Is There Hope for Artist Mothers?

On the tantalizing urge to just. Give. Up.

My laptop has been at the “genius” store for almost three weeks because I:

A. Left it on the couch when I went away for the day to my yoga therapy training intensive

B. My child spilled water on it to “keen it”

C. My husband noticed it had some water droplets on it but figured it was fine

I’m trying to apply for writing and teaching gigs, as well as submit my work for grants, publications, etc. There are limitations to this when sans laptop. The harder I try to export files to rearrange and prettify them for the anonymous eyes assessing me and making/breaking my market value as an artist and human being, the more absolutely ridiculous it feels.

My son wants to share my armchair as I look through my files on my phone. He wants to make video calls to our loved ones instead. He needs some “mbu” aka water. My husband tries to help me by taking him out, but he needs me first to get him dressed appropriately, find my car keys, unload my stuff from my car so they can use the bike rack on it, and by the time I sit back down I’m starving and simply DO NOT CARE WHO NEEDS MY SERVICES AND HOW MUCH THEY ARE WORTH, ANYWAY.

Maybe I need an emergency session with my old life coach (shoutout to Pia!), who made me feel better than any of my new and abandoned therapists have, health insurance coverage be damned. Maybe I need to study something new, like somatics or psychomilitancy. Maybe I just need to stitch a few cross-stitches and take a deep breath or two. What if I gave in to the acronym that has made me shudder since I learned what it meant on a Facebook forum, desperately learning about co-sleeping and breastfeeding and baby-led weaning….

SAHM.

Stay. At. Home. Mom. It often feels more like a demand than a moniker. More a death sentence than a life station. When I’ve had a good day, when everyone has eaten a homemade meal, when I’ve done chores and made art, when we keep the devices down and the eye contact high, when we build a tower and pick a flower….then it feels like a privilege. WOW.

Watching a little boy grow. A boy with big feelings and long sentences, who doles hugs and feeds strangers. There are moments when being a SAHM feels like my life’s work, and the amazing chemistry in our little family feels like it should be immortalized in a monument as big as the Statue of Liberty. More than that, it feels like freedom. Like we’ve cheated the system created to keep us down, miraculously.

But then the dishes pile up. A new shirt gets stained indelibly. I get a fresh rejection from a grant I was convinced no one else was more suited for. Half the people who signed up for my embroidery class don’t show up. And sometimes I want to shriek like my toddler does, my heart blooming with the sense of failure, as though I am watching all my hard-earned degrees eddying down into a whirlpool, overheating and boiling to pulp thanks to this weird new world of data centers and manmade earthquakes.

The cycle begins again, the pleasure/pain circuit of being a SAHM whirls around and around with the umpteenth load of strawberry-stained laundry.

Despite failing as a wife — I let Rami scream through a very important live online presentation his dad was giving — there was one recent day I succeeded as both an artist and mom. I use the word succeed very lightly here; let’s just say for two golden hours, both identities coexisted harmoniously.

It was the MDW Summit 2026 (pronounced Midway), where participants gathered from all over the Midwest to think and cocreate. I’d been approached by Emily Staugaitis, community organizer and art professor extraordinaire, to participate in a session called Loose Parts: Children as Studiomates. The title was based on this essay, and the session was supported by Sometimes Space, directed by Nathan Byrne.

The premise for our session was simple: three artists bring their kids into the conference, and model the activities they do alongside each other in their studios. Emily and Toma would bring in Tinker Toys, Moe and Charlie would bring in balls of clay. Rami and I would fingerpaint. It was a practice we had developed together out of desperation.

In the deep of January 2026 in the suburbs of Detroit, Rami and I tried to take a snowy walk. We’d run out of things to do inside that didn’t include a screen, and I was dying for some fresh air. It was a rare sunny day, and it felt good on my face, a deluge of honey gold kisses. Rami walked down towards the frozen river by our house, and his short legs sunk in the fresh powdery snow banks, immobilizing him; he was forced to sit and play in the snow but he refused to wear gloves, so a few minutes into our outing, he was screeching from the raw redness of his icy hands as he tried to scoop up snow to eat it. I hefted him over my shoulder and back home we went.

Back inside, I wanted to cry. I’d spent so long putting on our winter layers. The kitchen and living room were a mess. I took Rami down to the basement, intent on making our day fun after all. I stripped off our winter coats but we kept our thermal layers on in the cold, unfinished basement.

I rolled out a piece of canvas I’d used as a projection screen in my Practicing Dying exhibition at Art Prize when I was still pregnant with Rami. I put splodges of fingerpaint on the canvas, letting Rami dunk his pudgy fingers in them. I’d been waiting for this moment since I was a lost girl in my twenties, praying for a child to re-experience childhood with. He went right to painting on himself with his fingers. Then caressing the ends of paintbrushes dipped in paint, in true sensory play style. And then he did something super cool — he started dipping errant toys and objects in the paint. Pompoms. Then toy cars. Then together, we drove the cars in the paint, leaving behind the tracks in abstract, wavy lines.

It was so freeing to spend that time together, layering paint on without pressure to make it pretty or mean anything, no point other than to mark our presence together, in that moment, in the basement banked by snow in the sun.

It was this moment I wanted to bring to the MDW gathering, where artists would gather with their children. The setup, in the Boyer Campbell building in Detroit, felt immediately warm and welcoming; Nathan and Emily were being helped by Carlie Wagner of Project Project, Omaha. Everything was at floor level. The building was ramshackle anyway, no pressure to keep it pristine with all the kids running around. The gang had set it up beautifully with toys and books, and they put up Rami’s and my painting on the wall right away. No curatorial committee. No submittable link. No application fee. We were exhibiting in the conference, our first artistic collaboration.

Rami ran to the Tinker Toys and moved without hesitation to smoosh his hands into the balls of clay Mo had piled up on their low table. It was the first time I could see clearly he was an artist’s son. He had been conditioned to touch, to experiment. Or rather, that natural impulse hadn’t been quashed in him.

Emily said to me, “Tinker Toys saved my life,” and I felt it in my soul.

The attendees started coming in. Families. Educators. Parents who had traveled to Detroit from other states without their kids and partners.

The sweet moments came in rapid succession:

Rami and Toma running and dancing up and down the paint, with no repercussions but laughter. Charlie squelching thick layers of paint onto the long roll of craft paper we’d laid out, making new colors by driving toy cars over them in grid lines. Talking to a schoolteacher who lived amongst cornfields about the impulse to create being connected to the impulse to procreate. Rami and I having our photo snapped by a polaroid-touting dad.

Sure, the kids fought over things. We were loud. It took us a good half hour to clean up and get paint off the floor. But I made new friends. I exchanged numbers and Instagram handles with a mom who is a performing artist.

Cleaning up with a dozen other people was invigorating. When Rami took a monster stinky poop in the parking lot, I didn’t even feel disheartened. I felt resilient. Like I could clean up everything, even my own shitty attitude.