The Baby is Not on the Fire Escape...
‘In the foreground, children grow and develop, while off in the distance the mother as a person with a narrative of her own disappears from view.’
-Julie Phillips, ‘The Baby on the Fire Escape’ (2023)
Around the middle of October last year, on a grey Thursday afternoon I gave birth to my son. My labour was quick as I always knew it would be. My own mother gave birth to me in a little under twenty-five minutes, fleeing a blood smeared bathroom with a towel pressed between her legs to release me into the world in the waiting room of the maternity hospital thankfully only a couple of miles down the road. Because of some last-minute complications that were not in the grand scheme of things all that complicated, my own son was born in the hospital. Though I thought for a moment he might be born on the stairs in the close of our Glasgow tenement. He was supposed to be born at home, whatever that means.
The seconds before he was born were the most intense of my life. I’ve described the sensation of his crowning as like eating fistfuls of psychedelics and coming up far too quickly. I have also described it as being crushed by a house. A little while after the fact my partner told me I appeared in that moment possessed by a force scarier and bigger than all of us in the room put together. Months later all these descriptors still ring true but I’m not writing about birth, though I think more people should. I’m writing about a book that served me in those bleary, cunt-sore and milk-sticky early days of my son’s life; a book I pored over in the wee-small hours, under the light of a torch wrapped in a red handkerchief so as not to disturb the slowly forming circadian rhythms of the new creature clamped for hours and hours and hours at my breast.
‘Sorry i Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back’ by photographer Andi Galdi Vinko (Trolley Books, 2022) is a photography project, which in the artist’s own words is a ‘work in progress, which will always be a work in progress’– an allegory for the experience of parenting if I ever heard one. The book serves as an intimate and comprehensive document of pregnancy and early parenthood with an emphasis on the bodily and the domestic, two spheres that collided with an unstoppable force the moment I had the inclination to buy a two-pack of pregnancy tests from Sainsbury’s on my way to work, convinced that the very act of ripping open the packet would will my late period into existence.
In her book ‘The Baby on The Fire Escape: Creativity, Mothering and the Mind-Baby Problem’ (WW Norton & Co., 2023) biographer and writer Julie Phillips writes, ‘the expectation that women (more than men, even now) should be ever present for their children does compete with creative selfhood.’ Phillips’s insightful exploration into notable artists and writers of the twentieth century who also happened to be mothers explores the ways in which these women – Susan Sontag, Alice Neel and Audre Lorde to name a few – exorcised themselves from their children and domestic responsibilities in order to create meaningful work. Phillips examines the impact this compartmentalisation had on not only the artists’ families’ lives and wellbeing but also their own. Though almost all the mothers that Phillips explores did eventually create art related, even tenuously, to their experience of motherhood, for the most part their legacy remains primarily focused outside of the maternal. If the most highly regarded artist-mothers of the twentieth century are those who transcended their role as primary caregivers and successfully focused their attention elsewhere, leaving their babies in the figurative ‘fire escape’ of the mind, then what does that mean for the rest of us – those who despite our best efforts remain mired in the mental and physical mess of motherhood?
Andi Galdi Vinko writes, ‘as long as I remember, female role models I admired openly talked about their choice of career over a family.’ I am writing this paragraph while my baby spends the morning asleep on his father. I’m sure it will be another week or so before the opportunity to write will arise again. I have approximately two hours free from the weight of my son’s soft body on mine before he will cry out for feeding and my attention will refocus on him for the rest of the fourteen or so hours that remain of our day together. Though writing is certainly not my career by any stretch, it is something that has been the focus of my life for the past decade and letting it slide into the background unsure of when I will be able to spend significant time and energy on it again is a subject that feels sore to touch. I suppose you could say in Vinko’s terms that I’m writing this from the depths of my own disappearance.
Perhaps because my experience of early parenthood so far seems to revolve heavily around minimising the upheaval caused by frequent corporeal leaks and explosions, I was most captivated by Vinko’s images of bodily fluids. From the moment a pregnancy takes root, shit, piss, milk and vomit begin to seep out of the more polite margins of the adult world and into – well, everything. In ‘Sorry i Gave Birth’, a self-portrait sees the artist with a heavy splat of an infant’s curdled milk vomit over her face. Other photographs depict shit heaving up the back of a small child from their nappy and tiny Tupperware tubs of precious breastmilk stacked up and preserved in a thick drift of snow. A spread showing the photographer flicking her middle finger up to a mustard yellow shit-stained bedsheet spoke to me so directly that the finger could’ve been my own. During the first night of his life when my son passed meconium (the dark and sticky substance containing everything a baby digests while in utero) my partner and I, although no strangers to changing nappies, flew into a blind panic and proceeded with the necessary clean up as though our arms were made of rubber and our eyes sewed shut with rugged thread. I remember holding my baby’s body up beneath the bedside lamp in disbelief that this tiny thing, smeared greenish black like an oil-slicked seabird, was now our responsibility and ours alone and we could barely get it together enough to wipe his ass.
Of course, it got easier. I didn’t think it was possible, but it did. My son is now seven months old, has something that vaguely resembles a bedtime and sometimes eats banana. Yet despite all the growing we have done together these past few months I still feel I am living in his shadow. This essay is now in its fourth week of writing and is starting to feel like my own work in progress that will always be a work in progress. I suppose this painfully unbalanced distribution of precious time is the defining characteristic of the ‘disappearance’ that Vinko describes. The hours I used to spend on work are now gobbled up by walks around the park in the drizzle so that the baby sleeps and we both get some air. In these moments the person I was before I had my son, the one who reads and writes and sleeps in and fucks and has a sense of her place in the world feels like a distant memory.
The person that remains, assembled from the dregs of the old, can sometimes feel more household appliance than human: a milk dispensary with the sole function of keeping the baby alive and the washing machine spinning.
But I am not invisible and mothers do not disappear. I am held together and rebuilding with something entirely new. In ‘Sorry i Gave Birth’ alongside Vinko’s photographs are hand scrawled dispatches from an infant addled brain. Scrawled in colourful felt-tip and crayon, one reads: ‘my google searches are the same as yours…’ which helped to alleviate some of the shame I had felt around my completely unhinged internet history from the newborn days, when I stretched the prefix ‘is it normal…’ to its absolute limits. Another quote is set across the page from a photograph of a small globe beside a television remote control and reads: ‘The FIRE is still on I’m just on the back burner.’
Carers of small-children and babies know that we call out to each other in the long and lonely nights like whales across the ocean. I still blink back tears when I recall a friend in Ireland and mother herself to a blonde shiny-eyed toddler sending me a lengthy voice note to reassure me that my feelings of resentment towards my six-week-old baby, who despite my best efforts to prepare had exploded into my life like a hand-grenade, were in fact normal and didn’t make me a monster. She told me with conviction that fondness was on the horizon, and she was right. The back pages of ‘Sorry i Gave Birth’ are dedicated to this kind of correspondence and detail snippets of candid messages sent between Vinko and her friend, Charlotte Jensen while in the thick of their own early mothering. One interaction states: ‘it’s a constant negotiation between their needs and yours, between what you want to do and what you actually feel capable of...’ Another reads: ‘The days are long and it’s only noon’. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since becoming a parent, it’s never to watch the clock. Though these messages passed between the two mothers are a little more philosophical and measured than my own Whatsapp output, I found comfort in them all the same.
It seems to me that the boredom and isolation that are widely accepted as an inevitable aspect of raising children is actually a direct consequence of parenting not being considered important work under capitalism. After all, there is scant profit to be made from wiping snotty noses or picking toys up off the floor. Despite having had the relative privilege of becoming a mother in Scotland where I was able to access free maternity and postpartum care on the NHS and have access to a small sum of temporary income support, I still find myself in the role of primary carer of our child and home by default because I am the parent with the tools to breastfeed. For at least the next couple of years, or until my son begins school, my ability to work and make money has been curtailed by a damning lack of support for working parents and extortionate childcare costs. In short, despite our best efforts to avoid them, the gender roles of the traditional nuclear family are being upheld in our household by the sheer force of a dire economic climate. It would not be difficult for me to blast out a long manifesto for the radical changes that urgently need to be made in order to make child rearing less alienating, isolating and exhausting but this is not the time nor the place I want to do it in.
Instead, and in the absence of any real governmental support, I am glad for artists like Vinko who elevate the commonly private domestic realm and making it worthy of art. Vinko and others like her who are making work that deals directly with the banalities of parenthood show the world that we haven’t disappeared, we exist and our lives and work are not only indispensable but beautiful too. In another of her crayoned proclamations, Vinko writes; ‘is mothering a word verb job’. Indeed it is, and if we could recognise the strength of our individual efforts in raising entire new generations we might begin to build the collective power needed to make the experience more communal, more equal and more free.