The Letter, 6 March 2022

'I think our inner artist faces the fire through motherhood.'

When I started getting notifications about comments on the last letter I sent, I was surprised. They were coming through weeks after I shared it on LinkedIn, and I thought it had—like everything I’d posted there for what feels like the past year—sunk right to the bottom of the well.

One of them was from a friend who opined:

I think our inner artist faces the fire through motherhood!

While notions of right-and-wrong are unhelpfully dualistic in such a situation, I am sorely tempted to praise her and say YES! And also NO! The notion of motherhood as transformational is important, because it genuinely is a transformative experience, but I disagree that it’s just that our inner artist faces that fire.

Instead, I feel that women become artists through that fire of metamorphosis.

The very act of becoming a mother is the act of an artist, as an act of creation.

Like art, creating, growing, birthing a child is a difficult, challenging, emotional, messy process.

Like art, bonding with, handling, nourishing, guiding, and handling a baby is a process is getting dirty, losing yourself, finding yourself, getting stuck in the Zone so much you forget to nourish yourself. You don’t know what or who you’ve encountered. You trust the process. The outcome just is. You don’t, won’t, can’t control it.

So why, then, as artists do we assume that we can control our own art? We’re channels for the work of something greater than us. (If you want to become literal and meaningless about motherhood you could be rude and point to the fact of women being channels for other humans, inwards and outwards.)

If you look at the word itself—art—we know it as a skill derived from learning or practice. It’s doing the work. Mothering is an art that is also a skill that you gain by learning, by practice, by doing. You forget the nappy bag the first time you venture out, but you only forget once. You realise, coming home late from dinner at a friend’s, with a sleeping baby that you have to then change into pyjamas, that you could’ve changed him into PJs when you last changed his nappy. But you only do the silly thing once. Your skills grow, you learn. As your child reflects your behaviour back to you, you adapt, you grow, you learn about you.

My experience of art is similar. The art is in the doing, but the art is also the lesson. You’ve got to get dirty, as the author Lore de Angeles reminded me.

I’d lost the art intrinsic to my existence when I began to chase business success instead. I rationalised that the art was in the support I was giving to other people, other brands, other projects.

But when Beren came along, I realised that all along what I’d been doing is putting myself on hold. That I couldn’t do it any more. That I was no longer able to rationalise that this ridiculously masculine way of existing had anything to do with the impact that I was hoping to have on the world. That impact would happen through my ability to help my son become the person he’s destined to be. The artist deep inside that cavern, locked away, started screaming for attention, and this time I couldn’t ignore her.

The fire of motherhood burned away the edges of the cage.

That little stunted artist is building up her courage with which to pummel the cage’s remains into dust. She is preparing to re-emerge.

As I write this, I’m facing Week 4 of the 12-week Artist Recovery program. It’s a week of Reading Deprivation. No emails, no comments, no social media, no news sites, no internet at all(!). No text messages. No books. No notes to myself.

Nothing.

No input.

I’ve conceived ambitious new writing projects that are meaningful. One of them tackles the maiden-to-mother metamorphosis. So if you know of any authors who also tackle this theme, please reply with references! Reply, even though I won’t be reading them for another six days.

May your week be filled with the glory of words and narrative.

I’ll let you know whether I survive.

xx Leticia ‘going dark’ Mooney