Art was a baby before the boy, but helpless and more hungry. The work, just like a fetus, would suck out the life force of desire and spit back bone and tooth. My thirst to make, to raise from dust something out of nothing, existed long before his beautiful and willing nucleus began carving out my flesh to make a body. Everything in me before him had been selfish and frozen, a glacier unto myself. I lived on a precarious live wire. No one knew when the shock would come, if they would get burned or blessed, if they could trust anything but the art. Words rose and fell like waves, I chased them like a surfer rides the ocean, they conquered me or I took them. My arms were childless and ready to write, my head unstuffed with Sage’s urgent demands. My body was free of his marks, but my insides were all frozen and my heart was sore and empty.

My art was shit before the baby.

I had ridden the amusement park pregnancy, vomited after every ride, took home all the crap I could buy. I wrote letters to myself, letters to the baby, letters to the future, lists of things To Do, and took notes on the parenting no-no’s of my past. Birth came and went, leaving me humbled and barely human. The last thing I felt capable of was imagining beyond the baby, focusing on me. Every creative force I possessed became fully burdened with my new and delicious creature. He sucked it all out of me, till I heard “productive� and thought of mammary glands, not art pieces. I drew hearts around the baby’s name, doodled aimlessly in my diary, and tried to plot out the chaos in writing. The pen-on-paper sessions always left me hollow, like I didn’t or couldn’t give enough, but was there anything really left to give? I was deconstructing Babylon and delivering Zion and reconfiguring the universes, and still I couldn’t go out at night and perform my powerful energy, exude my mystique to the masses. The phase of frustration. The muted motherhood.

What I don’t remember writing is the poetry, the mantras, the chants, the songs of gestation and birth; those were scratched out in madness and then stuffed under the nursing chair, or pecked out on the keyboard in the computers midnight unforgiving glare. They were haunting verses; a woman trapped inside the weight gain of afterbirth, the stretch marks, the guilt of a fatherless life for an innocent baby, a manifesto on the everyday mother. Where did these words come from when to the world I was vulnerable and mute? How did such a delicate slice of myself survive the wreckage of pregnancy, birth and raising boy? I would sit inside the swirl of a used body, angst, and aching love for him and write like opening a channel from the deepest earth; let my motherhood find itself a shield of words. There was no rivalry yet. The boy was my whole experience; the words I only ran to as an escape like a midnight snack for the food obsessed. They didn’t fight for me, wrestle and see who wins, like the tug of war my art&child life has become.

I moved and left some demons, gained some friends and spaces to perform, and my Art grew and changed and cleared her throat. She opened her mouth and notes came out and she sang, bizarre and dangerous, and now we sing and speak together to a community that has already taught me. This new place gives me space for making art, because of the simple life, and the sisterhood of women. All of us are single mothers, and we bend and break ourselves for each other. I spend nights washing down, changing, and feeding other women’s children for them to do their art, so I have time to do mine as well. Sage stays a neccesary part of the creative process. Even my most political performance pieces are inspired by the commitment to life I made the day he was born, and my optimistic vision that speaking out and fighting will change the world my son must grow up in. He digs himself into every corner of my art, each layer I peel apart contains the smell of him, his imprint somehow.

A woman in art is like an animal in childbirth, humped over, gasping for air, concentrating. I need whole moments in strings of even hours or days to put down an idea, form the cosmic, make it happen. Our house contains the cacophonous sounds of an artist’s family life. Echoes of the mother singing distractedly over the boy’s head while he writhes on the floor in three-year-old Superhero fashion, or banging away on instruments, my computer or his drums, in chaos and frustration and creation. In the background, there’s also phones ringing, people back and forth, networking, web-building, filmmaking, audio checks, rehearsals and classes. Sage is jealous of my art like he is of my lovers. The first thing he destroys in my house is the phone, next is the computer. More than once I have found shreds of what used to be my writing notebooks thrown in the trash. If he is with me at one of my shows, he is in my arms, or at my feet screaming, “It’s my performance, not yours Mama!�

For my dual devotions, I find myself back at the computer in the ancient midnight feeding ritual, eating off the flesh of words, regurgitating my love and exhaustion. Making art is a body gutted open, a continual giving of birth. I still rip off chunks of meaty words and gulp down sweet poetics, except now I turn my head and, like a mama bird, offer some to the baby. The soul is a prism of difficult contradictions. My heart has been slashed wide open, leaving caverns of space for all my wild offspring.

today i am

the artist mother, the captivated mother, the tender

mother. today i am the lactating and impatient mother, the aggressive

mother, the working mother, the beautiful mother, the awkward

mother. today i am the shiva mother, the monster mother, the abusive

mother, the playful mother, the baseball mother, the father

mother. today i am the shepherded mother, the confused and disconnected

mother, the sexy mother, the virgin mother, the aging mother, the teenage

mother. today i am the startled mother, the consumer mother, the torn

mother, the fierce lioness mother, the absorbed and intoxicated

mother. today i am my own mother, and nobody’s daughter.