Illustrating motherhood and fatherhood

VALENCIA. Lyona, Marta Puig's artistic pseudonym, is surprised by how much we empathize with stories of warriors and superheroes and how little we do with stories about motherhood. Illustrator and director of video clips for groups like Love of Lesbian, she has just published Madr¿eh? (Random Comics, 2021), an illustrated autobiography in which she recounts the process she has (per)followed to become a mother. A path that has not been exactly easy and that he defines as a true "adventure story." «In Mother, huh? there is everything: action, drama, sex... I don't understand how it can't interest everyone, beyond mothers or women. We all come from the same place," he emphasizes.

For the illustrator Xarly Rodríguez, better known in his creative facet as Lucreativo, the fact of having a child is "a savage thing, a cartwheel." "No one is prepared, nor is what is expected," he warns. In his case, it was the pandemic that encouraged him to write and draw The Wonder of the Everyday (Grijalbo, 2021), an ode to enjoying the little things inspired by Martín, his now 8-year-old son. "He was to blame for all this," he says.

Two looks, two stories, two graphic works that talk about maternity and paternity with two completely different visions and something, yes, in common: nobody is capable of teaching what has to be learned. «You don't know how to play a mother, but she doesn't know how to play a daughter either. You are going to learn together», it slips from a cartoon of Madreeh?, and in The wonder of everyday life the glove is picked up: «Calm down, dad. I'm new to being a kid, too."

Lyona's Story

Marta Puig (Lyona) was always clear that she wanted to be a mother. Economic instability, the absence of a partner who wanted to share the trip with her, and the demands of her job, however, ended up causing her to postpone her decision. “You reach 40 years of age and you realize that it is not so easy anymore, since there are many factors that make it very difficult,” he explains.

Being diagnosed with endometriosis (a disease that affects fertility) was another of the challenges she encountered when she made the determination that she wanted to be a mother and was not going to delay it any longer. She was 38 years old at the time and a long way ahead of her. «When I realized that I had a very low ovarian reserve and I was not going to get pregnant naturally, I began a process in which I hallucinated. I hallucinated the things that we did not know, “he says. And that is how he began to learn about terms such as "egg donation" (an in vitro fertilization technique that consists of using an egg donated by another woman instead of the patient's own) or "antimüllerian" (a hormonal test to calculate the ovarian reserve ); assisted reproductive techniques; or all the details about the menstrual cycle.

The need to tell everything that was happening to him in a diary was the driving force behind Madreeh? (Random Comics, 2021). "I thought I had to share it, give all that information," Lyona explains to Culturplaza. Infertility is a "so hard" process, "in which you feel so alone," she points out, who knew immediately that she wanted to accompany other people who could share with her that emotional roller coaster that fertility treatment entails.

"There are so many things we should know and they don't explain it to us...", he laments. For example, about pregnancy. “When we are younger, they tell us to be careful with sexual intercourse because we can get pregnant. You think that it is something that can always happen. And, depending on the cycle, this is not so easy”, he points out and adds, in this sense, that “sexual and reproductive education is negligible in schools”. "There is not enough information," he insists.