The recurring question in most every conversation with other mothers my age who are either nursing infants or caring for toddlers is, quite simply—how do I manage to work while mothering? My go-to answer is that I don’t have a choice. Because I have only lived here for two years and haven’t had a full-time job, I am infinitely less privileged than anyone who might have had even the most basic occupation which would have guaranteed me some form of paid maternity leave. Italian laws are not as generous to mothers as other European countries. The higher cost of living also means that hired help is unaffordable. I confess I feel envy when I meet other mothers in the region who get to enjoy certain luxuries to which I am simply not entitled. Additionally, most of them have had their mothers or siblings help them ease into parenthood. My in-laws had COVID one after the other soon after our child’s birth, which made them inaccessible to us for almost three weeks. When my partner exhausted his 10-day paternity leave, it meant that from the time he began his work day, at noon, until 7.30 pm, I was alone with our child.

One of my coping mechanisms involved clearing my plate in the final two months of pregnancy. I refused work that didn’t pay enough, which nonetheless resulted in financial loss, but I had better paying work lined up from my third month postpartum that would put me back on track. In the past two months, despite all the challenges of tending to a newborn—and I had many, from recovering from a C-section to not having enough milk and having to pump every three hours while also feeding and caring for our child to having to manage an overactive letdown—I have continued to send these weekly dispatches and write my monthly art criticism essays for the online publication for which I am a contributor. I have also been simultaneously working on my archive, as well as two publications that I must put to bed by the first week of May—the first, a mock-up of my thesis that was the basis of my residency at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, the second, the culmination of my jam documentation project in Tramin, the Traminer Marmaladen Almanach.