The Daily Return: On Motherhood, Art, and Undoing the Architecture of Sacrifice

Tracing the quiet rituals that dismantle inherited systems of self-erasure.

June 1st 2025

Now that school is out, I’ve been returning—quietly, deliberately—to a sketchbook each morning. It’s a small ritual, no grand ambition. Just a daily act of meeting the page without pretense. To create without judgment. But inside that gesture is a reckoning I didn’t realize I needed.

For years, I’ve been entangled in an inherited architecture: that motherhood requires disappearance. That creative freedom is a luxury afforded only to the unburdened. That to be a devoted mother, a serious artist, or a materially supported woman, I must choose—because I surely cannot have all three.

This belief didn’t arrive all at once. It settled in over time: in the unpaid labor of caregiving, in the silence around financial abandonment, in the subtle social cues that framed motherhood as noble only when self-erasing. And even now, as I try to rebuild a life that holds art, family, and sovereignty in the same palm, I can still hear the echo: you must sacrifice to survive.

But what if that’s not true?

What if the deepest disruption I can offer—to patriarchy, to capitalism, to inherited narratives of lack—is to insist that my work as a mother, my work as an artist, and my right to be resourced are not mutually exclusive?

This summer, I’m testing that hypothesis. One small drawing at a time.Not to produce. Not to perform.But to re-inhabit the space I once gave away.

This is a slow practice of self-trust.Of recovering time as an elemental material.Of remembering that creation can happen inside a life already full.

I share this here not because it’s resolved—far from it—but because I believe we need more public traces of the unfinished. Especially when we’re rewriting structures that were never built to support us.

Thank you for witnessing. More soon.