Meet Cole Godvin
I’ve lived in quite a few cities, and by living I pretty much mean having fun, struggling, dreaming, trying to figure it all out. New York is expensive. LA is expensive. The Bay Area is crazy expensive…. Before that it was Paris, Berlin, Milan. Honestly, in retrospect it was all a little glamorous in a bohemian bon vivant sort of way, teaching, writing a little, batting around good ideas that never got very far due to sunny distractions, but I am incredibly stoked now to be in Austin with solid ground under my feet and surrounded by a vibrant city that is facing the future.
My partner and I met in the Bay Area, at the little Cantor Museum on the Stanford Campus. He made a point of demonstrating the animation gizmo in an Edward Muybridge exhibit to me – Muybridge the great 19th century photographer who captured horses running. One look at those galloping hooves, and then his sharp eyes and inherently incredibly sexy demeanor and we were off to the dating races. We went all over the place in the Bay, and met up in LA and down in San Diego and were perpetually having a blast with book store visits and art shows and delicious meals and it was all so effortless. And then, much to our complete and utter shock I became pregnant, at 46.
How did I announce this? By showing him the pregnancy stick, completely unbriefed. My thought process was that if, at 46, I were to preface anything with the words “I am pregnant” reason would dictate that he would think I was completely hysterical. I will say, that that night right before this ginormous reveal of impending parenthood he had said to me over drinks, “I’d like to embrace radical change in my life this year.” I asked him to repeat the sentence and hold the thought.
Now, three years of radical change later we are thrilled to be parenting the most radical spitfire of a two year-old girl and dreaming up all three of us where to go and what to do next. I am in my last year of a masters degree at UT-Austin in Art Ed and teaching art at an independent school in North Austin, he is working at the medical school, our daughter is learning to sing her ABCs and painting some awesome art. The adventure of parenthood has turned out to be a joyful revelation for both of us. Not least of our discoveries as older parents is that the world we’d been living in is not nearly so family-friendly as it could be. Now, in my work as an educator and researcher and on the board of Partners-in-Parenting I intend to do all I can to help make Austin a city where all families thrive.
