THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, January 21, 1997 TAG: 9701210025
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
LENGTH: 71 lines
IT WAS MY first night at home as a mother.
Still aching from childbirth, and exhausted from sleepless nights at the hospital, I fell into a deep sleep only to be nudged awake by something.
It was a noise - an annoying noise, to be honest - and my first thought was that someone, somewhere, ought to make the infernal racket stop. And then slowly, as the cobwebs of sleep began to part, it occurred to me that it was the sound of a crying baby. The sound of my baby. I, therefore, needed to get up and make her stop.
Far from the rosy glow of mother's intuition that I had expected to kick in at the moment of delivery, I felt a mixture of fear, doubt and exhaustion as I stumbled from my bed.
What do I do now?
Anyone who can relate to that should go to an art show called B.A.B.Y. that opened at the Virginia Center for Contemporary Art Sunday. The exhibit shows the experience of parenting and babyhood, warts and all.
This is no peaceful Madonna-and-Child show. You will find no gauzy curtains blowing in the wind as a child sleeps peacefully on the bed. No cooing baby lying on a bearskin rug.
Rather, you will see a baby that looks as though he's about to scream his head off. A bathrobe with baby heads stuck onto it, which reminds me of how I feel when I walk in the door from work and find children automatically stuck to me. And one of my favorites, a graphic photo of a baby emerging from the mother during childbirth - yes, it looks mighty painful - with the rather ineffectual childbirth advice written to the side: ``Imagine you are floating on a cloud.''
Yeah, right.
Some people will find some of the work - and this column, for that matter - distasteful. What? Find something less than angelic about parenting and babies? Perish the thought. Except for those dirty diapers, of course.
But the truth is parenting is hard work. And about the only warning you get is your friends saying, ``Your life will never be the same.''
Even though we know instinctively that parenthood will be hard - it's all right there in the parenting manuals - the images in advertising, television and movies tell us otherwise, over and over. We get cooing babies more than upchucking ones, charming ones instead of the ones that talk back, slumbering ones instead of colicky ones.
Which all adds up to unrealistic expectations.
Ridgely Ingersoll, who handles public relations at the museum, compares it to the way women feel about models. ``You know instinctively that you can't look like that, but you feel like you should anyway.''
There have been plenty of times when I have not felt like the Madonna and Child.
I can remember crying in the bathroom - the only place where I could be alone - and looking down to see little fingers under the door, searching for me. Or the time my daughter was in the hospital and I was supposed to be strong, but instead had my head between my knees, trying not to faint.
But those feelings, captured aptly in this art exhibit, take nothing away from my love of babies and my children. Or my ability to rise to the occasion of parenting more often than not. Or my belief that if I were told parenting would be 100 times harder I would still give birth to my children 100 times over if necessary.
In fact, it is the difficult parts that make the love so intense. MEMO: B.A.B.Y. will be on exhibit at the Virginia Center for
Contemporary Art, 2200 Parks Ave., Virginia Beach, through March 2. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Virginia Center for Contemporary Art
``Urchin'' by Nina Levy is in the B.A.B.Y. exhibit at the Beach.
Photo
``Infanta'' by Elizabeth Berdann depicts a crying baby.