Why so long?

It's hard for me to say why it's been so long, dear Blog, since you and I last spoke. So much has changed since then. So much has not. But let me try to explain:

1. I've been busy doing this thing called "being a mother."

2. Having a baby makes one a complete mess for a while. Seriously. I had no idea what I was in for. Add on top of the instantaneous drop in hormones the traumatic birth experience Adela and I had and then the weeks upon weeks of horrendous breastfeeding trials and tribulations, and I was not doing so well. If it's any indication what a hot mess I was, I started--but couldn't bear to finish--a post entitled "Bathing my baby in breastmilk and tears." I think you get the picture.

3. Plus, when you have a baby, you don't get much time to yourself. Showering (let alone shaving your legs) can sometimes feel like the best feat in the world.

4. But even after things started to get better and settle down a bit--say when Adela was around 9 weeks old--I thought of you and contemplated becoming reacquainted with you again, but didn't want to give up any precious moments with my little one. Ok, really I was ashamed that I had hardly taken any photos with which to post to you (and in fact still haven't. Jake and I aren't picture people. Let's face it. At least future children of ours won't be upset when there's no pics of them either.) Our lack of documentation of this whole process is ridiculous, given the fact that we bought an incredibly nice camera for this occasion.

5. And did I mention yet that when you have a baby you don't get much "mama time?"

6. I've gone back to work. Adela's in daycare. I also contemplated writing to you then to report of this new change in our life, but how to put all those emotions into words? Perhaps you'll help me work through it someday later, but right now it's too raw to explain.

Now, though, I find myself with just this: a short span of "mama time" and I'm not entirely sure what to do with it. I am experiencing a rare night of sleepiness from my little girl. She's all swaddled up in her crib. I've just completed my various chores for the evening, including making scrumptious stuffed green bell peppers and doing laundry for the umpteenth time this week. And I thought, "Hey! What the heck? Why don't you write a little. Say hello to your online presence. Put a few words to paper so to speak."

So dear blog, it's good to be back. My life--while crazy--is so very much worth every bit of chaos.

SWAN Day

This past weekend I had the wonderful opportunity to be surrounded and enveloped by many talented, lovely, and beautiful women from across Pittsburgh for No Name Players' third annual SWAN Day Celebration. SWAN Day (which stands for Support Women Artists Now) is an international celebration of women artists during March, Women's History Month. At this particular Celebration, the performance is a conglomeration of women creating art in all its various forms--dance, music, theatre, visual, media, literary, and everything in between.

It's funny how some things just fall into place. My dear friends, Em and Christina, and I were discussing how cool it would be to start a women's theatre group here in Pittsburgh. We then thought--with all of our copious amounts of free time--that we could get something put together for women's history month. Needless to say, it was quickly becoming evident that this was not going to happen. But then we were guided toward the direction of Tressa, the managing director of No Name Players,who had been organizing this awesome SWAN Day event. I met with her in December, and she found us an 8 minute spot in the show. How cool was that?

Each piece for this year's celebration was going to be based on interviews Tressa had done with local women about being women. When we watched the interview footage, we had pages upon pages of notes. We talked for 2 1/2 hours about everything we found interesting. Trying to decide what to talk about in 8 minutes was going to be hard!  But we decided to structure our piece in a way that no one else had done before for SWAN Day: a monologue performance piece written and performed by us in conjunction with visual artists who would create art based on our monologues. Sweet, huh? While initially we had envisioned the artists creating something in real time during the performances, they ended up creating an awesome animation that ran behind us based on our themes and prop.

Prop, you say? What kind of prop? As you may remember, I posted my monologue a while back. The monologue was about how terrified (and guilty because of it) I was to have a girl. Em's and Christina's monologues also touched upon different "flavors of guilt" associated with different stages of motherhood. Em's discussed the need to do everything "right" and "by the book" or else we'll all die from the unknowns (think hysterical, smothering mother). Christina's investigated the desire to break free and become her own women again--only to feel guilty about leaving her family to do so. So to tie all of our guilt together, we used a rope. A long long rope. It was tied, wrapped, unwrapped, bundled, stretched, pulled, wound, went over, went under, climbed through, stepped on, in circle, in cats cradle--it did a lot for showing how we all felt. And hence, the title of our piece was In Knots.

We got a lot of positive feedback on our piece, which was wonderful although unnecessary because I think that even if everyone had hated it, we had so much fun putting it together that it wouldn't have mattered. I swear--we would get together for an hour and half "rehearsal" and probably only rehearse for about 30 minutes of that time. We gelled and it all came together. The rest of the time was spent chatting, venting, crying, laughing, eating. I got to know two amazing women through this process, women who have already begun to share their motherhood experiences with me and guide me towards becoming the mom I hope I'll be. I'm forever grateful to them for such a wonderful experience.

Here's to getting our women's theatre group up and running, ladies!