I am reading Lauren Elkin’s new book, Art Monster: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, while getting my hair colored. Underneath the black salon robe, I feel my jeans digging into my stomach, even though this pair is less tight than the pair of jeans I changed out of before coming to the salon. The long-sleeved black cotton tee I put on before coming to my appointment is also too tight, a fact I did not appreciate until I arrived at the salon and saw my reflection in the mirror, and was shocked to see that tucked in, the shirt revealed flesh spilling out over the tops of my jeans. I pull my raincoat around me, and can’t help but look around to see if anyone else has noticed that it looks like I didn’t look in the mirror before leaving the house (I did not). I can’t shake my self-loathing for the rest of my appointment, as I watch the beautiful and stylish people around me get their hair cut and colored on Saturday afternoon—people wearing proper outfits, jumpsuits and Doc Marten’s, with places to go—and dread the moment when I have to take off the salon robe, stand up, and stride out of the appointment. Everyone will see how pathetic I am, handing over my credit card to pay for an expensive balayage treatment in an effort to feel good about myself again, when I can’t even find a shirt that fits correctly.
I do appreciate the irony that I am reading a book that purports to discuss “unruly bodies,” and that, in actuality, delves into the history of feminist artists that attempt to “tell[] the truth about [her] own experiences as a body.”1 I appreciate the irony that I am spending three precious hours on my own, away from my child, to become blonder, rather than work on my art—my writing, which these days is fixated on telling the truth about my own experiences as a body—and I am spending those hours in my own head hating my body.
A few days later, I wake with clogged ducts. My right breast feels like a bag of rocks. I have a deadline at work and yet I have to spend the morning alternately nursing my daughter, icing my breast, and soaking it in an Elvie (for those of you unfamiliar, a little plastic vessel that you suction on to your breast to collect dripping milk) filled with warm water and Epsom salts. The problem is a milk blister—a “milk bleb”!— a little hardened piece of milk on my nipple that skin has grown over, preventing milk from flowing out. To fully submerge my nipple in the warm solution, I have to sit with my left leg dangling off the bed, my right foot touching my inner left thigh, bent over so that the Elvie—which contains my tit—touches my right knee. In front of me, Elkin’s book. The chapter title, Her body is the problem.
Your body does not get a break when your body has made a body. It has been almost seven months since my husband cut the umbilical cord the connected me and my daughter for the previous nine, but the clogged duct reminds me that we are still inextricably linked. My milk supply increases to match her appetite. I am dependent on her to unclog me, but she grows frustrated that my right breast, her favorite breast, will not give her what she wants. She squeezes and scratches, with the nails she refused to let me clip last night, and pummels my breast. The work deadline must wait. My milk supply dips in the next few days because this breast has not been emptied. My body thinks that I have stopped feeding her.
Driving home across the bridge from a concert that night, my breast throbs. It is still making milk, though that milk has no place to go. Tears stream from my eyes and I taste them, half expecting them to be made of milk that has no other way of leaving my body. I did not want to leave my daughter tonight.
Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead is filled with desperation and cruelty but the scene that haunts me is Demon’s young mother tied up outside by an abusive boyfriend, her hungry baby screaming inside, while her breasts fill and harden and ache and leak through the night.
Home from the concert in the city, which I spent using my hand pump in the bathroom of SF Jazz until the motion-activated lights turned out, leaving me in near darkness to inspect the measly 5 mL of milk I had collected, I take a long shower. I massage my breast, soak it in the Elvie. I go into the darkened nursery, where my daughter has been asleep for four hours. She rouses and and begins swimming her little head toward my nipple. In the dark, I let her do her work. I feel the rocks dissolving and I cheer on her. Good girl, I whisper, you’re amazing. Tears start to flow again, this time in gratitude, in awe that this little 17 pound turkey is so strong, that I can rely on her. Then the tears keep flowing for the reason they often do when I am feeding her at night, when I remember that I made a body, a perfect little body, that will not live forever.
Elkin quotes Claudia Dey in the the Paris Review: “Mothers are makers of death.” Our extraordinary power to create and sustain life is bounded by the fact that the umbilical cord must be cut and the baby must be weaned. Such steps towards independence are actually crucial to the child’s survival. Motherhood, in Elkin’s words, requires “the acceptance of the self as finite, the act of procreation as prolongation of the material of the self, and the unbearable knowledge and impossible acceptance of our children’s eventual finitude.”2
Finitude! I can’t stop thinking about the eventual finitude of both of us! I count the weeks that my daughter has been alive, outside of me, and can't help but feel one week closer to death, one day closer to the day when my daughter and I will not be together, the day when my body fails me or her body fails her and I am powerless to stop it. To make her requires an acceptance that she is as mortal as I.
As Day writes, “No one had warned me that with a child comes death. Death slinks into your mind. It circles your growing body, and once your child has left it, death circles him too. It would be dangerous to turn your attentions away from your child—this is how the death presence makes you feel. The conversations I had with other new mothers stayed strictly within the bounds of the list: blankets, diapers, creams. Every conversation I had was the wrong conversation. No other mother congratulated me and then said: I’m overcome by the blackest of thoughts. You? This is why mothers don’t sleep, I thought to myself. This is why mothers don’t look away from their children. This is why, even with a broken heart, a mother will bring herself back to life.”3
This sudden awareness of death presents itself as a sudden awareness of my body. Motherhood, like pregnancy, will not let me forget that I am not just a mind, I am a body. There are my feet, which ache in the night when I walk to the bathroom, my heart that might sometimes skip a beat (I really should see a doctor about this), the headache that comes too quickly if I feed my daughter in the morning before I have a sip of coffee. And it is my body that my daughter wants. She knows nothing of my mind. She only knows my smell and my voice and my soft flesh, the milk she draws from my breast. This body of mine is working in overdrive, sustaining both of us. My husband feeds me. I feed her. I’m not sure how I will ever feel good in pants as long as I am eating three times before noon.
Trying to work a full-time job when your body has recently made a body is a comedy of errors. It teeters on the brink of tragedy. I run to catch the bus one day, wearing rented mustard linen pants, three sizes bigger than what I wore before getting pregnant. My bladder leaks as I run, and when I get to the office, I see the dark wet stain between my legs. I can’t take off my long black raincoat for the rest of the day.
The next day at the office, in my rush to set myself up for pumping, I knock the pump, the size of a Polaroid camera, which is connected with one cord to the electrical outlet, and to my breasts with clear plastic tubing, off the table. The piece of plastic at the end of plastic tube—the piece that connects the tubes to the pump—snaps clean in half, rendering the pump inoperable. I check my watch. I dawdled, and it has been four hours since I last emptied my breasts. My breasts are full. I call my husband, and he and the baby get in the car and drive downtown to get me.
Another day, a few weeks earlier, I forget the AC adaptor that allows me to plug my pump into the wall. I panic, and then realize that other women have stashed their tote bags full of pumps and pump parts in the cabinet under the sink. Thank you, I’m sorry, thank you, I whisper, as I rifle through another woman’s tote, filled with plastic milk storage bags and wipes, and find a Medela-compatible AC adaptor.
Yesterday, I put olive oil on a cotton pad and stick it in my bra, to try to soften the milk bleb on the surface of my nipple. It leaks through and stains my white tank top, one of the few pieces of clothing from pregnancy that I have managed to keep pristine.
Another day, when I am working from home, my daughter wakes from her nap ready to eat while I am still on a call. I hear my husband start heating up a bottle, but if I have to pump, a ripple of inconveniences will ruin the afternoon. “Give her to me,” I whisper, and I throw her on my breast while sitting at my desk, muting myself when she begins to squawk.
Another day and nothing fits, my new breasts cause all of my buttondown shirts to gape between the buttons. But I feel slimmer than usual and I decide to try on my old pair of favorite jeans, which I wore for months into pregnancy, and I cannot get them over my thighs. I didn’t realize I had put on so much weight in my thighs. The baby is fussing, my husband is trying to get us out the door. I swallow my self-loathing and throw on something frumpy and avoid looking in the mirror.
To be able to even consider how to feel good in my body is a luxury. I am so grateful to be able to pay someone to help me unclog my pores and my ducts and to work on the knots that form where my trapezius muscle touches the spine. When I am laying on Norine’s table under a mustard quilted blanket, which feels more comfortable than the bed at the Ritz-Carlton in Santiago, with steam on my face and her hands pulling the flesh of my back up toward my shoulders, I think about how it would be nice to be Jennifer Aniston and get facials every week. When Yolanda works on my hips, I think maybe it is not too terrible to have a body after all. I am grateful to have a body when I stand on my yoga mat in mountain pose, my dog resting his head on one foot, my daughter’s hand on the other, and I feel the current of energy coursing through my limbs and rooting me to the ground. I am grateful to have a body when I am feeding my daughter and her little hand reaches up into my mouth and I find myself sucking her fingers, in a primal reflex that is at once wholly natural and wholly bizarre, but it is the one way I can keep her from pinching and pulling at my breast. I am grateful to have a body when I curl up against the warm body of my husband on the rare morning we are awake with coffee before the baby, and he reaches his cool hand under my pajama top and scratches my back.
These fleeting moments of pleasure in my body do not stop me from feeling slightly sick with envy every time I see a slim woman in jeans pushing a pram. I sit cross-legged on my bed writing this, my boobs hooked up to the machine. I’m wearing a bathrobe and my stomach flops over the band of my underwear, reminding me of what it felt like to be pregnant. Once a body has taken so much space, it is hard to shrink.
Elkin’s book is grounded in a speech made by Virginia Woolf, posthumously published as an essay by her husband Leonard, titled Professions for Women. As a woman, the barrier to creating art, explained Woolf, was not just her more famous “Angel in the House” metaphor — the wifely, obsequious figure who is “utterly unselfish” and disinclined to make anyone uncomfortable — but some unknown self-censoring force that prevented her from “telling the truth about my own experiences as a body,” lest she be revealed as an “art monster.” Elkin traces the “art monster,” an appellation that appears for the first time fairly recently, in Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation, through a history of women artists —beginning with Artemisia Gentileschi—and discussing it in relation to the work of, among others, Kara Walker, Lynda Benglis, Carolee Schneeman, Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, and Eva Hesse.
Lauren Elkin, Art Monsters, “decreate to create,” p. 266.
All of this. All of this. All of this.
Absolutely stunning essay. Thank you for this.