This post is part of my maternity leave series where I let other writers take over my substack. Enjoy! See you on the other side! - Rachel
Zoe B. is an artist, activist, educator, and mom from the Bay Area. By day she teaches high school history, civics, and theater. By night she occasionally DJs in the underground electronic music scene. You can listen to her music at soundcloud.com/clavae
Yesterday I dropped my four-year-old off at school. Then I had a leisurely cup of coffee, did couple’s counseling, saw an old friend, and went for a run. A day like this, one mostly of my own choosing, would’ve been unimaginable a couple years ago. I think I can say I’ve made it through the first gauntlet of parenting. Halle-fuckin-lujah.
Most of my friends who want kids are just now in the fertility or pregnancy phase, so I find myself in the funny position of being a source of knowledge…even though I’m barely ahead of them on this ride. On one hand, I’m desperate to share what I’ve learned; I’ve spent four years consumed by this new role. Somebody please ask me about it! On the other hand, everyone’s experience is wildly different - shaped by health, resources, childhoods, our kids’ temperaments. The only universal is that we’re all winging it in a society not designed for thriving.
This summer at a festival, a stranger named Deb asked how I balanced being a parent with making art. How I managed to be both a reliable grown-up and a freaky clown witch DJ. Others have asked me similar questions, and this essay is my attempt to answer them.
Underneath Deb’s question, I heard an anxiety about getting gobbled up by the immense responsibility of parenthood. A legitimate concern, given the models we’ve seen. The nuclear family is an extremely modern and flawed arrangement. Countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s offered alternatives, but these were suppressed, then replaced by the Reagan-era obsession with financial independence and upward mobility. What millennials saw growing up were exhausted parents grinding away, with little joy.
So I understand why it’s perceived as an impressive feat for me to have a kid and still have a fulfilling social and creative life! While I’m wary of overstating my insights, I hope my reflections feel supportive to other folks wrestling with these themes.
Parenting defies categories of good or bad. It’s simultaneously so grueling and so euphoric. Being a mom is the best thing I’ve ever done, but it is also excruciatingly hard, tedious, and undignified. I don’t know if there’s a word for that in the English language. And the fact is, there is a huge amount of loss that coexists with the joy and awe.
It’s ok to feel grief at the changes of becoming a parent.
It was pretty devastating for me to no longer be the center of my own universe. Particularly as an artist, because honing my craft often involves tuning in to my voice, my vision, my interpretation of the human condition. For me, this requires a lot of curiosity about myself, and a belief that my ideas are worth sharing. Sometimes my creative interrogation leans towards self-involved, even a little narcissistic. And that orientation was totally obliterated by having an infant. (Maybe people with more caregiving experience wouldn’t find the shift so jarring. Even as a teacher, I didn’t really understand care work until I became a mom.)
So, the first couple of years completely kicked my ass. The sheer magnitude of tasks was crushing. But even more disorienting was the psychological and spiritual realignment of my life’s energy and purpose. It was kind of a Copernican revolution…like ohhhh, damn, the sun doesn’t revolve around me, I revolve around it. That’s really different.
Another grief that surfaced for me was in recognizing how undersupported parents are in our society. Becoming a mom put me in contact with an entirely new category of disappointment and rage. I was shocked by the profound physical challenges of being pregnant; I actually felt deceived about what the experience would really be. But I was even more shocked by the expectation that I would continue working (i.e. participating in the extractive labor economy) at the same pace while I grew a human inside of me. After birth, it’s more of the same: parents perform some of the most consequential labor in society, yet they are besieged by unrealistic expectations and minimal social support. I also felt misunderstood and under-supported by many of my friends who didn’t have kids. That was deeply painful. I experienced a lot of grief in giving up my fantasy of a social community that could be more resourced and responsive to the needs of new parents. But I know it’s not a personal failure of my friends - it’s a consequence of our dysfunctional, siloed, individualist, economically-precarious culture. Before I was pregnant, I too, had no idea what a lonely and vulnerable thing it is to parent in late stage capitalism.
Having said all that, I cannot emphasize enough how delighted I am to be a mom.
Being a parent is extraordinarily fun.
In the grown-up communities I roll in, we invest a lot of energy pursuing a state of childlike wonder. We throw elaborate parties and ingest powerful substances to mute the stress and cynicism of our adult lives, and reconnect with our ability to just play. But you can also get that effect by just hanging out with kids. Babies are goofy as hell, toddlers are hilarious, and my four year old’s enthusiasm for everything is totally contagious. A glimpse into my child’s exuberance: when I got home from work the other day, he greeted me with screams of joy about the fact that my husband got new tires. “Mom, NEW TIRES!” and then, when he was helping me unload the groceries, with maximum exhilaration, he yelled, “Oh my gosh, you got ORANGE JUICE?!!!” A little while later, we were listening to the Ghostbusters theme song. As he pumped his little fist and chanted “GHOST-BUSTERS!” I thought, I’m having the time of my fucking life with this dude.
It’s also unexpectedly gratifying to see the benefits of all the personal growth work I’ve done. So much of parenting is (consciously or unconsciously) a replication or rejection of our own childhood. And having meticulously examined my young triumphs and traumas, it’s fascinating to see how I show up in the parenting role. I’m surprised at how equipped I feel to guide someone else’s foundational blueprint of the world.
And then there’s the absolute fucking peak experience of unlocking a new level of love. Any effort to explain how much I love my child will immediately sound cliched, but here’s something I wrote in an attempt to describe it anyways: “Nothing can prepare you for how much you will love this being who’s forming inside of you. Actually, love is too small a word. It’s more like a piercing exhilaration and a shattering devotion, an utter astonishment at the miracle of the human experience. This feeling will dwarf every love you’ve ever had, and it will reorganize the molecules of your reality so that you find yourself living on an entirely different planet. And it will be the thrill of your life.”
Being a parent shows you what is essential to you.
The urgency and overwhelm of keeping a baby alive stripped away the noise and clutter of a busy life. Everything superfluous fell away. In the first months, when I had maybe an hour to myself, I often spent ten minutes dancing, not as a deliberate practice of my craft, but as something that kept me alive. That raw, intimate engagement with creativity strengthened my identity as an artist and confirmed that art is a lifeline, not a luxury. But my creative practice has changed to fit new constraints on time, space, and focus. I’ve gravitated more toward DJing and writing, and away from theater or choreography. (I’ve written this essay over the course of weeks, stealing away an hour before my child wakes up whenever I can). I also discovered that going to parties - even though it was a logistical nightmare at first - is actually an essential life-sustaining activity for me. It’s worth it to me to jump through the hoops of arranging childcare, pumping milk, driving long distances and losing sleep, in order to participate in the adult community rituals that nourish me. It turns out that, while my child infuses my life with daily enchantment, that’s not a replacement for the collective effervescence of being on a dancefloor at sunrise. Every parent has to make difficult cost-benefit calculations about their limited energy. These are the choices that have made sense for me.
Like anything, parenting gets easier with time.
This is a message for my first-timer friends who are in the throws of the fertility phase, or the pregnancy phase, or the newborn phase. Each chapter is totally different and wildly impermanent. Even though it’s all-consuming while you’re in it. When you’re pregnant, it’s all you can think about, but then you have a newborn and - I swear to god - you can’t even remember what being pregnant was like. All this too, shall pass. The absolutely catastrophic overwhelm of the infant phase will pass. The demands of parenting do get easier, and you do get better at remembering/packing/hauling all the gear and finishing all the laundry/cooking/dishes; it just becomes second nature.
We must go rogue.
For many of my peers, the question of starting a family has been framed as a choice between no kids and living a peter-pan fantasy forever, or kids and becoming an overworked, risk-averse normie. Rachel described why she created the term rogue mom: “It emphasizes the part of this endeavor that resonates most with me which is that I’m going off-script. I’m deviating from the instructions. I’m making my own way.” Yasss. More than any other role I’ve ever had, mothering brings pressure to conform to very rigid expectations. But most of those expectations are misogynist, capitalist garbage, and we get to be the author of our own parenting stories. I guess that’s my biggest insight about parenting: we can do it however the fuck we want.
Becoming a mom - off-script, making my own way - is the most personally fulfilling thing I’ve ever done, and it’s more than that. It’s my most significant contribution to the future of a thriving world. Parenting in a time of ecological and political collapse is not for the faint of heart. But what could be more important than raising a generation of humans who are responsible, attuned, creative, and brave? The cultural scripts we’ve inherited about parenting will not meet the collective needs of our time. In the midst of profound upheaval, we can no longer continue business as usual or ignore how our actions shape the future of life on Earth. Rogue parenting - in fact, rogue living - calls us to center life-affirming practices in a life-destroying society. As Rachel has beautifully articulated in her writing, being a rogue mom is hard work. It’s exhausting to have to be so inventive and resourceful. It’s lonely and scary to break away from traditions and expectations. But these imaginative choices make it a more liberated world for our kids, our friends, and everyone else.
In the end, my advice on balancing parenting and art is more philosophical than practical. I believe (and this is true with or without kids) we ultimately have to rely on the courage of our convictions to pursue a meaningful life. In this endeavor I sometimes feel like I’ve hit a flow. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a battle. Often I’m just desperately seeking fellow travelers. And I’m lucky to have found more than a few.
So Deb, please know that you’re not the only one wandering into this wilderness. I recently wrote to Rachel, and I extend a reminder to all the rogue moms out there: “Even when we can’t speak directly, feel me howling at the same moon.”
What you can expect from The Larkstack
The Larkstack is where I share my thoughts in essay-form! Normally I try to publish at least every two weeks but right now I’m on maternity leave, so enjoy these guest posts in my absence, and please follow and support my guest writers!
These posts are all thoughts in process. Expect my views to change and morph and solidify and stray and evolve.
I’ll also share announcements about life as an artist; things like show announcements, music releases and new merch.
Announcements
I’m on Maternity Leave! Enjoy guest columns from my brilliant friends, mentors, and co-conspirators! I’ll be back in late January and might pop in to say hi before then :)
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