New motherhood can be impossible to describe in all of its beautiful, wonderful, terrible, exhilarating awfulness. Thank goodness for artists like Line Severinsen, whose hilarious comics capture the experience perfectly.
The Norwegian artist and mother’s hilarious depiction of pregnancy and motherhood recently went viral, and in the midst of it, she spoke to SheKnows about which comics are her favorites, what she hopes moms will take away from her work and how she feels about all this attention. (Spoiler: It’s not the first time people have been clamoring for her work.)
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Lactation nurse
Image Credit: Kos and Kaos Severinsen maintains a website, Kos og Kaos (which means Cuddles and Chaos), and between it and her Instagram, you’ll find pitch-perfect comics of the good, bad and ugly of pregnancy and new motherhood. There are the touchy-feely belly patters, the “helpful” lactation consultants and the hospital-issued mesh underpants. Each time you think you’ve found your favorite comic, you scroll a little further and find one that nails the experience even more completely.
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Co-sleeping
Image Credit: Kos and Kaos Eventually, though, you’ll come out with a few favorites that so thoroughly hit home you’ll wonder if Severinsen is in your head. SheKnows wanted to know if Severinsen herself had any favorites, and it turns out she totally does!
They include this one, which perfectly illustrates the “joys” of co-sleeping.
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Trimester Three
Image Credit: Kos and Kaos “I told my boyfriend that before we have a second child, we have to get a bigger bed!” Severinsen told us. “We had a pretty small bed when we had our first baby, and we always ended up with me and the baby taking up the entire bed, leaving him with a tiny corner.”
Another favorite is this late-pregnancy moment that is all too real for so many of us:
“When I was nearing the end of my pregnancy I was just feeling bloated, heavy and had some heavy pelvic pains. Someone once told me that if you tip a cow over, then it can’t get up again. I felt just like that.”
So true! Anyone who has ever needed to rock back and forth like a wounded turtle to get on their feet after making the rookie mistake of lying down between weeks 32 and 40 is nodding their heads right now.
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Never guess
Image Credit: Kos and Kaos For Severinsen, creating art is nothing new. She’s a UX artist by trade, and has been drawing since, well, forever!
“I have always been into art,” she told us. “I think I have known since I was a young child that I wanted to work within this field. I made an enormous amount of drawings when I was a child. When I was five I made a shoebox animation and showed it to the kindergarten. They were so excited and ran to their parents to tell them that they saw a movie! Thirty years later I got a degree in Animation from Emily Carr University and started working as an animator and UX designer. After I [had] kids I started drawing more… and keeping a diary in Kos og Kaos.”
This isn’t even the first time that Severinsen’s drawings have caught the attention of the greater public. Her work has been published in Mamma, a popular Norwegian parenting magazine, which you can imagine was a pretty big deal:
“The first time [my work] was published in Mamma I was super excited! It is such an awesome feeling to be able to go the store and see something I created on the shelf! And the feedback was amazing, so I kept every issue.”
This new brush with viral fame, however, is something else entirely, and has been a total whirlwind for the mom of two.
“I haven’t had time to sit down and understand what is happening. I’m home with a 5-month-old baby, which of course will get my attention when he is awake. Fortunately he likes to sleep a lot, so then I can sit down and answer all these emails! I have never been on TV before, and [last Friday] I was on Norwegian breakfast TV, so things are happening fast.”
We’re not sure what Norwegian breakfast TV is, but it sounds pretty exciting.
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Keys
Image Credit: Kos and Kaos Despite her tongue-in-cheek comics about the less glamorous side of maternity, Severinsen is so thrilled to be a mom and looks forward to compiling a book of her work. Just as soon as she’s done processing all this attention and answering tons of comments on her site and Facebook, that is!
Motherhood, especially when it is raw and still brand new, can feel so isolating, and makes us wonder if maybe we’re the only ones not glowing and graceful in our fertility goddess state, but Severinsen says that she hopes people will see her work and realize that nothing could be further from the truth:
“I hope that people see that they aren’t alone. We all have some pretty weird moments when we are pregnant!”
Definitely.
Fortunately we have fellow moms like Severinsen to remind us to find the humor in our less-than-picture-perfect motherhood moments.
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