The Washington, DC area is full of amazing moms: working moms, stay-at-home moms, single moms, moms of multiples, foster moms, adoptive moms, etc. We want to highlight some of those moms like Kate Zaremba! Each month we will feature one special mom as the mom of the month. Know a fellow amazing local mom here? Nominate them here!
Kate Zaremba: October Mom of the Month
Kate Zaremba is an artist who specializes in wallpaper, textiles, and ceramics. As a kid, Kate grew up on theatre sets and sound stages as a child actress. This inspired a career in the visual arts from early on. Kate studied Interdisciplinary Art at the Kansas City Art Institute with a focus in textiles and ceramics. She was assistant to Jonathan Adler in New York City before attending graduate school at The Corcoran College of Art, where she studied exhibition design. She met her husband in 2010 at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. They now have two young children and live in Takoma Park, MD.
Here is our Q&A with Kate:
As an artist and lifelong creator, what are some of your favorite simple ways that parents can expose their kids to the arts at home?
The simplest ways are by having the right supplies (by that I mean, age appropriate) at the ready for drawing and painting. Or kids could make something out of paper or cardboard at a moment’s notice. This way it doesn’t have to be a big to-do for me to get things set up, and my daughter, who has zero patience at 2 years old, doesn’t have to wait very long to get started on something. I keep a little cubby in our living room stocked with an old sheet that I can quickly lay down, a pack of colored paper and a drawing pad, a box of crayons, a little jar of brushes, and a palette of watercolors. Also, anytime we get a large box from a delivery of some sort, we turn it into something like a car or a mini castle. This always ends up providing hours of imaginary play that doesn’t cost anything extra and I get some much needed time to work while she’s busy pretending to take all of her toys to the donut shop.
What is your hope for your children?
I hope my girls grow up confident, compassionate, and assertive!
What is something that nobody warned you about as a mom? Any words of wisdom?
I was probably warned about all of the hard stuff but it didn’t register! I think the best advice is to trust your instincts and DO NOT hesitate one single moment when you feel unsure about something. Reach out to other moms and dads! No one gets just how confusing and exhausting parenting is (at all stages) more than fellow parents. And specifically newer ones, mind you. Don’t ask your own mother and father for advice about a newborn. That might sound weird, but when they became parents, putting the baby on their back to sleep WAS NOT A THING. They don’t get how much harder it all is now with millions of statistics right at our fingertips, when we are sleep deprived and googling in despair.
What has been the hardest part of being a new mom during a pandemic? And what has been the silver lining of the pandemic?
I sort of don’t know anything different, you know? My first daughter was 5 months old when Covid hit and my second daughter was born this past April. We don’t have any family nearby and that has been really hard. Really, really hard. I suppose the silver lining for us has been moving out of an apartment in DC and into our first house in Takoma Park. We love it here so much and feel grateful every single day to have this home. I don’t know if we would have felt the urgency to settle down in this way, had it not been for the pandemic.
