Welcome to The Mother Myth
This space is born from a life lived outside the margins — a deeply personal archive of art, memory, and survival. My name is NaDa y ToDo. I’m a multidisciplinary artist, storyteller, and mother of five who raised my children on the road, in a converted bus, outside nearly every conventional expectation.
The Mother Myth is both an ongoing portrait series and a living archive. It reflects the raw, layered truth of what it means to parent alone, in a rare and radical lifestyle, while working to break the patterns passed down through generations. This work is about more than just resilience — it’s about visibility, reclamation, and creating a language for experiences so often left unnamed.
Here, you’ll find paintings, personal essays, archived photo journals, and glimpses into the quiet chaos of a life built from scratch. My hope is that this project creates conversation — not just about parenting or poverty, but about what it means to live deliberately, outside of systems that were never made for us in the first place.
Whether you’re a witness, a fellow traveler, or someone simply seeking to understand a different kind of story, you’re welcome here.
“A visual memoir of myth-making and survival of one mother and five children, a bus, and the truth beneath the stories.”
“The Mother Myth” is my response to the weight of worship and erasure. Society venerates mothers only when they’re silent, soft, and endlessly giving. But real motherhood—mine—has been loud, brutal, brave, and unwavering.
I have created myself as the mother most would never canonize: barefoot in mud, hands torn between art and caretaking, carrying generations in my bones. This series aims to reclaim the halo, redefine divinity, and dares to show that survival is sacred.
These portraits will not plea for sorrow or sympathy. They will prove to be proof that the divine does not wear white robes. Sometimes, she wears overalls and blood and dreams.
~a snippet from the first installment of my current project
“Wednesday, 5:23”
This is a love letter and a confession. It is the moment I almost gave up—but didn’t.
“Wednesday, 5:23”
captures a reality so ordinary and so relentless it nearly disappeared into the folds of time. But I refused to let it. I was pregnant, exhausted. Around me, four small lives looked to me for direction, even as the world seemed intent on proving I had none.
a mural on the wall—half-painted—represented a version of beauty I kept chasing, even when survival itself felt like a full-time job. I painted with one hand and held a sobbing toddler with the other. a ten-year-old tried to help, an eight-year-old quietly disappeared into fantasy, and a thirteen-year-old carried more weight than she ever should have..all while My unborn son stirred inside me.
This is not just about motherhood-it's about being trapped in cycles of scarcity, and still daring to make art. Still daring to hope. Still daring to love imperfectly and messily. This site stands as testimony to my life, my children's lives and all the lives of women like me: the unseen architects of broken homes still trying to build something whole.
for a bit more check out the eclectic mother guest blog post i wrote in 2019