Araks - Becoming Jamie Arendt ~ A conversation on light, romanticism, and lett

Forever changed, forever the same.

There is a version of motherhood that gets sold as transformation: a before and an after, a woman erased and remade. Jamie Arendt doesn't experience it that way.

"Motherhood has caused me to feel forever changed and forever the same at the same time," she says. The idea that you become an entirely new person once you have a child is only partly true, she's found. Much of her, her wants, her determination, her romanticism, is still, stubbornly, hers.

Her son, Pierce (P, mostly) is five and a half months old. He wakes early and giggling in the room next door, and by the time Jamie is upright, her husband Maxx has already placed a coffee cup beside the bed. What follows most mornings is a slow trade of baby and coffee and crossword, the three of them passing the hour back and forth until P gets bored, or falls asleep between them. "We all know we are very lucky to share these mornings and we don't take them for granted," she says. "It never stops being wonderful."

“Mostly everything, at least for me, has become more fun for me with a child. I didn’t realize how silly I would become as a mom and how fun it would be. It has released this more serious perfected version of design and home and allowed for PLAY. Right now I am thinking about what I can paint for him and how I can mount it to our ceiling. Seeing the way he is fully obsessed with things like flags, napkins, pillow cases, dots, stripes. I start to imagine rooms as actual worlds.”

—on the physical world she's building for her son

Mundane moments from the trailer for La Collectionneuse, directed by Éric Rohmer in 1967.

Days tend to arrange themselves around a soundtrack. Jamie plays music constantly — Huey Lewis and the News in the early days, Rosalía lately, Justin Bieber's Swag II on repeat, which she admits she didn't understand until P made her understand it. "I feel like I am constantly trying to impress him with my music curation," she says. On a good summer day there is a run on the beach, a scare about sharks, homemade wraps eaten just in time, flags made out of napkins and pillowcases waved about. There is a walk down what she's named "tree alley," an outdoor table angled just so a nautical flag can hold a five-month-old's full attention, a stroller parked at a Farmers Market so vegetables can be swayed overhead like something out of a dream. At night, after Clip-Clop, she reads Hemingway aloud to him on the playmat until he starts making a sound she calls his "guzzy guzzy" noise — the sound of a baby fighting, and losing to, sleep.

For those not in the know: Clip Clop is P's favorite, a story of a horse that lets a cat and a dog and a duck and a pig climb on his back as he takes them on a ride, only for all of them to fall off into bales of hay and then shout “AGAIN” and off they go, again.

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Jamie describes her romanticism as something closer to an instinct for light than a mood. "I always notice the light first," she says of waking. It's the last thing she considers, too, in a house full of windows and skylights she can't help but study. Asked what feeds this way of seeing, she struggles, briefly, to make it sound like anything other than what it is: "The shadows from the sun going down and watching yourself dance against it, the simplicity of light through a mason jar, the fog rolling in when the cool and warm atmosphere collide, the dappled light coming through the trees first thing in the morning." She pauses over her own answer. "Now that I am writing this I wonder if romanticism is all about lighting. It's very cinematic for me. I am always imagining the scene."

That cinematic instinct predates Pierce by decades. Jamie comes from a family she describes as non-creative, and spent much of her childhood rehearsing scenes in her room that would never see the light of day — trying on characters, wardrobes, half-built stories, "a way of exploring all my emotions," she says, in a world that rarely had patience for how big those emotions were. She still sees it all just as clearly. Her head, she says, is "consumed with screenplays I have half written, with wardrobing for the characters, with half-baked ideas."

Femininity is a harder thing for her to locate. "I really struggle with my feminine side," she admits. "It is the topic of many therapy sessions." She has a feminine body and, by her own account and others', a masculine directness — she's been told, more than once, that she carries a masculine energy. Visually, femininity is supposed to read as softness; that has never matched her experience of it. "How I experience it is like a giant wave running through me at all times. The tide, the break, etc is unpredictable and I am stuck on the ride. To be feminine to me is to be ever changing, almost against your own will. Too dark?"

"...As it is currently summer and I live in New England this luckily is a bit simple, nature is on my side. I push him under cherry trees as they sway and we pick baskets of cherries. I walk him through our yard and he reaches his little hands out to the hydrangeas."

If there's a throughline to how Jamie is raising Pierce, it's a refusal to let precision win out over play. She's noticed him falling for flags, napkins, pillowcases, dots, stripes — and has let that reorganize how she thinks about the rooms he'll grow up in. "It has released this more serious, perfected version of design and home and allowed for play," she says. "I start to imagine rooms as actual worlds." She still wants quality materials, things built to last. She has no intention of being precious with any of it. "I let him drool on all of it."

What she's building for him, more than any single object, is a sense of permanence she never had herself. She grew up moving constantly, without a fixed idea of what staying put felt like. "I have never known what that feeling might feel like," she says, "but I think I am trying to build it for my son." At the same time, she's trying to give him what she calls her own erratic, intuitive nature — the sense that there isn't one right way to move through a life. She wants both things true for him at once: an anchor, and a wide-open world.

“It is beautiful to be able to feel these complexities all at the same time, and it is beautiful to let my son reshape me as well. I have always been a deep romantic and motherhood can be quite romantic if you allow it to be. In the midst of the complete chaos every time I hold Pierce up under a tree to see his face lights up I am reminded that life is quite simple and we are surrounded by beauty. Motherhood, if we are lucky, and if we have had a third coffee, allows us to pause and begin to see that beauty daily.”

—on motherhood

“I feel really 90s American answering this but I think that—I was born in 85—and when I was a kid and a teenager and seemed like the worst thing you could be was a sellout or a suit. Reality Bites was kind of the sentiment.”

—on how she sees the world around her

She finds most of her beauty in what other people walk past. Not the obvious kind — sunsets, postcards — but the version that has to be caught secretly, almost stolen: dishes washed slowly with a glass of wine standing in for company, a bath of raspberries on a chipped plate, an ordinary Tuesday. She has been working for years on a photography and writing series called Tuesdays, built entirely from this instinct. \

One night, washing dishes, she wrote:

I do not rush
to unload
the dishwasher
pour a glass of wine
make it
a lover
now across from me.
We can do this slowly, I say to myself
I have no place else to be

"I suppose I look forward to making each day a bit surreal and romanticized for my son," she says. In the meantime, she is doing the same for herself — noticing the light, keeping the secret, holding him up under a tree until his face catches it.

Mundane moments from the trailer for The Big Chill, directed by Lawrence Kasdan in 1983.

Not everyone's mind runs this way — some people don't hear an inner voice, or dream much, or see an apple when they think the word apple. Asked what she'd prescribe for someone who wished they saw the world the way she does, Jamie seems genuinely humbled by the premise. "It is truly hard to contemplate being in a logical thinking mind for me," she says. "I am in awe of people with other brains — the ways they can organize, the attention to detail, how they can remember street names, teacher names and dates. I love seeing how other brains work."

Even so, she has a prescription. Films: Wings of Desire, Science of Sleep, La Collectionneuse, Last Year at Marienbad, The Big Chill — "mostly I just like this film, it has nothing to do with this question." Records, pulled straight from her own shelf: Mulatu Astatke's The Story of Ethio Jazz, 1965–1975, Jacob Cummings' Southern and Enlightened — she especially loves the cover of "Forever and Ever Amen" — D'Angelo's Brown Sugar, Sade's The Best of Sade, Stan Getz and João Gilberto's Getz/Gilberto, Nils Frahm's Solo.

The question of where to go trips her up more. "This question makes me uncomfortable," she admits, "because I guess I find the fun in finding inspiration from the Yemen restaurant on Atlantic St, your backyard, etc." But she offers a list anyway — The Getty, the Jardin des Tuileries, the ocean in general, The Carlyle Hotel, The Guggenheim, any ferry, Yvon Lambert, Casa Organica, any bookshop, Dodger Stadium, farmers markets — before waving most of it away. "There are so many places I feel silly to list them. I think what's important is the physical world and moving through it. Take a ferry for no reason, go to a park on a misty morning, sit in front of the ocean while it rains — do anything for no reason with no timetables. Meandering is more important than the place itself."

"... I feel the satisfying exhaustion of a day well spent and experiencing the world together. I pray he falls asleep soon so I can get rest and we can do it all again tomorrow.”

A heartfelt thanks to Jamie for taking part in this conversation, and for sharing such an intimate glimpse into her life. You can explore her work here. All photographs shared were pulled from Jamie's personal archive.

Becoming is a series of conversations with women, considering the ongoing process by which a life is shaped and reshaped. Rather than a point of arrival, it attends to what is continuous — the shifts, the reimaginings, the ways a woman is, at any given moment, still becoming herself.

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