Artist Series: What I Know
On Writing: Three essays by Rachel Larsen Weaver
I am over the moon about introducing you to Rachel Larsen Weaver. I first came across her incredible photography work which led me to her writing which led me to her, and let me tell you, every single facet of Rachel and what she puts out into the world is rooted in truth and joy. She is forever inspiring me, both as an artist and as a mother. She is documenting our love and family in her 4x4 Mentorship + Workshop on Ocracoke Island in September and I am so thrilled to work with her and be in the orbit of her joyful, creative energy. You can learn more about the 4x4 here.
Rachel has so graciously sent over three (THREE!) essays for today’s feature and I am so grateful to share these with you. While reading the first one, Peaceful, I got all watery and emotional because she described peace in the way that I’ve lived and felt it my whole life, but never quite knew how to put it into words. I know in my heart of hearts this piece will resonate with you.
The second essay, What I Know, gets to the center of why I started this Substack in the first place—what it means to be the artist and the mother. In the early days of postpartum, I felt my artist self dissolving and this newsletter was a way for me to hold myself accountable to the writing. I have written every single week for almost two years and this is a special place to me—a place where I know I can come back to myself regardless of what motherhood [life] is asking of me.
The third essay, Heady Mama Rachel challenged my own view of motherhood—how I think about it now versus how I thought about it in my youth. I loathed the entire concept of mother in my youth, but since becoming one, I have found so much joy in this place. I’ve also found exhaustion and a sort of self-sacrificial pressure that can so easily take over the joy. Rachel’s essay widens the lens on motherhood, expanding the mother archetype into its truest, wildest form, and god damn, I needed this. If you’re a mother, do not skip reading this one.
Rachel Larsen Weaver is an artist-educator and photographer joyfully living on the Maryland beaches of the Chesapeake Bay. A mother to five and creator of moments, her enthusiasm for details and self-love are infectious, infusing creative sessions with a buoyant reverence for the simplest pleasures. Her portfolio and practice is fat-affirming, mindful, and genuine, focusing on the life and light of clients. Co-founder of NOW, NOW School, and creator of #FindingMyselfInPortraits and the original Long Form Sessions, Rachel travels the country documenting mothers, bodies, and details.
What are you reading right now?
Right now I am reading Shugie Bain, by Douglas Stuart. I read Young Mungo, another one of his novels, earlier this summer. I think I liked that one a little more, though maybe I just should have put some more time between them.
What do you do when you're coming up against resistance, and you can't seem to get to the center of the thing—the writing, the living, the task at hand? How do you get to where you want to go?
Sometimes I think that the key is to not do the task at hand but to dive into the living in some other area.
I have learned about the cycle of relationships: the big, romantic relationship of my life but also my relationships to mothering and friendship and creativity and my business.
A thing can be really great and then get really bad, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be great again. And often it isn’t the relationship that feels stagnant that needs support as much as one of the other relationships in my life.
I know that when I feel restless, my energy needs somewhere to go, and usually that somewhere is not directly into the thing that feels in trouble.
Sometimes I need to work on business so that my creativity can return. Sometimes I need time with friends so that my mothering can flourish. There are times that reconnecting to Tom has been the thing that has reconnected me to my love of making images.
Tell me about this piece. Where did it come from?
I have written these essays over the past couple of years as a part of my weekly writing practice that takes the shape of a Monday night newsletter.
For me, my newsletter is a way of honoring my commitment to writing. Having a consistent and firm deadline has been really important for me—I need that structure or else all of the demands of life and mothering would make it so easy to wait for the perfect time.
*You can subscribe to Rachel’s newsletter HERE & NOW on her website here.
Three essays
by Rachel Larsen Weaver
PEACEFUL
It is with some regularity someone will make a remark about how peaceful my life appears. There was a time I thought it was almost funny they should think that. I have five children, a dog, and a cat that no longer comes inside because of the dog but always begs to be noticed in the middle of the night by tearing up the weather stripping around the front door.
I work full time as does my husband. There is no childcare—in fact, most mornings I watch one or both of my three-year-old nephews while my mom helps homeschool my six and eight-year-olds.
We live in a house that by US standards is relatively small and is certainly in need of updates both large and small. It is a messy house. Loud and cluttered. Full of movement and piles of sand. Most drawers are junk drawers and the closets don’t even have room for our skeletons. I can never remember a time when all of the major appliances were working properly at once. I sometimes wonder if my neighbors wonder why I drive past their homes so many times any given day. I am endlessly mailing off film, getting more eggs, running Gus to soccer practice.
As I write, Alamae asks me to find a cheetah print jumpsuit for her Christmas present. Arlo needs me to protect him from Gus who is trying to steal his hair tie from his head. Gus reminds me that I have to drop him off at work in 10 minutes and the dog needs to take a shit in our yard that I will beg Sena to go clean up later, but there will be pushback because she’s home from college and can’t believe she is required to do anything to help this haphazard household.
Now Alamae wants my phone. And now I must get up to go take Gus to his job. I will be back to talk about peace in just one moment.
When people first began suggesting that my life was peaceful, I thought they were absolutely absurd. My life is loud. And my life is in constant motion. And I would like to pretend that it is just messy around here, but the truth is, it’s downright dirty. And my car..my car goes beyond dirty all the way to filthy. For a long time I felt like those things indicated that this was not a peaceful home. This was not a peaceful life.
But what I have come to realize is that the disconnect was actually in my definition of peace.
I believed that peace was about the outward circumstances.
But peace isn’t a state of stillness or quiet or order, none of which are in abundance in my days.
Peace is the absence of tension between what things are and what you wish them to be.
The noise is not what disturbs the peace—it is the desire to quiet the noise that does.
And if that is going to be my working definition of peace, then yeah, I do have a peaceful life.
Because I don’t mind the way things are. At this very moment, I can hear Sena in her room playing her guitar and writing songs. I hear Tom in the basement on a conference call. Arlo and Alamae are huddled around my phone playing some sort of game that I allowed them to download without looking into it for even a moment. The dog is snoring and farting beside me. And I feel full and happy.
I am content that we will not rake the leaves. I did a quick Google search this morning to find some sort of justification for letting them stay where they are.
I don’t care that we can’t close Alamae’s bedroom door because Arlo drug his mattress to the small space by her bed so they could sleep together this week while Sena is back to reclaim her room that they have taken over these past few months.
Sure. It’s a goddamn mess around here, but at its heart, it’s a peaceful mess.
WHAT I KNOW
I started dinner. Broccoli and cauliflower are roasting in the oven. And I grated cheese for quesadillas. Tom has taken over so that I can write about what it means to be a mother and an artist.
Townes is supposed to be sitting next to me but he keeps crawling onto my lap. “I’m so cold. I’m so cold,” he says, wanting me to wrap my arms around him.
The house is not cold. A thunderstorm just came rolling through—loud and exciting, whipping hail across the yard. We closed the windows but had to open them again as soon as the storm passed because it’s so muggy in here.
Townes could also put on a pair of pants if he was, in fact, cold.
The charade is weak at best. He wants my attention.
And there is a part of me that wants to offer my attention to him—my full undivided attention. I want to trace his arms and legs for him as we did this morning. I want to build a tall tower. I want to tickle him until he begs me to stop and then do it again once he begs me to start.
But if I walked away from this computer right now, I would feel resentful.
I would be disappointed.
Once a week I find a few hundred words and I put them on this computer screen and then I share them with a few hundred people. It’s a practice I am deeply committed to.
At some point every week I think, “Maybe I won’t this week.” Because things always come up. It is always hard to carve out these precious few hours.
Sometimes I blame it on the ideas—where the hell are they?
But the ideas come. They come all day, every day. But they go just as fast because it’s time to make lunch. Because there is a fight to mediate. Because it’s time to pick up Arlo. Because it’s time to drop off Gus. Because there is a tiny little body begging to be tickled.
And every one of those tasks—they are worthy tasks. They are things I am grateful to be spending my days doing. But ya know what? I don’t think I would be grateful for them if they were everything. If they were my whole day. My whole week.
I want to be a good mother. In fact, I want to be a great mother.
In order to be one, I have to walk away from their desires to give space for my needs.
And I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it.
When we sit down to eat the dinner I started and Tom finished, Sena asks me if I have finished my newsletter.
On Tuesday, I picked her up from her first year of college. Everyone warns you that you will become your mother, but no one ever talks about how it feels when your daughter slowly becomes you. When she goes to the college you went to. Majors in what you majored in. Wants to pierce her nose like you, gets a film camera, wears all of your clothes.
“I started it, but it’s not done.”
“What’s it on?”
“Art and motherhood.”
“Not exactly breaking new ground this week, huh?”
Then we both laugh our big, similar laughs.
She’s a little bit right.
Tom jumps in to defend me, “What’s she supposed to write about? The time she murdered someone?”
And he’s a little bit right too.
This is what I know.
I know how to mother and how to create.
And while sometimes it seems that the two things are in conflict, I think that mostly they aren’t.
I am a better artist because I am a mother.
I am a better mother because I am an artist.
HEADY MAMA RACHEL
In college, among a few, I was known as Heady Mama Rachel—a nickname I knew better than to protest too loudly, lest it take hold the way deeply despised nicknames usually do.
I didn’t love the heady part; I wanted my persona to feel at least a little more intellectual than a straight-up jam band enthusiast.
But it was the mama part I loathed.
Moms were sexless and self-sacrificing.
I was fun.
I was joyful.
I wanted to argue, “What kind of mama’s main way of providing was to use her fake ID to buy boxes of wine?”
I wasn’t the type to have snacks and bandaids in her purse. I was and remain a terrible nurse.
I wasn’t a mama. At worst, I was a cool aunt.
Really though, couldn’t I just be known as an autonomous human who loved books and live music and dive bars and protesting every single thing George W. Bush did?
I was a precocious homeschooled kid who started and finished college early. When I got pregnant at nineteen, just weeks after graduating from college some people saw it as inevitable. Of course, Heady Mama Rachel would be the first to find her way to motherhood.
In Gen-Z speak, I am told I have a lot of mom energy, and I flinch a little every time they do. I don’t like being characterized that way. Because even though I am a mother five times over, even though I think I might actually be a pretty damn good mother, even though I like being a mom and see it as a deeply creative act, I have never wanted to be a mom-type. And I’m not talking about just being a cool mom. I’m talking I want to be a fully developed human in my own right. I want to exist separate from the fact that I have bred and/or raised children. I don’t want my identity to be tied up in all the ways that I can nurture or care for another.
Which is maybe a confusing thing to say because I am really devoted to being a kind and compassionate human who is here for other humans, including but not limited to the ones who are my children.
How come I thought mothers were supposed to be sexless and self-sacrificing?
What a bullshit idea. We’re not supposed to be the giving tree.
If we all chopped ourselves down for some asshole kids, well that would be the end of life on earth.
When people call me Heady Mama Rachel or tell me I have mom-energy, I jump right to some very narrow ideas about mothers.
I think that the problem might be that society has been celebrating a few elements of the mother archetype—the nurse and the nurturer—but has given scant attention to the ferocious and wild mother.
What is more ferocious than a mama bear?
How come I accepted some idea that to be a mother meant I was to be small and tamed and mild? How come I saw motherhood as purely domestic and forgot that it was ancient and untamed? Why didn’t I want to attach to the ideas of mother as giver of life and life as beautiful and chaotic and glorious?
My wildness, my laughter, my joy, my pleasure—those are deeply connected to the most maternal parts of me, the most ancient parts of me, the parts of me that have been with me before I ever had children—the parts of me that are my favorite parts.
Where to find Rachel:
Instagram | Website | Newsletter
