Merdonna and Child

Motherhood, Instincts and a Prayer for a different way

I am so excited to share with you all my brand new piece, Merdonna and Child. Set at night with moonlight bathing the scene, the Merbabe awakens for a quick snack. As he wiggles around, bioluminescence is ignited and the magical light of millions of tiny sea creatures sets the scene a glow. Like a sea otter and her babe, the Mer-family is cozy in the lengthy and sturdy leaves of kelp, floating calmly above a kelp forest below. The ripples in the water turn into a nebula encircling the scene in a cosmic eternity turning a fleeting moment into a timeless memory.

This painting premiers in person this weekend at the opening of Visions of the New Earth, the new exhibition at the Alembic I curated featuring the work of the Visionary Muse Collective.

Merdonna and Child, 24” x 36,” oil and casein on canvas.

Animals of fur and feather snuggle their babes close when they sleep. It is in our nature to do the same. In fact, there are a lot of things in our nature to do as mothers and parents that our culture tells us are wrong and then sets up systems and beaurocracy to make sure we can’t actually do the things we know in our bodies to be correct setting us up for guilt, shame and feelings of failure. This is where the idea of this painting came from. We are constantly asked to second guess our instincts as mothers and it literally starts from the moment you give birth (and arguably from the moment you get pregnant - that’s a whole other story).

Image Credit: Tyson V. Rininger via Bored Panda

For example, we co-sleep with our baby as a family. The hand-wringing about how co-sleeping is not safe comes from a study that was conducted on parents who were addicted to drugs and alcohol and there was no differentiation to what counted as a bed, so a sofa or lounge chair counted as well. In this study, they found that parents had a tendency to roll onto and harm their children. No kidding. I’m going to pause for effect…..There has been no other study about co-sleeping with your baby besides this and this is why everyone says it’s unsafe. The stigma around even mentioning this out loud in certain circles and to most pediatricians is pretty extreme and the result is that parents second guess their most basic instincts and go down a road that causes “fussy sleepers” or untold amounts of other “sleep problems.” We need to get over some imaginary expectation of what “good sleep” is in a baby, cuddle up with them, and let it be. This is just one tiny example of the absolute deluge of topics that one encounters as a new parent and where the very structure of society forcibly removes what we know in our bodies to be the right way to do something. Our culture is chronically disassociated with our instinctual Self and in some ways, it is never more clear than when you are trying to raise a tiny human.

(There are great resources out there telling parents how to co-sleep safely with their newborns and if you are interested, I can point you in the right direction and give you some sources.)

We brought our baby home from the hospital and I took one look at the crib and my whole body said, “Nah.” And I’ve never slept apart from him since. It’s literally one of my greatest joys. We share a closeness and bond as a family that is unbreakable and is the bedrock when things get difficult, as life tends to do. And it’s this primal, basic, beautiful bond I wanted to capture in this vignette of a painting.

Merdonna and Child, detail.

Mermaids (happy Mer-May by the way) are both human and animal, symbolically uniting aspects of different sides of our nature that are often pitted against each other. Take our analytic minds and our emotional body for example. There is a seemingly endless discourse about the duality of mind and body. This is a completely imagined duality and if we were just taught from childhood, like many cultures do and have throughout our human history, that not only are they on the same spectrum of being but that they exist on a continuum that can assist us in placing ourselves into a much larger web of interactivity with everything around us, not only would our world be different but we would be profoundly less messed up in a myriad of ways.

A Mermaid can honor both of these aspects of Self and does not feel conflicted by duality – she has alchemically achieved the coniunctio, the marriage of opposites, for she represents both the mind, by her human part and the instinctual and emotional body, by her fish part. This primordial wholeness is what she passes onto her son, who was born Mer, or alchemical whole, the filius philosophorum in this case, from the beginning. You can also think of this as the healing of ancestral traumas. Once you heal your ancestral lineages, that pain and intergenerational transmission of traumatic genetic material stops with you. You achieve integration and your child can start life without needing to process it further.

Merdonna and child, detail.

This painting is a prayer that more cultural thriving can be born from a marriage of the opposing forces within our culturally conditioned fractured humanity and that we truly honor, support with societal infrastructure, and shape culture to allow mothers to truly mother their babes to ensure a vibrant, grounded, and integrated future. We can all feel as safe as a baby otter wrapped in seaweed with his Mum if we see the value of building a world that raises up the power of maternal flourishing which ensures generativity for generations to come.

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Come see the painting in person along with the work of 16 other Visionary Muses in this beautiful new show at The Alembic (show info and tickets here).

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Can’t make it to the opening but are free in the afternoon? I am teaching my creative integration class, Alligator Lizards from 1-3pm at The Alembic and we are going to be doing a special session where we respond to the artworks in the show. Check out more details and register HERE.