The Creator

ambition, astrology, medicine & dreams

“I can’t keep up with his appetite,” she said, pointing out her son reaching into the potato bin of the John Givens stall at the Atwater farmers’ market.

“There’s nothing more satisfying than watching your kid eat,” I said. She looked at me like I was an alien before quickly agreeing. I imagined her telling her husband about it later. 

“She used to be an artist,” she might say. “Now she’s just a mom.”

(“This is all in your head!” Stevie laughed while reading this, pointing out that I’m the one talking to my husband about it, while she probably went about her day, immediately forgetting the exchange. It’s possible she didn’t even know who I was.)

She was a classmate from college, a filmmaker I used to stalk on Instagram before I deleted my account so I couldn’t do things like that anymore.

It’s true, finding things your child loves to eat and watching her eat them is one of the true pleasures of life when you become a parent. It’s also true that I can imagine other things being potentially more satisfying, like getting your film into Sundance.

It reminds me of that scene in Sex and the City when Carrie & friends show up to the baby shower of an ex-party girl who is now pregnant and while she and the other moms are drooling over bibs and boutique car seats, Carrie and Miranda stand off to the side staring in horror.

“This is a cult,” Miranda says, while Carrie wonders in fear if she’s next. I used to be a Carrie. I still feel like a Carrie. I still don’t relate to the baby shower ladies, just like I don’t relate to the woman who runs Maya’s day care talking about how one of the snacks they offer is a “donut” which is actually a slice of apple with sun butter (it’s a nut free school) and the kids can choose a coconut flake or raw cacao topping.

“That’s not a fucking donut!” I want to scream on our tour of the school, please don’t lie to my child and tell her that’s what a donut is. But I don’t scream, because I want Maya to be accepted, and I want to be accepted too. Maybe we all think we’re Carries until one day we wake up and we’re a mom and say something like “there’s nothing more satisfying than watching your kid eat” (because that’s actually true! It’s primal and you can’t help it!) but then we’re like oh fuck, what have I become? I used to be interesting.

I find myself in compare and despair mode lately. This is something that rears its ugly head every few months, whenever I’m stuck on a project or run into an old friend at the farmers’ market who’s more successful than me and I wonder, where did the time go and have I wasted my life?

There’s so much I want to do, I find committing to one thing to be a challenge. Instead, I have numerous projects on a very low simmer for a very long time, nothing coming to a boil, the water in the pot slowly evaporating. It’s a slow kind of progress.

I’m looking to John Steinbeck for inspiration. Reading the letters he wrote to his editor while writing East of Eden, while slowly making my way through the actual (fatty) novel at night in the few minutes between mommy and daddy TV time and knocking out hard. It’s a comfort to see even one of The Greats got bogged down by distraction and loss of focus. But he did write The Grapes of Wrath in six months, while I’ve been toiling with this silly little memoir for over two years. Steinbeck hand wrote Grapes straight through without stopping. I have written so many drafts of the beginning of my memoir, it would make your head spin. It’s the curse of working on a computer I guess rather than a typewriter. Of course Steinbeck had a wife who typed up all his pages for him, gave notes, made edits. It must be nice to have a wife like that.

“If your writing supported us, I’d type up your handwritten drafts,” Stevie said. I got mad at him for saying this, but he informed me it was actually a very supportive thing for him to say. I couldn’t see it that way through the cloud of shame that descends whenever money is mentioned in the same breath as my writing.

Every time Maya and I watch Encanto, which is a lot lately, I find myself crying at the end when Mirabel—the overlooked, powerless member of the magical Familia Madrigal—discovers her gift of bringing the family together, thus saving the Madrigals and finally getting her moment to shine. I wonder if I’ll get my moment to shine.

I remember the early days of motherhood, feeling like the picture frame holding the art that was Maya. I don’t feel like that so much anymore. I don’t feel invisible. But I do resist being decentralized in my own story, and part of me wonders if this is just what it is to become a mother, and if it’s even worth resisting. My ego is fighting it, but there’s part of me that deeply wants to let go, to stop guarding against disappearing, to allow myself to just merge with her, to become her support, to let go of being the one who is seen.

“You’re not the ingenue anymore and what a relief,” said my guide for a medicine journey I’ll be going on November 1st, in our prep call this week. This will mark my first night away from Maya and also when I plan to stop breastfeeding. It feels like my work at the moment is learning to accept that there’s no going back to who I was before and trusting that something even more beautiful and profound lies ahead. And that it might not look like how I imagined my life would look: the outward validation, artistic and financial success, the celebration of my ego I’ve been chasing for so long.

“I’m trying to accept the idea that my life might be smaller than I envisioned,” I said to Stevie the other night. He looked surprised, relieved.

“Really?” He sounded hopeful.

“Nah,” I said.

“There’s something in your chart that indicates you had a big past life, maybe you were famous,” my astrologer John told me once. This excited me at the time, but it occurs to me now I may have missed the point.

“And this go round,” he continued, “you’re slightly humbled.” Rather than chasing that thing that feels just out of reach, perhaps I need a dose of humility. And maybe a broadening of my idea of what a big life looks like.

“Imagine a world in which The Mother was considered The Artist, because she is the ultimate creator,” my medicine guide told me on the phone. “Imagine if we valued a mother’s work like we value the work of a CEO of a big company, because it’s actually not so different. The multi-tasking, the sleepless nights, the absolute commitment to the job.” It’s hard to value a mother’s work in this way because our culture doesn’t value it, and because mothering doesn’t pay the bills. Capitalism, baby, it’s a bitch.

In this Scorpio season of letting go and deep investigation, the message feels like it’s coming from all directions. Sorry to be someone who’s like, let me tell you about a dream I had. But, let me tell you about a dream I had:

I’m at an outdoor market in Bolinas, where I grew up. A local woman wants me to look at some jewelry. She opens a little box and says there are special pieces in there. She shows me flat gold and silver medallions, one that looks like my Grandma’s Roman coin necklace. She can tell I’m not going to buy anything and starts making me a necklace. She guesses that I’m an Enneagram Type 2, The Helper, and puts a “2” on the necklace. I tell her I’m not a 2, she just doesn’t know me. I’m actually a 3, The Achiever, offended that she thinks I’m a 2. Then she goes on to say that the first impression of a 2 is that they’re boring. Maybe she’s telling this to someone else as she makes my necklace, and I say sarcastically, “thanks for thinking I’m a 2 then.” I don’t want to be a Helper. I want to be an Achiever.

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Thank you to reader Danielle for coming up with the title “Ava Bogle: Uncensored,” and for leaving this review:

“It's naked and raw and sometimes unflattering. It's like the opposite of an instagram filter.”

I needed a little validation, so thank you for seeing me!

(Burger Queen)