She is sexy, dynamic, flirtatious, calm, and funny.
She is burnt out, gentle, loving, and annoyed.
She misses her babies when they aren’t around and resents them with jealousy for her time when they are.
This is my hommage to the exploration of motherhood, womanhood, daughterhood, and selfhood - as I have experienced them all in parallels. An identity forged by fire and expectation, and what has happened when I’ve bent into the moulds presented to me and what has exploded when I’ve refused to get inside. I am using my life to learn how to hold space for two opposing truths, embracing and celebrating both when and how I can. Here you can join me in celebrating the deconstructing and creating that we are all given the opportunity to explore everyday.
Matrescence
2018 – Present
My exploration of motherhood has been a common theme since my pregnancy with my first son in 2018. Reading back I find my words always clawing themselves out of stereotypes, as the origins of those typecasts begin to make sense to me. I never wanted to be considered a ‘mum’. I always wished to identify with the ‘whore’ more than the ‘Madonna’, yet often I find myself neck deep in washing of tiny clothes or sighing through the emotional slog of child rearing. The wrestle between my expectations for myself in this role and surrender to the power of growth within can be found throughout my work.
Death
2021 - Present
My life of privilege has been made painfully apparent within the past few years of losing too many family members and friends for whom I loved deeply. Nothing like rubbing shoulders with mortality for everything to rattle itself loose with change. My stories of palliative care for my father-in-law, intergenerational living as we started a small family of our own, living out the burdens of our family legacies, and asking myself what death has to teach me is a very real theme in this space.
Deconstruction
2010 - Present
Since leaving the church in 2010, I’ve been desperate to find literature about the pathway through deconstruction. Not enough has been written on this topic for the millennial generation because the stories we will live to tell are the lives we’re currently in the midst of. This is a space that a lot of us can feel very alone without that beacon of representation. But I can tell you with great certainty, there are many, many of us ex-Christian kids out there wandering through modern life and wondering how the hell to navigate the path out. We’re waking up each day with years of patterns to disconnect, decades of trauma from purity culture to trudge through, and the longing ache to again cultivate a community of 40 people who ask how your life is going on a weekly basis and truly care for the answer. We’re here. And we need each other.
Andi Bloom is a writer, photographer, mother, and smack-talker based in Canberra, Australia. An Alaskan by birth, a vagabond by heart, she spends her days hoping for gentler days in old houses and killing her house plants by water-logging them.
Images by (left) Oli Sansom and (right) Jessica Tremp
