Real Life

This afternoon, I slipped out of work early and headed next door to take advantage of the “free” Thursday-afternoon viewing at the local art museum. I’m definitely putting this in the “benefits of work” column on my should-I-stay-or-should-I-go list, as art is a big part of my life—or, rather, it used to be before I became a mother. I like to fantasize that if I were a stay-at-home-mom I would have all kinds of time to revisit my old hobbies and interests. More likely, though, is that all the extra time would be eaten up by additional childcare and housekeeping responsibilities. At the very least, I am fairly certain that I would never make it to the free Thursdays at the museum, seeing as how they start at 4:00 p.m., which is right in the middle of the boy’s nap. And without a salary I could never afford to pay for the regular admission.

Anyway, on this Thursday, I caught the last day of the museum’s Ron Mueck exhibit, titled "Real Life." Mueck is a hyperrealist Australian sculptor with a background in toymaking and puppetry, so his sculptures of people (in sizes ranging from twelve inches to more than thirty feet) have an eerie verisimilitude. Walking into the gallery, I was confronted by a sculpture of a newborn baby of truly monstrous proportions, but rather than be startled or horrified (imagine the diapers!), my maternal instincts kicked right in and I wanted to scoop him up and cuddle him, as impractical as that would be.


Other than the fact that this newborn was 20 feet long, everything about him was to scale—from his little half-moon fingernails to his shiny, knotted umbilical chord. And there was something about his large swollen eyelids and that full head of silky black hair reminded me of the first time I held my own son. Oddly enough, I felt more maternal at that moment, in the gallery, than I did upon first becoming a mother. So, perhaps it is true, what they say, that sometimes it takes a little while for motherhood to really grow on you. Or maybe I should just chalk it up the emotionally manipulative effects of hyperrealist art. After all, Mueck’s sculpture, which was actually titled “Girl,” had tricked me into thinking it was the doppelgänger of my very own “Boy.”

Moving onto the next gallery, I sat down to watch a video of Mueck creating another of his giant sculptures, this time it was a pregnant woman who appeared to be in the early stages of labor. The scale of the sculpture, which was probably 20 feet high, only highlighted how truly enormous pregnant women look and feel at the end of their pregnancies, and the look of exhausted strain on the woman’s downturned face made the memory of my 28 hours of labor come flooding back to me. Mueck had posed her with her arms held above her head, as if she were some Atlas struggling to hold up the world, and I thought to myself, “Yes, that’s exactly what it was like.” Nonetheless, I was really overcome with the desire to be grossly pregnant again myself, because Mueck’s hyperrealistic woman—even in her very lifelike pain—looked so unbearably beautiful.

I couldn’t help noticing, also, that Mueck’s woman looked a lot like me. The same pinkish skin and auburn hair, the very plain and regular features, the completely average figure. “Surely, I never looked that beautiful while pregnant?” I wondered. I certainly never felt that beautiful. I was perhaps the world’s unhappiest pregnant woman. Other women have told me that they were never so happy nor loved their bodies so much as they did while pregnant. They rave about the thickness of their hair and their glowing skin, but I only experienced chronic static and adult acne. In addition, I was nauseous and suffering from brutal heartburn from the first month to the last, and I got even less sleep when pregnant than I did in the weeks after my son was born. But for all of that, I would have given anything to be pregnant all over again.

Making my way out of the gallery (after all, I had to get home in time for the five o’clock feeding), I started calculating the months before I could get pregnant again and finally be a stay-at-home mom to a newborn—and to my eldest child. I have only just started my period again, now that my son has started eating solids, so if I got pregnant this month, I would be due in June. “A summer baby, how lovely!” I thought. “We could walk to the park every day of my maternity leave, where I could nurse in the dappled sunshine and watch the 18-month-old navigating the playground for the very first time.”

But as lovely as that would be, with two children under two, I’m fairly certain I would never have time to spend an afternoon at the park, let alone on any of my longed-for hobbies. Also, even in my hormonal haze, I could see the lapse in logic that concluded that I should have a second baby just so that I could finally stay home with my first. Isn’t there any way I could just stay home with my son and still have the means to make the occasional visit to an art museum? I wondered. Then just as I was walking out the door, in walked two mamas, each with a baby in a sling, and they, too, looked remarkably like me.


29-day forecast: Stay at home.