I have been on juries before, but this felt so special because I had once been a fellow and a resident. I couldn’t escape the consciousness that at some moment in time, a jury sat and discussed my application. It was validating in many ways, but it also felt like a measure of how far I’ve come in my immigrant journey. The sense of accomplishment manifested in small things—the fact that walking was a choice and wasn’t my default option in order to save money. I don’t feel precarious like I did then. The other realisation that filled me with a special kind of delight was that I was arriving at the residency for the first time alone. Every other time I had our child with me. In the beginning, he was growing inside me during the second trimester. Then he was an infant and I remember even breastfeeding him while I was in a conversation with a scholar that was being screened online. He was with me when I went to install my work at the group exhibition at the culmination of our residency. But last week as I was arriving, he had just woken up and was at home with his father who would offer him breakfast before taking him to the daycare centre. He would narrate my absence to any interested party as ‘Mama study’. 

I’m not trying to suggest the banal ‘time passes so quickly’, because as a primary caregiver, I have definitely felt in my bones the breadth of each hour, even if it feels later like quicksand. I’m reflecting on how the best outcomes in my life have had to do with my having followed a feminist intuition. I’m not even sure how to describe what that means. Because the word intuition itself feels mystified because it is so nestled within the body, somewhere in the intersection between gut, heart, brain and pulse. The proposal I sent in at the time to the residency was called ‘In the Name of the Mother’. I had thought it through completely so every word in my application had been metabolised. It wasn’t hurriedly put together or an attempt at sounding like I had a plan. I knew what my methodology would be. I didn’t feel the need to cite too many writers to sound intelligent. My sentences reflected the fact that I had done the requisite reading, that I had a sense of background research. But I applied before we were anywhere close to conceiving our child, and when I heard I had been accepted, had to decide if it was feasible for me to say yes. My partner was sceptical. For me, it was a hard yes. I look back now at all the writing and the work I did during that period and I marvel a bit at my stamina, even as I remember the many evenings during my pregnancy when I had no energy to be social, and felt oppressed by my gestational diabetes diet.

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Since last week I have been trying to lean further into what it means to inhabit the glow of these good decisions that continue to bear fruit. Feminist intuition, I think, has to do with knowing in the pit of your soul that something is a right fit because it empowers you. It’s like a compass that enables you to gravitate towards that which is nourishing and regenerative, the opposite of toxic and depleting.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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