We bought the food for our Mexi-Grill fest today. It's a three day process of preparation. Four actually, because Carrie already began soaking the rice and beans in water with a little apple cider vinegar yesterday. She does this because we learned through working with our holistic health counselor/nutritionist Andrea Ramirez that soaking like this especially for beans helps release the antinutrients and enzyme inhibitors they carry as their way of protecting themselves from predators — and also brings out the most nutrients they naturally hoard until you soak and “trick” them into starting the reproduction process thereby releasing their nutrients.
Tomorrow we will cook most of the menu and Sunday, before and while our guests arrive, I will do the finishing touches on the cake I'm making and grill the veggies and chicken that has been marinating overnight. It will be a fairly small party and the guests who are coming don't know one another. They are each from different groups/connections I've made while living here the past six years. One is an artist friend, one an art teacher/work friend and the others are a family that Carrie and I met through a sort of non organized local “new mommies” group. So the attending guests represent three parts of my identity: artist, art educator, mother. Interestingly these are probably the strongest parts of who I am (although not neccesarily in that order).
This year I've spent a lot of time 'exploring my identity' as an artist and art educator (above is one of my Art Jrnl pages sketching out ideas for my "Mapping Me" self-portrait project). These explorations have included art therapy, art making, research and writing. But on a very practical every day sort of level I haven't made art everyday nor have I taught at all this year. The one and only thing I have done on a daily basis is my practice of motherhood. I never realized how much being a mother would connect me to other mothers and parents in general. I guess I just assumed that since kids are so unique there wouldn't be such a comraderie or feeling of shared understanding between parents but so far in my mere two plus years of being one, I found parenting to be a universal bond that people from all cultures and walks of life belong to.
There is a shared 'gone through the ropes' sort of bond, but also a shared deep understanding about the kind of euphoric love that you get with loving a child you call your own. A woman came up to me today while I was sitting with Gryffin in Barnes & Noble who was making her first Lego 'tunnel-shed-tower'. She had that sort of “i just have to say something” kind of energy and said “aren't they just so cute? I have toddlers myself, my husband is with them and just dropped me off to do an erand...but they are just so cute, aren't they?” and I smiled and agreed with her in that knowing parent-to-parent sort of way. And she was being especially cute, bias noted, as she called out the color of each Lego before placing it saying “then the green one over here” and so on. I took about ten photos of it and am only slightly embarrased to admit that I thought about how successful an architect she will be someday. Maybe then she'll be able to stand still when I try to snap her photo next to her work...but for some reason I doubt it.
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