Within Easter there's an egg. I open it, the yellow, thick yolk sticks to my fingers. I let it stay. I try not to worry. The child screams and cries. The new period of my parenting is apparently based on: damned if you do and damned if you don't. I can't win. Instead I try not to lose my temper, patience is key. Right?
A project can't move forward, when you can't do anything right. Creativity is lost in the lost sleep. Why are we so tired, I ask him yesterday evening. I guess it's a vacation thing, he answers. I think to myself, maybe it's exhaustion. How can you tell the difference.
Giving Birth
One of my friends is in the hospital, for a week now. She gave birth. It was messy and violent, as births tend to be. I still don't know what exactly happened, but somehow deep within I just know. Mothers know.
In the game I wanted to depict birth. My own birth was also bloody and fearful, a vacuum delivery. It was never critical, but I thought I should die. I realised in that exact moment that birth is life-threatening. No one had told me this at my hippie birth preparation, where we mostly learned rebozo massage and to breath properly.
No one had told me, I would be cut in two halves.
I thought of it mostly like a distanced action, if I were to make it into a game. At first, it should be in the hospital bed, where you play another simple, light game while the birth is going on, as a sort of dissociation, leaving the body behind, while still knowing what's going on.
The text would be (Something I wrote after my own birth):
jeg burde være død, jeg døde,
vi døde, barnet og jeg,
nu er vi noget andet
I should have died, I died,
we died, the child and I,
now we are something else
Birth factory
One of my old friends is an obstetrician. After only 6 months in this
job, he’s already kinda bored of the monotony of the work tasks. He
described very mechanically the sound and movement on how to deliver
babies with a vacuum (suction cup), making a sound like a finger coming
out of a glass bottle. Pop. While pulling his hand back, like using a
plunger or something like that.
I then created the game idea: Birth Factory. A lot of female bodies (no face), very simplistic drawings, giving birth. One at a time. You drag the suction cup onto the eggs head, you pull it out. Done. Next one comes. Meanwhile there’s loud techno music playing, like being in a fitness center. All the eggs are gathered in a bowl.
(The text says: Is the player God? Mother Earth?)
Afterwards the big egg would be cracked, and a whole civilisation would walk out of it, celebrating life.
Transition
But it no longer feels like the right way to do it. My friend giving birth and sending me fragile pictures from the hospital bed this Easter, reminded me of what's really at stake. It shouldn't be from society's POV, but the mother's POV.
It gives me a new headache, because how on earth do I describe the feeling of birth?
While giving birth you leave the old part of yourself behind, while a part of you has removed itself from you. It leaves the mother as an empty holster in deep transition.
You have to pick up the pieces of a shattered self, while you have to take care of this little baby that grew inside of you. You have to figure out the transformation, all awhile you don't sleep, your hormones are all over the place, and someone possibly cut you in halves, your skin was torn, your blood and insides where gushing all over.
The Animal
It's weird giving birth at a hospital. Most of the time you're naked while screaming and bleeding and hissing and laughing of pain. You belong within the deep forest, in the roaring ocean. You're an animal trapped in civilisation. Then you give birth, and you have to pretend you're civilized again. But are you really? Can you ever god back to what was?
As
I went through all of this years back, I felt that I had a basic
instinct, that I could rely on. Inside of me lived all mothers from all
times. They told me what to do, when my modern, rational mind couldn't.
Something inside me, an animal, an cosmic mother, was taking charge.
I will not go easily around this theme. It's very important. I hope I can figure out a way to show it the right way.
To be continued.
