Every day, I reconcile being a mother on the grounds that this has happened to me by complete accident. I tend to give no credit to the Spirit here. The fleeting thoughts of leaving a life of e-girl notoriety, suddenly laying low and emerging post-pandemic as randomly “trad cath” confuses me to this day. Now, there’s no escape, for I belong to God. I ended up marrying a guy I met off a 4chan offshoot and had a daughter. Miracles can happen to the Too Online, but I am a fluke. Why would God grant a beautiful vocation to a chick with a Sanrio tattoo? I ask God this, and He hasn’t explained Himself.
On an unassuming afternoon as I fight the demon that wants me to resort to unlimited screen time to get a break, I get a text from my friend Karina. She’s a fellow St. Vincent Ferrer parishioner and playwright. Ecstatically, she suggests I would be a great fit for a performance piece she’s workshopping in concert with an exhibition of abstract paintings by French artist Josephine Dubern. She’s specifically looking for mother artists. My first instinct is to text back “nooooooo sorry omg thank u for asking tho!!” to everything I’ve been invited to do since I dipped my toes into the beautiful and strange art scene created through Arthouse2B, who I only met because my priest clocked my husband and I as friendless losers who needed to meet other Catholics our age.
Through this ministry, I’ve constantly met with devout hearts who have complicated, explicit and grave gestures towards Christ and His Church. The art is an extension of the liturgy, and treats it as the grand Drama it is. Because of this serious task, to make the religion which says not to contracept look palatable, I find difficulty in participating. This is the fifth time or so I’ve outright rejected Karina (and others) in participating in any form of performance, retreat or collaboration. This is too weighty a task–this is meant for a serious Roman Catholic, not someone who followed through on the wager that perhaps life is better this way.
My worst trait is my lack of public testimony, it’s worse than embarrassment or denial—it’s silence. The Hell of absence.
I answered the Holy Spirit’s call to publicly be something I almost can never say out loud: I am a Catholic Mother™. Almost like saying out loud “I’m a Proverbs 31™ Woman” but with less evangelical cringe. This label is true but I cannot speak it into existence formally.
I agree to be part of Karina’s performance. My fiat is my text through gritted teeth.
“Yay! Sending details soon!”
The Sheen Center is located next to 26 Bleecker Street, better known as the shuttered Manhattan location for Planned Parenthood, the same location where I once procured services for — you guessed it—a pap smear when I turned 23. Across the street is a bougie maternity store that has figured out how to make a non-embarrassing pair of jeans for moms “well into the fourth trimester.”
Upon entering the gallery, I was met with a self portrait of Josephine in Carmelite habit. The only truly figurative work in the show, staring into the small gallery, where I’ll be performing in a few days. In stark contrast with her pastel abstractions of Marian imagery, or the inner mysticism found in the joyous drudgery of day to day mothering, the self portrait reflects at once a former desire, a discerned vocation whose fruits are felt somewhere else. It stares onto misty color fields, from palm sized to wall length textiles. It looks onto the future, and the future site of a performance I’m asked to do. It begs for fellowship in a gargantuan task–where are the other mothers?
I often wonder about women like this, who God’s grace clothed throughout their lives, that they actually weighed two options about giving everything up, wondering which way they would die unto themselves for something else. Which one asked more of them, which one pleased God more? Had I ever weighed holiness in my own life like this? I then remember I quit my job at this awful LES furniture gallery by lying about being called to be a Poor Clare and had to enter the novitiate within the same two-week quitting notice or I would never be able to again. Had to pick something Franciscan last minute because they give non-believers Good Vibes. The gallery owner’s adopted daughters lurked my public Instagram stories soon after to see if I was lying.
Josephine’s work is never iconoclastic despite the abstraction—Our Lady emerges in Marie as she does in her apparitions, as a faint trace, then devastatingly gentle. Mary is the silhouette of our comfort and hope, and the precursor of potential loss. In true post-scene-kid fashion, my favorite title of hers is Our Lady of Sorrows, pierced and cloaked in black mantillas with tears running down her cheeks at the agony of losing her Son.
In Psaume du Jour, Josephine turns a minuscule canvas into a small wish for the day to be shaped by the enormous sanctity of the daily Psalm. Entrusting this smaller, inconsequential moment to the Lord, all of its problems and all of its repetitive tasks almost seems pointless, but I remember Psalm 127 (the one people who have huge families love), not for the quiver full verse, but for the reminder that:
“Unless the Lord builds the house, They labor in vain who build it.” (Psalm 127:1)
I cannot give to God what I still feel a sense of shame of—I don’t really know how to be a mom. I didn’t always want it. How do I prove to someone “Yes, this is worth it!” when I can never paint the satisfying picture myself of a world outside my rage? But seeing this small plea for a brighter day, I am compelled to ask God for once to meet me here. It’s just as a favor to Karina, anyway. She’s always been so nice and generous in her prayers for my family.
Karina gathered us “mother artists” with enthusiastic hope that this would all go perfectly. The enthusiasm and trust is so foreign to me–beautiful things have happened in my life and I still cannot trust God to make it through. A long week of rehearsals within the confines of this intimate gallery, where Our Lady peeked through sea foam and sunsets canvases, watching our work.
The performance envisioned involved not just us, but our children. Sort of like bringing proof of residence to get a library card you’ll never use–I had to raw dog having my daughter there, preferably while worn in a carrier. When this was first mentioned on our Zoom call about the work, I began panicking. Right behind me, Lucia, who is a furious storm of hyperactivity and hunger, screamed between English and Spanish asking for milk. Not now sweetie, mommy is looking at the intimate role between motherhood and artistry through an expression of her body in motion! Lucia is my hope and my terror. No matter what supportive Instagram post or “you’re doing GREAT mama!!!” text I get, her unhappiness at any given moment becomes the face of my own self-worth. I am totally unprepared to be seen as a representative of the vocation of motherhood, because I cannot make it look pretty. My daughter famously hated nursing, baby wearing, strollers, just about anything that restricted her and kept her close to me. And what’s worse– she prefers her dad! So having to withstand the juvenile BPD trauma of feeling rejected by your daughter while trying to be Her–just let me go back to being Eve, please. After all, as Saint Edith Stein said, “Every other woman has something in herself inherited from Eve, and she must search for the way from Eve to Mary.”1
And I am still debating whether I can ever shake off Eve.
Our rehearsals were two hour sessions, with moms bringing their kids and toys for them to play with as we rehearsed. Our choreography, which we developed as repetitive, strange and disjointed references towards the difficult tasks of day to day mothering, from frantic rocking of a newborn to wiping gunk off yourself after cleaning a high chair, was a test to myself on whether or not I could ever remember an entire sequence after giving birth. In my constant immature fits of comparison, I wondered how everyone else seemed so at peace with their children around the gallery. Certainly they couldn’t also be dreading something awkward happening with their young children in front of sympathetic onlookers, you know… the ones who believe in a merciful and loving Jesus Christ? My daughter was, admittedly, going through it this week with teething. Lucia would throw herself on the ground and screech from the agony of the language that would soon emerge from her maturing mouth. It pierced her gums and became the foundation to eventually say “puppy” the following week.
Because I said yes to Karina, I had also said yes to the Holy Spirit guiding her wisdom in choosing co-performers. As Lucia wailed and thrashed, one mother provided an ice pack for her to chew on from her daughter’s lunchbox. Another mother, pregnant with her first child, rubbed her scalp and told her it would be okay. Karina grabbed onto my shoulder and said “It’s okay, be at peace. Be at peace.”
I was confronted with a thoughtfulness and eagerness I kept rejecting for years. I was at peace in admitting this to myself, but not just yet in letting anyone outside this bonded bubble see its way through. We continued to rehearse our movements and our lines, poems from Karina’s sister-in-law. Something that is archetypal about almost every Arthouse2B performance is the sincere amount of collaboration and building upon one another’s works. Their events are always in reaction and in response. None of this is happening alone, per se, not even my motherhood. It is sustained by passive prayers of people who pray those effusive and fruity prayers behind the $1 prayer cards you get at a parish gift shop. I saw the communion of the Holy Spirit work through my existence and my daughter’s existence turning from disruption to encounter. I was helped.
The night of the first performance was agonizing. I had been getting matcha clouds all week on Lafayette and two hours before our show, I puked it all up in the family bathroom stall. I could not memorize my lines, and my daughter’s insistence for independence instead of an adorable, enviable, koala-like cling was bracing for impact with my nerves and rage. Karina told us during practice that if we needed to attend to our children in the midst of performing and leave, that this was alright, and it was to the nature of this improvisation. In these short sessions, I recognize God as that very tacky thing the late Pope Francis would always say: the God of surprise. It straight up sounds like the euphemism for a trickster deity versus all of Being.
“In the morning glory…..it was an outburst…I wanted to tell how I suffered….have I done what is required of me to make this world a better place….” I muttered these lines over and over, their confessionality became my twee mantra that said “HEY LOOK AT ME I’M A MOM AND I’M GOING THROUGH IT!!!!” I recited these as my husband, a few blocks away, made sure our daughter fell and hurt herself just enough to exhaust herself to foolishly believe she would fall asleep in a baby carrier on my anxious sprawl of a chest.
Ten minutes to show time, and the donors and young Catholics and the randos pour in. Lucia is squirming in the carrier while I bounce and say discrete hello’s to those I recognize. Her godmother, Erin, whose earnest and sheepish love for me and my family is so kind that it makes me feel like a bad person in comparison, introduces us as artists and mothers, all at once, all the same, who said yes to being part of a larger conversation on the hope that is uncovered in a motherhood in tangent to Christ.
Lucia is kicking and arching, the platonic form of rejection and reflux. And as suddenly as Karina began her first monologue, my daughter’s head thumps and slams hard onto me.
Because I said yes, I felt her sleep on me for the first time in over a year.
Lectures to the Organization of Catholic Women, Zurich (1932)
