Performances of Motherhood

Anaís and I have been painting a lot. There’s something about the act of making art together that strengthens our connection. No primal bond was ever formed between us through breastfeeding. I tried. She refused every time. Three days after she was born, she indulged in two-ounces of Similac and stopped crying for the first time since she took her first breath. And that was that. We never looked back.

She grew attached to my mother early on. At two months old, when Jeff and I went for a short trip to Cartagena for a friend's wedding, my mother stepped in, and Anaís, as if sensing my mother’s calm in a way she never sensed mine, settled into her arms. At the wedding, someone told me “I looked great for just having had a baby” and proceeded to ask how I could bear to leave my newborn behind in New York because she would’t have been able to separate from hers even for 5 minutes to go to the bathroom. Until that moment, I was sure Anaís was in the best hands; my mom had this skill—she could calm her at 4 a.m. when I had nothing left to offer but exhaustion.

Anaís is now nine, and most nights, she still walks next door to my mom’s house to sleep there.

I went back to work by choice when Anaís was around four or five months old. I didn't insist on rigid routines. No Pinterest crafts. I let her have café con leche from an early age because, well, I'm Colombian and that's what we did. I rarely cooked for her. In fact, most of her wholesome meals were freshly made by my dad, or Jeff, or Ceci, our nanny. Yes, we had a nanny. And Anaís called her "Mami" too. My mom and my mother-in-law were also present. Because it does take a village, and while I am confident I could have done it all by myself, I am thankful I didn’t have to.

Then Bianca was born. When she was two years old (and Anaís was three,) I chose to go back to school to get my master’s in art. My mom wondered why. “You don’t need another degree,” said the woman with 5+ degrees and no plans to stop. On the first day of class, I cried, wondering if my daughters would one day feel abandoned. But I kept going.

Ceci and my mom stayed home.

It’s been four years since I graduated and now Anaís and Bianca are growing up surrounded by paint, books, colors, paper, fabrics, Mexican fibers and anything I choose to be an art material. For a while, I tried to keep them out of my art studio, thinking it would protect my productivity. But they’d wander in, interrupting my sessions, asking questions that were, quite honestly, hard to answer.

“What are you making, mama?”

I told them it was art, but they weren’t convinced. Except for a painting of the palm tree-lined dirt roads of Ceci’s town that she asked me to make for her new apartment’s living room, nothing in my studio looked like the art they had been exposed to in children’s books or the Bob Ross videos they loved to watch on You Tube.

The questions got more exhaustive:

“What is it about?”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“What is it for?”

“But what does it do?”

The most disconcerting of all: “What's the next step?”

“Can we help you Mami?”

No, you can't Bianca.

This is mami's homework, Anaís.

When the quarantine hit, I started to share my studio with Anaís. She was only 4 but she already had zoom meetings with her pre-k classmates so she needed a space to do her homework and "be productive." The shared space facilitated an exchange and we organically started painting together. Not as an activity—it was something else.

We had tried it before, but I overthought it every time. I wasn’t sure what to make of those collaborative pieces— were they art? Were they like the Pinterest crafts I avoided at all costs? I didn't know how to locate them within the framework of my other work. And of course, I worried, is this going to be considered cheesy?

Am I just another mom making art with their kids?

No, this doesn't look like a Cy Twombly.

But one night, something shifted. During this time where we have learned to let our guards off, I sat down one night and let Anaís "play" with the acrylic paint I had been hiding from her and her sister. I also let her use a 24x18 primed canvas I was saving for a painting I wanted to start. But I never did. I lacked the courage. I didn't know what to make. If it was going to be good enough. But this 4 year old didn’t hesitate— she just sat there with my acrylic paint, which she made hers, grabbed a brush and just started. Without too much preamble. Without premeditation. She just squeezed the blue tube on a ceramic plate and started painting something she described as the sky. Then she grabbed a pale yellow. I though she was going for sand, but she abandoned the common sky and sea narrative and went for a suburban landscape. A sidewalk and some grass laid down a starting point for me. A color narrative. An invitation to join her. I went for the hot pink and pale yellow. I mixed the colors but kept their identities recognizable from each other yet beautifully blended. Anaís got brave and mixed some colors that made a beautiful lilac. We are not done with the painting yet, we have some areas to tweak but we got tired and went to bed. Way past her inexistent bed time that we refuse to enforce.

For the first time, the question of "is this art?" became irrelevant last night. All that matters now is that the painting became our bridge. That I'm not scared anymore to mix pink and yellow, to start an uncertain task when Anaís is there to pave the way for me. Painting, as it turns out, became our bonding agent—messy, imperfect, and, hopefully, as fulfilling as breastfeeding could have been.