Santiago’s Heart of Many Colors

Although I was born and grew up in Venezuela, in 1980 I spent a year living with my (trying-not-to-divorce) parents in a Manhattan brownstone. I was two when we got there and three when we left (after the inevitable divorce). In the mornings, my dad would hold my hand and walk me to my beloved Montessori preschool, where we students used our senses to nurture our brains. 

One of my favorite activities was placing hundreds (it seemed like millions to my toddler brain) of colored beads into some pattern that our ever-patient teachers would meld together via what I can only imagine was a clothes iron. Whatever the method, the final result was a blend of color and the patience of a child who’d convinced their fingers and mind to collaborate in creating something tangible. 

None of my beaded creations survived the move from New York back to Caracas, but I knew when I had children, I wanted them to also travel to the tactile learning lands I’d once enjoyed so much. Thus my two sons, William and Santiago, also attended Montessori preschool. One afternoon when Santiago came home as a three-year-old and handed me this heart, I felt like our bond had broken the time-space continuum, and the heart was an amalgamation of his and my childhoods. We’d made something across decades and cities. Something tangible, but also kissed by magic.

Santiago’s heart, with all its (in my mind, at least) symbolic wonder is the physical object that best exemplifies what I’m hoping to accomplish with this Substack. Do you also have such objects? What joins you to others you love in some physical yet transcendent fashion? Please share in the comments. I’d love to hear about it.

Unearthed Photo

My mom has quite the knack for keeping things neat and orderly, and during her marriage to my dad, she amassed about a dozen leather-covered photo albums. It being the 70s, the albums had the sort of pages you could glue your pictures to and create a neat and orderly (or even messy and disorderly) collage of your life. Little did my mother know, the nifty glue would, over the decades, swallow the blues and greens of her photos until all that remained was a pink, orange, and yellow version of our past. I could color-correct these images and try to give them some semblance of normalcy, but I like them this way–faded, weird, and alive in their nostalgic and fragile paperness.

Here you see my mother nursing me. I love her face in this photo. For all her diligence in keeping a photographic version of our lives for posterity, she hates having her picture taken. The camera makes her uncomfortable, and you can see it in her expression. But I also see her holding my dad’s gaze behind the lens. A moment of connection, a sense of holy shit over what they’d done. They’d made a being, and my mom was keeping that being alive with milk her 24-year-old body produced. 

When I see this picture, I’m amused by how red I am (nursing is hard work), and I feel tenderness over the freckles on my mother’s chest. Her freckles always seemed grown-up and beautiful to me as a child, some badge of adulthood I thought I would one day earn. Except I never did because we realized the sun is not your skin’s friend anymore, and sunblock became a religion-of-sorts for me and for so many other babies nursed by freckled mothers in the 70s. As I was studying the picture as I write this, I noticed in her non-nursing breast the milk spilling out, impatient for its turn—like my own impatient breasts did when it was time to feed the beings my husband Nate and I brought into the world.

Watch Teta: A Nursing Mother Tells Her Story on Youtube

Independent filmmaking is quite a ride (more on this in posts to come). You and your fabulous crew pour in everything you have and then some, and you make a film you’re all (hopefully) proud of. It goes to film festivals and gets awards, and it’s a magical time. And as much as you enjoy those two years of people watching it at festivals, it feels sad that it should end there, because after all, it was a lovely film. Such is the story of my 25-minute documentary, Teta, which (you guessed it) deals with my experience nursing Santiago (of the multicolored heart) for 22 months while juggling my career as a professor, writer, and filmmaker.  

I just launched a YouTube channel where you can watch Teta (in English and Spanish) as well as individual scenes from it—like the one below—for free. My hope is to continue to add my previous films to this channel so they can find an audience yet again. Hate to say it, but please subscribe, like, and comment so the almighty (and admittedly creepy) YouTube algorithm gods can decide we’re worthy and recommend the film to others. 

If you know any nursing mothers or pregnant women, please send the channel their way. I made this film for them. Also, I’m always happy to talk to nursing groups or prenatal courses about the film, so if you belong to one or know someone who does, comment below, and we can arrange a screening. 

To see all the videos, you can visit my new channel and subscribe:)! 

Stories that Transfixed Me (and May Transfix You)

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Gabrielle Zevin’s novel about two childhood friends separated by misunderstandings (and social class) who find each other again in college and collaborate on making video games is one of the great love stories of our time. It reminds us that love doesn’t need to be romantic, and that two people who love each other can create something together beyond literal children. It’s also a love letter to the long-term creative process—to its high costs and high(er?) rewards. 

Past Lives, written and directed by Celine Song

Oscar season is a hectic time at our house, as Nate and I try (and, since having children, fail) to watch every nominee. We do make it through most of them, however, and are rewarded with unexpected gems like Celine Song’s tale of South Korean childhood friends (it seems I’m missing my childhood friends) separated by immigration, who connect and reconnect as they age, trying to figure out what they mean to each other and how to patch up the wound of their severance without, in the process, losing who they’ve become as adults.