Birth as Art?

I read recently about performance artist Marni Kotak who plans to give birth in a New York art gallery. If I understand correctly, she feels that life is full of art, and too often artists try too hard to show meaning, to force it out in their work, to overdo it to show the meaning of life in their work, when it is present all around us, we just need to see it.

Now, I hate the type of person who lives to rain on other people's parades, who has a been-there-done-that attitude to everyone else's joys and struggles. It's not a role I like to play often, and certainly not one I strive to play more often.

But this situation kind of begs for it, no?

Seriously. I've given birth the old-fashioned way. Three times sister, each kid only a smidgen smaller than the one who pummeled their way out beforehand. It was never pretty, or loving, or wonderful. It was a disaster from start to finish, me on my hands and knees for so much of it, alternating between yelling or grunting, telling people off and making a mess of every towel in my house.

If my births were a performance art piece they would go something like this:

Scene 1: "Oh shit"

Scene 2: "What the fuck have I done? How in the hell do I get out of this? Maybe if I hit my head hard enough on the bath tub I'll slip into a coma and they can just cut this thing out of me".

Scene 3: Main character realises she is nothing like those yoga-doing, my-vagina-is-a-lotus-flower-opening-with-love-rama-lama-ding-dongs she's been watching in hippy birth videos all these months. "This is not 'waves of energy' this is a goddamn locomotive surging through my insides. Who is this mellow midwife offering me essential oils? Where is the person with the drugs? If only my husband weren't so damn shy I'd send him door-to-door to see who is hoarding the percocet and T3's."

Scene 4: (to midwife) "Listen lady, I don't care what happens or who gets hurt, on this next contraction I promise to push as hard as I can if, if, you promise to pull on that head as hard as you can and get this thing out of me, you got it?"

Scene 5: She didn't get it.

Scene 6: "I don't care what gender it is or how big it is, just somebody take it for a few minutes so I can get my shit back together. That was the worst experience of my life."

And curtain.

The last thing I can imagine doing with my births is inviting other strangers into it. Thank god we erased the first birth video and never made any of the rest of them. The only people present for these raw moments of horrible primal reality are those sworn by their profession to secrecy.

As for Marni's plans to document every day of her new baby's life online for the next 18 years (every day?) I've got news for her, it's called a blog, there are thousands of them created by mothers all over the world, many great, even more not so much. This is not your trailblazing moment. But keep brainstorming sweets, something will come to you.

I know, I know, too bitchy. But ooohhhh it felt good.

C