. Trying to keep babies alive under compounded ongoing colonial trauma.

Que vivan las madres; making the world’s next generation, raising ourselves and kids for an unknown future. Let the mamas lead the rebuilding. We’re speaking up, shouting out for all children’s chance at a future. Rematriate the land, break up with patriarchy and capitalism. Our making makes the way.