RHYTHMS OF MOTHERBABY

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A few weeks after the birth of my son in June 2021, I walked into a bookstore and bought “A Life’s Work” by Rachel Cusk. I remember the cashier saying, “You know, it’s not really an uplifting portrait of motherhood.” I smiled, nodded, and bought it anyways. Cusk writes of the “motherbaby” as a “composite creature”: “I feel like a house to which an extension has been added: where once there was a wall, now there is a new room. I feel my heat and light flowing vertiginously into it.” While her book has been described as “contentious,” “unsparing” and “disarmingly frank,” its darker narrative, though not fully aligned with my own, illuminated a permission for matrescence (the transition into motherhood) to be complex.

Soon I discovered an echo of “motherbaby” from an article by the University of Cambridge: “Research found that mums and babies tend to synchronise their brain waves – an effect known as interpersonal neural connectivity … and how information flowed within each separate brain, and also how the two brains operated together as a network.” This collection of paintings explores the fervent, startling overlap with one’s child in all its bewildering layers of duality and communication. Made late into the night, they became a submissive stumbling of mess and control, enchantment and fatigue, uncertainty and joy.