Split Attention

I never wanted to be a mother. This is a fact that was so tied up in my involvement in the art world that it was tantamount to a promise I’d made to myself. There was no way the salary of a curator could cover children, anyway, and the schedule certainly couldn’t—full of late night talks, openings, and dinners. This was an exchange I was happy to make. 

Then, I was on my way home from a road trip in early fall of 2023. Somewhere between Brooklyn and Cincinnati, and traveling for a wedding ceremony which was prelude to an ill-fated marriage, I got sick over baby carrots left in questionable cooler water. I vomited for days, relieved only by my visiting friend’s stomach-flu bequeathed stash of Ondansetron. Finally, I took a COVID-19 test, which came back negative, before sneaking to my local pharmacy for a pregnancy test. Positive. Knowing I had an IUD, knowing it was likely ectopic, did little to calm my nerves before the rush ultrasound.

And yet, there was part of me that willed the pregnancy to be viable, that felt that whatever this life force was inside of me, it had to live. My partner and I had had many conversations about our childfree life, had left many visits to my brother’s children with a sighed relief, the relief of those children belonging to someone else.

A few days later, far uptown, I heard the words that would forever change my life. After many moments of silence, the ultrasound tech quietly exclaimed, “There’s a baby in there. With a heartbeat.” Though she wasn’t supposed to break that news without a physician present, this was her first IUD pregnancy, and I guess she couldn’t help it. “Did you hear what she said?” I asked my partner. Later, as I cried in the bathroom of the imaging center, he reassured me. “One day at a time.” “Are we gonna have to move to California?” I asked on the way home, as the car drove down the FDR.

Now, nearly three years later, I can answer the questions left hanging in the air with the wisdom fate only affords to the future self. No, you won’t have to move to California. Yes, everything will change. You care less about evening events than you previously thought possible. And you took part in your own ill-fated marriage, the strewn-about pieces of which constitute much of daily life in the present moment.

A 2022 study published in the Journal of Marriage and the Family uses American Time Use Survey data to examine how remote and on-site work arrangements affected parents’ domestic labor during the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers found that while telecommuting did not increase primary childcare hours, mothers heavily engaged in multitasking and shifted their work schedules to manage supervisory care, the kind of on-call care that means being responsible for a child and keeping an eye on them while you are primarily doing something else. This shift ultimately exacerbates gender inequalities.

The way that attention splits as a mother is something hard to articulate. For Washington D.C.-based artist Tsedaye Makonnen, it means being highly selective about what she does and doesn’t do, even at the expense of the so-called “advancement” of her career.

Tsedaye Makonnen: I have not been able to do a lot of residencies, so something like Skowhegan I’ve always wanted to do, but the first eight years of my life as a parent, it was really limited. I didn’t start doing residencies until he was older and more independent. And then the pandemic happened, and then I got pregnant, and it kind of felt like I was starting all over again. So I tended to, just because of circumstance, find residencies and fellowships that usually come with a stipend, something that can offset the bills, cost of living. I think this year for the first time I’m like, hmm, maybe I can do residencies.

When talking to artist June Canedo de Souza, her current version of family life involves a never-ending cold passed between herself and her daughter, newly in daycare. 

June Canedo de Souza: She’ll go to daycare, and then by Friday, she has a cold. And then we spend the whole weekend recovering, and then I have the cold by Monday. And then she’s fine by Monday and then by Friday, has the cold again.

For Canedo de Souza, the entry into motherhood coincided with the demands of her career, where she gave birth and then four months later had to finish her last semester of grad school at Bard College.

JCD: And that’s when things became really clear to me, that the kind of compromise going forward is going to be a real challenge for me, in this environment. Because I’m so hyperfocused on my work and getting things done, and getting the next idea and the next idea and the next idea. When you have a kid, they don’t care about any of that. And so, the first year of continuing to make my practice happen and have a kid was really difficult. That was like, the idea of splitting, and people telling you that you can do it all or you can’t do it all. I felt very much like I had to disassociate in order to do it all. 

I was so bothered by not being able to “complete,” because I had been so used to meeting my own deadlines that I created for myself, and with her, it’s impossible to do that. This idea that you finish whenever it happens, after everything else happens. Not just the taking care, the childcaring, but the worldbuilding that happens around it. The is the house tidy, are the clothes clean, is her hair done, is everybody happy, did she get enough park time today? That stuff comes first. And then what’s left now goes to my practice. Making that shift for me was really really difficult. It took a year, and a lot of tears, a lot of turmoil. I had to be a different person, basically.

So my partner, his career has taken a backseat, because he stepped up and took care of her more, while I pursued my things. Which is also really challenging, because there are all these ideas of what the man is supposed to provide. Even though we’re not like that, they still come up, because they’re ingrained in society, so it’s impossible to escape from. He took care of her a lot, and when it came time for Skowhegan, she was one, almost one and a half, and it was a really big deal to do nine weeks. I think by the time I arrived there, like the first two weeks, I was just sobbing all the time, crying all the time. But after two weeks, I was like, this is amazing! Wow! This is what it was like before! And I really leaned into that, because I knew it would be finite.

My experience at Skowhegan was really different, because I was one of only two people that had left their small child behind to do this. Skowhegan was less of a social space for me, and definitely a workspace. I was waking up at like five in the morning and going to the studio and working all day long, and not leaving the studio, only leaving for lunch breaks and food breaks, and then coming back and working into the night. I would tap into the social stuff, but I felt like I was witnessing a film. I was in my own world, because I knew it was only going to be nine weeks.

To be a mother is to be constantly shifting between different forms of time, remembering what once was while being utterly subsumed by the present, and more often, the future. To realize you’ve been cutting grapes in half out of habit long after they’re no longer a choking hazard, reaching for hands that no longer need you the way they did a few weeks ago. My daughter’s feet no longer stutter up the stairs, but instead take a swift smooth series of steps to get to their destination. But my body remembers when each stair required a reset, a hand on the ground, and a verbal encouragement. For Tsedaye Makonnen, time came in its most surprising form during a month-long Savage-Lewis Residency in Martha’s Vineyard–uninterrupted.

TM: That is something where it’s like Oh! I have twelve hours of uninterrupted time to just make work […] I had just gotten so used to “I have fifteen minutes here, I have an hour here,” like squeezing in my practice in between moments of caretaking. And obviously once my son was in school full time, I had my own studio space, and I was able to work longer days. But that experience on Martha’s Vineyard was life-changing and also made me realize low-key what I was missing out on. I didn’t know this is what other artists get to experience. Because when I became a single parent in my mid-twenties was when I decided I was going to pursue art. It felt very life or death, like, it’s now or never. If I’m going to pursue art, I’ve got to do this now. I guess because I understood that the role of parenting was going to take over my life. I’ve got to also keep a part of myself for myself and show my child just because I’ve become a mom doesn’t mean I don’t get to pursue my dreams or my passion.

For me, the split attention of mothering feels like something similar to anticipatory grief for my time. I expect my time to be on loan to someone else, accounted for. I’m currently writing with the uncannily high voice of kid’s Youtube star Blippi in the background, because my daughter’s daycare vouchers were voided for some undisclosed bureaucratic reason, and her father and I have to begin the sisyphean process of recertifying. The long summer days I thought I’d have to myself as I seek new employment are now spent entirely on caring for a child, or recovery from the days spent as a freelancing solo parent without childcare.

Both June and I have weathered weekslong absences from our children. One of the last things we spoke about was the notion that babies can’t tell time, so they don’t actually know that you’re coming back when you’re gone. In that, I wonder, what connects you to someone when the precondition of your relationship (mind-wrenching, body-shifting proximity) is no longer the primary mode of relating? Is absence still just an inverse of presence? 

And what of the fact that to be present with children often means to be absent from art spaces, which are at turns generative, life-giving, and alienating? Many times I’ve coordinated my arrival to an arts institution with my daughter to carefully align with the 6:00 pm Manhattan start time listed, so as to maximize the amount of time before her 8:00 pm Brooklyn bedtime, carefully weighing a cost-benefit calculus of socializing. Attendance to a just-worth-it event can easily skew into a less-than in the case of a meltdown, parking ticket, or lack of changing tables at the venue.

And still, despite our careful calculations in this ongoing, temporal Tetris, mothers like June, Tsedaye, and myself keep showing up, keep hoping for a streak of chance to make the evening worth it, hoping for community to meet us at the other end. And so often, those who do are other mothers who have cobbled together their own exquisite corpses of care, support, patience, and tenacity.

At the end of June’s time at Skowhegan, on one of the last nights in the barn, there was an opportunity for people to go up and say their goodbyes. June shared, “I’m not one to ever share anything. I kind of keep to myself a little bit. I just got up, I don’t know why, went to the podium and I was like, ‘I don’t know how to explain this, but I want to share with you that my baby has grown six teeth since I’ve been here.’

And that’s all I could say, you know, and I was just like, why did I say that? But then, it makes sense, like that’s how much you’ve missed.”