Throughout my life, I’ve always had the feeling that I was trying to live the “right” life. I’ve listened to what others have told me I should be or what I should want out of life.

I was 30 years old before I finally realized what I wanted to do with my life. This may seem like an awful long time to go through life without a real direction but it’s not as if I ceased to exist. I had a typical childhood/adolescence. I went to college. I got a job. I got married. I had a baby…I became a mother. And that’s when my life really began. Many people consider the birth of their child to be an obstacle to living their lives as they did before. This is no way meant to diminish the joys of having children. It’s just a truth that in order to raise a child, you must adjust your life. I was expecting that. What I wasn’t expecting was how caring for this tiny person would galvanize my hidden ambitions.

Since I was a child, I wanted to be an artist. I had no idea what this would actually look like or how to get there, so, after high school, I went to art school. I actually started out as an Art History major as I didn’t think I was good enough to be an artist. It wasn’t until I attended a few events and saw the work of declared art students that I knew I could do it too. As I write this, one particular memory from those days stands out in my mind. A professor, a woman, told my advanced painting class that if you wanted to be a serious artist you couldn’t have a family. The fact that I still remember this tells you how deeply I internalized this thought. From that moment on I believed, in some corner of my mind, that if I wanted to have a family then I couldn’t be a real artist.

Painting after hours in my first year

Working on a monotype

I graduated in 2011 with a BFA in Painting and Printmaking but soon stalled out. The only guidance I was given regarding post college life was to go to graduate school. I had a vague idea of paying off my undergraduate student loans first and then pursuing some sort of post baccalaureate degree (neither of those things have happened nearly ten years later). I continued to live my life. Moved in with my future husband. Got a job completely unrelated to art. And whenever the urge to create struck me, I learned a new craft. I taught myself how to do calligraphy, book binding, soap making - any number of hobbies to scratch the itch. And I was happy. I think if I had been unhappy at any point during this I would have made more of an effort to do…something.

Trying to make a go on the craft show circuit while heavily preganant

And that’s where motherhood came in.

Henry was born in March 2016. There is so much fear and joy in being a new parent. You never knew you could be that tired, that overwhelmed, or feel such an intense love and joy. But as we settled into our new lives, I realized that something was missing. One of the tenants that I try to follow as a parent is that the only way to truly teach something to your child is to show them. I wanted to show my son what an ambitious, hard working, thriving, and fulfilled woman looks like. If I didn’t show him by living this life, then what was I really teaching him?

When I decided to get serious about pursuing art as a career, I knew the one thing I really needed was time. At first, I started getting up at 4am every morning to get in an hour or two before Henry woke up and my regular day began. This worked really well in the beginning to get me back into a regular practice. As the months went on, I started to crave longer stretches of time to work. One reason I stayed with my non-art related job for so many years was because it is a company that really values its employees as people. I approached my manager and was able to negotiate a 32 hour work week. Now I had this entire day to devote to art making - Yes! Success!

But, I knew I needed some kind of structure or I would just flail around until something worked (or didn’t work) over and over without ever really moving forward. After a couple weeks of research into artist mothers, I came across a project by the Pittsburgh based artist Lenka Clayton. In a nutshell, she was a working artist who needed to adjust to life after the birth of her son. She created the Artist Residency in Motherhood project (you can read more about her project and see the work she created during it here). She found the project to be so helpful that she put together a toolkit for anyone else that could benefit from the experience.

For the next sixth months, I will embark on this self-directed residency using Lenka’s work as a starting point. This blog will serve to document my experiences during this time and evolve as I do. Let’s begin.

Henry at work