Just like I have countless drawings from 2003-2005 of the brown boy sleeping, now I have those of Orin’s endless meals as he grows…
Sometimes we fight over the music playlist and fall into each other’s joke traps.
At other times we have some deep conversations.
“No one has fun without anyone, Amma”
“You need to draw the details, Amma”, he says. So I do –
“Why do you always draw when I draw, Orin?” “Because it’s like you and me cuddling, Amma!”
A serendipitous poem, drawing in a new sketchbook, Orin in a bucket. Sigh.
If only going to school was such a breeze…
But, really, over the years we have gone through this –
and now this –
Does it ever get any easier?
In the early days of being a mother I hardly had time or energy to draw. I went back to working full time when Orin was four months, and we had a nanny in the day time to look after him. Both the brown boy and I were lucky to have the choice to work flexible hours which is so important when you’re a new parent.
I started drawing again when Orin was about seven or eight months old and my drawing had of course suffered. Not only was my skill rusty but also lack of sleep had nearly killed my imagination – but I kept on drawing. The journals from those years were quite terrible, but I still needed to draw, to make sense of life unfolding. Here are a few scattered drawings from those years.
From the journal Brain cut wild, 2016
Transcript
Getting out of your comfort zone always brings with it a loss of identity and the last one for me was becoming a parent. Suddenly you’re thrown to the deep end, everything around you, losing the floor beneath your feet. Not only your body, your hormones, your sense of time and also your relationships, your mental makeup, your creativity and your sense of self. Everything you knew how to do, suddenly becomes harder. On non-existent, like creativity. Or sleep. It’s easy to hide behind the baby – but you really owe it to yourself to get it back or you might lose it forever. 18062017.
While going through my archives, I found these pages from a 2004 journal. The brown boy and I had just gotten married, and I was resisting all the extended family’s combined pressure on me to start propagating the species.
In this angry book it seems that while I did not want to have a baby, I knew all about the details of bearing one. What a know-it-all I was.
When we first started living together, years and years ago, I didn’t see much of the brown boy. He had a crazy work schedule and whenever we were at home together he would be asleep. So I had loads and loads of drawings of him sleeping from that first year.
inktales 