I have been mostly focused on video games and cuddling my son in the last few weeks and days of my maternity leave. I go back to work the day after tomorrow. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I’ve been home for 2 and a half months with my lil guy. I also can’t believe how painful the thought of leaving him is.
When my husband and I were talking about the announcement of Diablo IV, we were saying how we’d have to train Ronan into being a class that neither of us want to be. Ryan then described a drawing I could do of the three of us in our classes with Ronan as a little head on one of our backs.
Over this last week I ended up putting WAY more work into this than I could have expected, especially since Ronan was super clingy a few days this week and I could only work like 10 minutes at a time before he’d be like “no you’re too distracted cuddle me harder”
I made a point in the drawing especially since I play as a barbarian-type “fuck em up” class to include my scars. One of my laparoscopy scars ended up being the spot for some of my only new stretch marks and they made a cool little lightning bolt. And my huge-ass c-section scar is pretty symbolic to me ultimately.
Also I figured since I didn’t need to showcase my post-breastfeeding small boobs I’d showcase Dat Booty.
Anyway, who knows what’s gonna happen to my art productivity once I go back to work and also have a child to take all my attention when I’m not there!
Hello and welcome to the final stretch of Mary’s maternity leave, wherein she’s gotten a bit bored and uninspired and has only done art of her and her baby.
Except there’s also a story in the works! But it keeps starting and stopping and it might not end up finished. It’s a good idea though! With a weird array of inspiration, haha. We’ll see.
First family portrait I’ve attempted. As you can see I didn’t finish the shading and the lineart is still a sketch..but hey it’s been posted now.So of my three cats, the gentle friendly ones have ended up hating the baby most. That is, they hate sharing my attention with the baby. Miss Replacement Baby enjoys climbing on me and trying to climb on the baby. Jericho just looks dejected when the baby is in his way, and tends to follow me around if I don’t have Ronan waiting for attention.Miss Prozac Snowball, though, has continued on with business as usual and has allowed Ronan into her inner circle. (Actually she got stuck in the living room when our besties were over the other week and just sat in the corner of the room looking less and less frightened, and even took some of her tuna treat from them). Snowball usually gives Ronan a kiss or a bath like she does me and Ryan. And over the weekend when we were napping as a family she got really excited when I came back from the bathroom and ended up doing her “tidal wave” fall onto Ronan, who was like HUF but stayed asleep, so I lol’d and let them both be.As mentioned, family naptime. <3
As I slid my hand around my newborn’s back and settled into bed with him, I realized I never expected to be this kind of mom.
Especially in these early weeks I thought about what I was feeling and deciding about my child and felt like a psychologist, clinical, calculating, and insensitive. Except all of those early child psychologists were men, who weren’t affected by the same rush of hormones as a mother is, who aren’t evolutionarily primed to know their child is sleeping next to them, regulating their breathing and body temperature and feeling secure just by the smell of me.
It’s raised the question a few times in my head about what kind of mother I think like as opposed to what kind of mother I feel like. A lot of my feelings are instincts, intuition, and hormones. My husband has admitted a few times he doesn’t feel connected to our mewling newborn the same way as me, and for someone as clinical and masculine in her thoughts as I am, this has been a remarkable identity transformation.
For me, too, I’m bombarded by sappy mom posts about how overwhelmed with love moms feel for their babies – which is true; I’m confounded by how strongly I feel for Ronan, and the rush of affection I feel when I squeeze his warm squishy body against myself. But for me, the love is honestly aggressive, assaultive, truly hearkening to the “Mama Bear” identity more than anything. Mess with my cub and I’ll rip you apart.
There’s also the fact that as I’m moving through this postpartum period, the hormones are starting to ebb and thus affect my creativity a bit less. I’ve always known the PMS-y hormones make me ultra creative, and giving birth to a baby is truly the ultimate culmination of a rush of female hormones. So I was explosively creative despite my deep and confusing hormonal distress. And now as my body is slowly returning to normal (a new, cyst-free normal), my creative levels are returning to normal as well, and admittedly I feel like I’ve dried up a bit. I don’t ever force myself to create, so I went from making two or three sketches today, baby aside, to knowing I’d rather read a book or play the Untitled Goose Game.
I really will have to redefine normal for myself though, and that’s before I even go back to school in 2 months. Eep.
Yesterday when I was going to lunch with my husband and baby I realized I hadn’t formally introduced my child to my OC boys. I told Ryan I had to make a drawing with the three boys meeting Ronan and Ryan seemed confused and indifferent. Until I started this drawing. Then he told me yesterday night that he felt a little jealous that I had myself drawn with our baby and three guys (my “waifus” he called them. Only Micah was my waifu though…but I didn’t correct him) and he was like “boys get out of here” and then admitted with annoyance that I’ve technically known them longer than him.
I told him unfortunately for him it was delightful to be having a conversation like that with my awesome nerdy husband, who the day before had harshly judged me for telling him that I’d had Yu-Gi-Oh fanart at the library we were driving past when I was a kid.
THAT STARTED MY LIFE AS I KNOW IT OKAY
Anyway, I did the above drawing pretty easily yesterday and slapped some color on it today. I must say I have hit a new level with skin shading and I’m really happy about it. I probably credit Dumping a Dragon for that and for pushing my digital coloring to new heights, but that was a whole year ago now that I was working on DaD according to my Timehop.
Finally when I was working on the picture of my guys meeting my baby I kept thinking of this picture of them.
Based on the jacket I’m wearing this one was from my junior year of high school, so 10 years ago.
The funny history of it is drawing them when I’m 28 and a mother with a husband who in certain lights definitely does look like he could have evolved from Myoku. 🙂
My first alcoholic beverage during daylight (a cider) and I spill it on my nice green keyboard. Nice one Mary.
Anyway, here is some doodling I’ve been doing since Ronan came. Honestly I have a lot more free time than I did when I was working right now. Newborns just sleep, pee/poop, eat, repeat. And my husband is home still for another week too so we just trade off doing whatever we want and holding our calm happy sleeping (attitudey) baby.
In the mornings I get up early, get him dressed, and sit him at my desk with me. I sing terrible 2000s punk rock to him (FOB) and don’t feel sorry for it while I do art on my tablet.
A few mornings ago I finally painted my baby. I think it turned out to be a pretty good likeness of him. He’s the cutest baby in the world fight me.
painting practice on my new monitor setupan elf lady doodle during a break from holding the babyin my brief use of photoshop. I hate photoshop, long live clip paint pro.More mystical girl doodles.This morning I woke up wanting to make a busty anime girl my husband would approve of and then it occurred to me that he should be approving of me as a busty anime girl. Milk boobs are big (and fading fast, so they must be memorialized.)
It seems my speedy efficiency with art might have its parenting benefits! Here are some sketches/doodles/thoughts on the first almost week as a mom.
Thoughts about the hospital, including angry tears, seeing my husband change his son’s diaper, sitting uncomfortably in a hospital bed with my favorite boys, c-section scars, and the sudden arrival of breast milk completely transforming my body (much like pregnancy)And, on a similar note, I don’t know if many mamas necessarily have the same baseline for body changes but I feel like a million bucks right now. My pumping bra has been described by Ryan and I as Final Fantasy getup. And my tummy is super flat – I’ve lost almost 20lbs since delivery, and breastfeeding is continuing that trajectory.Nighttime adventures with diaper changing (and trying to get my pen to work right on my new computer)My baby narration is weird at the moment
Work while very pregnant and also slow in the summer meant I grabbed some oversized paper from the documentation room and did some pen drawings on my last weekend working. I decided this warm and “last days of summer” girl could use some color and I’m reallly happy with how it turned out. Done on my new all in one of course.Deer girl work doodleIronically, this is the drawing I did the morning that I went to the hospital to have a baby. I’d been experiencing signs of pre labor all weekend that I was convinced were all in my head, because they either could mean labor was imminent or else weeks away. For me, it was imminent!
Worth publishing, but incomplete – I was working on this blog entry and scanning a large painting with my newer scanning software, paused for dinner, and then after dinner, my waters broke and I went to the hospital to have a baby! So…a bit distracting, the whole week is gone now!
Ryan and I became parents on August 27 at 3:30 in the afternoon to our magical boy Ronan Mylo. The three days since then have been quite a roller coaster. I obviously haven’t been doing any art, but I’m gearing up! :3
I am 37 weeks pregnant! That means our little boy might be joining us any day now and we’ll welcome him with all our love and cuddles and it’s gonna be CRAZY. On my drive home today (I seem to do a lot of art planning on the way home from work) I decided I needed to do kind of a “last drawing” of us before we’re parents.
I think it captures the sentiment I’ve held for most of this pregnancy (ugh mostly), and Ryan’s sheer “I can’t fix it but I know you’re miserable” support.
I was also working on a Micah painting but it slowed down a lot since I started it last weekend so I decided to just save and post the incomplete sketch/painting. His face was turning out a bit weird anyway. It’s really that extended hand that made me even work on it for as long as I had. Perfection.
The slice of yellow was gonna be a highlighter but I redid his whole shirt and hadn’t gotten back to it yet haha.
Last weekend at work I was so bored I grabbed some 8×14 paper and did some pen drawings that I’ve been meaning to scan since they turned out pretty cool. But I have to scan them in and, lazy.
I mean honestly Ryan and I were in our best friends’ wedding this last weekend and that made all last week pretty fucking busy.
I’m also being cut a $3900 check from my insurance company for hail damage to my car, so Ryan and I are gonna both upgrade our computers! It’s just a matter of whether we can make our choices and get the check soon enough to have them before our son comes, haha.
On my husband’s birthday my Timehop was like 4 years in a row of fanart of the two of us and then when I was on my laptop working on his toast card, I fell down the rabbit hole of our whole folder of fanart and found this gem.
You can always tell how far along we were in our relationship based in part on how many tattoos we had, and definitely on the tone of the drawing. Am I still trying to impress him with being all cutesy but also, fancy pro art? We were probably actually really struggling at the time so I’m going to write encouraging things on art for us in hopes we will somehow be led to believe it? Yes, this one was probably the latter, haha. And without really knowing to what extent I would get into it, I decided this particular one needed a reprise.
And…voila.
I think I ended up spending two or three days on this one? I really really love it, except in the earlier draft I was snoozing with a little o mouth and that was why my eyes were closed. Now I look much more peaceful than I am, but we can pretend it’s general exhaustion, which is usually accurate.
I think my favorite part is the tiny kitty prints in my belly. And also Ryan’s silky smooth looking skin.
In other news, today marks 100 days until the due date for our little dude! Whether he comes that day, or hopefully before, or hopefully not after, 100 days until the day we were told about months ago when we really weren’t sure what to expect on this pregnancy journey (we’re still not).
After my semester ended and my daily digital drawings project came to a close, I felt a little void and wanted some new motivation to keep doing art regularly. So Ryan suggested another 100 days project like before our wedding, only this one would be up until our baby (should be) born. Since it’s following a fairly specific and limited project from the semester, I decided my only rule for this project is that I do a drawing more or less daily. Whether it’s an ongoing painting, a doodle in the margins of my school notes, or an unrelated cat comic like today, I’m marking the days until this baby is due by just being creative. I think I want to write the baby a note each day, but I don’t know if I’ve figured out how to document that quite yet. I’ll write today’s note, and then figure out how to tack it to the drawing when I have a full day off tomorrow.
That’s all I got! The cat comic I did today is posted on my art Insta account!
You know it’s really hard going into it to wrap your head around what you can expect throughout the whole course of being pregnant. 40 weeks is a long time. You grow a baby over the course of most of a year. And since I got pregnant right before the new year, it really is the cornerstone of the whole year of 2019 for me.
There’s a lot of moments to enjoy, and it’s great having so many people surrounding me to support me and listen and take care of me (usually anyway). My husband has been amazing x infinity hands down, patiently yelling at me when I complain about my daily changing body, planning activities for us after our son is born, and not giving me too much shit when I want to eat disgusting amounts of food (this week’s legacy was a double cheeseburger with a large shake – from a SECOND fast food restaurant).
But there are also lots of moments, more so right now that I’m looking pregnant, I’m feeling my son move everyday, and the summer is quickly flying by to where my son is coming in just about 3 months…where I’m just pretty scared.
Things should be feeling MORE real by now, and they probably honestly are…which is what makes them so scary. With the internet, and just…people giving you unsolicited opinions literally at all times in all situations, there are just a lot of big scary things that can happen to a baby. They probably WON’T, but when all you’re doing is waiting and waiting, it’s hard not to imagine many worst case scenarios sprinkled into the good daydreaming.
Obviously you can’t spend nine months in a state of perpetual excitement and optimism. Obviously there are days when I feel sorry for myself for gaining weight, or being sore, or having an anterior placenta. Unfortunately, those have been most days for me at the moment. I can’t help it. I’m naturally anxious when I’m waiting for things, and when people ask me how I am I feel guilty that I’m basically perfectly normal right now honestly. We got a lot of preparation for baby out of the way a month or more ago, and a lot of it is going to wait a month or so until the baby showers start happening.
The good news, and always, always, always the bottom line is that the only person I’m really in this together with is my husband. Always just him. Nothing else, or anybody else really matters, ultimately.
And luckily for me, my husband is AWESOME. He patiently yells at me when my self-esteem gets low (it’s almost always low right now), he doesn’t judge me when I get whiny, and he is so totally up for being a dad. What it comes down to is just putting one foot in front of the other, doing life together on the days when everything feels normal, and fighting through the days that feel terrible and scary because all I can do is wait and I’m hormonal and scared and frustrated.
I can only hope our little boy grows up with my husband’s calm in his head, and his deeply loving nature.
