Space Prawn

So this is the project that has been consuming me all year. Literally sucking life out of me.

I'm in the first trimester of my first ever pregnancy and a post-it of art is all I can manage. It's my interpretation of the ultrasound. Apparently we are having a prawn. That's alright. We'll name it Gerald and arrange play dates with other prawns.

I used to be able to boss and bully myself into getting work done. I released two books last year! Unsupervised! I used to be capable of setting goals and doing studies and workshopping and all those things that set the wannabes apart from the soon-to-be-professionals.

And now it's all I can do to get out of bed and go to my day job so the power bill gets paid, but all I wanna do is sleep when I get home, so the power may as well be cut off anyway. I can't seem to muster the energy to wield a pencil, let alone make progress on my artwork.

I knew this would happen. Part of the reason I pushed myself last year is because I knew I wouldn't be able to do it this year. Babies just take everything you've got for a while (sidenote: HOW THE HELL DID TINA FEY MANAGE TO WRITE FOR SNL WHILE SHE WAS PREGGERS?!?) But I feel like I raised the bar for myself and now I just feel like a major slacker! It's like I bronze medaled in track last year after training really hard and now I've switched to intramural cross-stitch. I'm playing a totally different game in a totally different field now, but still trying to hold myself to the same standards I was last year. And nothing gets done, my baby-eaten brain just looks at my boss brain and is like "Pffft! Yeah, whatever". I just lay on the floor mentally poking myself with a stick.

All my other mommy friends say it will pass.........My other mommy friends say LOTS of things. I guess I just want to feel like myself and not like I'm half dosed on cold medicine. I feel like so much of my identity is invested in actively creating, I feel like I'm not me when I don't have the physical strength to create. I know, I'm creating life, blahblahblah....I'm not actually doing  anything. I am ultimately not responsible for how any of that turns out. If he comes out with his nose on sideways, that's God's business. My job is to not drink or have sushi. Which just sucks. I feel like I've had the closest thing I had to a superpower sucked away. Like the Avatar took my Bending.

Maybe I'll try to do a post-it every day. A teeny drawing with just a teeny amount of energy. If it's all I've got, I should learn to count it as enough.




On a side note, lest you think I'm a completely emotionally dead monster, it was pretty nifty to see the heart beat on the ultrasound. It was like a little blinky space satellite, far, far away, blinking "I'm here! I'm here!" I kinda felt like Wall-E looking at the starry sky beyond his polluted atmosphere wondering "What's out there?" Only about this thing in my guts.