Episode 51: Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973-79)

Early on in the pandemic, I was on the phone with my mom.  And in the course of our conversation, I had that experience that everyone has had since last March: the realization that I couldn’t tell what day of the week it was.  I screwed up my brain and tried to find some purchase, but it just wouldn’t come to me.  We all know how, in the Before Times, each day of the week has its own unique, imperceptible quality to it: Monday has fresh momentum; Wednesdays are productive but kind of bloodless; Thursdays have the promise of Friday; Sundays kind of feel like the end of the summer.  And now all of that was replaced with a smooth, blank wall.  We knew, on some rational level, that the pandemic would mean we were losing hugs and restaurant meals, but we didn’t consider this kind of loss, the untethering of time itself.  My mom responded with a chuckle.  “I heard a good one the other day,” she said.  “We used to have days of the week.  Now every day is Blursday.”

I’ll give it to her; it was a good one.  And not just because it rings so true for the pandemic and it’s something we can all understand.  But because that joke is an old chestnut on loan from a very specific demographic, one that I’d also been a part since the summer before.  Because, I’d been living in months of blursdays by the time the pandemic hit, because I was the mother of a freshly born baby.  I had been living the cottony haze as hours bled into hours, days into nights into days into nights.  Babies aren’t born with a circadian rhythm – they need to develop them, and that means that as a new parent, you lose yours.  3am, 3pm, sunlight, moonlight, it’s all the same.  The previous decade of my life had been structured by a 9-5, the distinct borders between weeknights and weekends and the 7:51 train to get to work on time and beating the 11am grocery store rush on Sundays, and now all of that – I mean truly, all of it, my life, my normal – fell away, dissolved, disappeared.  Structure was meaningless in the sleepless broken hours spent staring into the face of this little squeaking being who started back in equal wonder.  Our most urgent needs, food going in, food coming out, and the crashing waves of sleep, became our only indication that time was actually passing.

How can I even describe those first days and weeks of my son’s life?  Someone once told me that it’s impossible to actually conjure the memory of pain, and when I think back on that time, I realize that can’t actually conjure the fatigue, only the small, poignant details.  The warm light of the bedside lamp in the middle of the night.  Staring at his impossibly tiny yet wholly complete fingers.  The hollow little squelchy suck as he nursed.  I remember how simple it was to feed him, yet so stressful to feed me, how attempting to follow recipes brought me to frustrated tears, how I would order food to pick up just as a reason to leave the house.  And more than anything, I remember how separate I felt from the world, on a solitary rocket ship to the moon.  Life became a series of contradictions; everything was both itself and its total opposite, depending on the hour.  I remember feeling giddy to bursting with love; I remember feeling wrung out and desperate.  My rocket ship was perfectly cozy and fit to our scale, and utterly claustrophobic.  I had, nestled in my arms, the exact person who made me feel whole, and I was really lonely.  I was on a thrilling, far-flung adventure, while sitting in the same spot on my couch, unmoving for hours, wearing the same clothes, steeped in my own gentle stink, the existential silence of outer space guided entirely by the sounds of whimpers and snorts and deep, shuddery sighs.

But for all its nebulous haze, the fact is that I can revisit the nuts and bolts of those days any old time I want to.  Because no sooner had this little body been evacuated from my own, no sooner had I joined the celestial ranks of our species, I was handed a hospital chart to fill out.  Which breast, how long, what time, how many ounces.  As soon as he would wake up, thrashing and sniffing, I was to pop him on my nipple and start a timer.  Countless doctors and nurses checked up on it, made sure I was filling it out, and, A-student that I was, I wanted to impress them.  But it wasn’t just for them.  I needed it.  I needed something, anything, that would give me back some control.

This is not a shock to anyone who really knows me.  When I first told my sister I was pregnant, she shook her head and smiled, not unkindly, about just how much control a control-freak like me was going to have to accept losing.  Because it’s true: control is in exceedingly short supply from the moment of conception, from which hormones are released to grow his spleen to how long the labor takes to how much milk you produce to when he starts to talk.  But you’d never know it from the app store.  There are infinite ways to maintain the illusion of control, to process all of this with a tap.  I was able to track my ovulation to the day; I know the exact moment of conception.  As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I was able to check in weekly on what literal size the fruit growing in my womb was – a grape at 9 weeks, a grapefruit at 23.  With the first labor spasm I was searching for apps to time the length between contractions, to tell me when it was really happening, and, I think – I hoped – what even was really happening.  Because even though my entire job that day was to give up control and get out of my body’s way so it could do the primary act that it was built to do, the data is still there, structuring the experience in bits and bytes.  And whether or not this kind of neurotic charting creates more stress on a larger level, I know that it comforted me in the moment.  It gave me back a sense of control.  And it made me understand, maybe the only thing that could make me understand, on a molecular level, what the artist Mary Kelly was all about.

Because, if we’re being honest, when I was introduced to the work of Mary Kelly in a college art history course, I rolled my eyes.  Post-Partum Document is her most famous series, the one that puts her in college survey art history courses, usually lumped together with other second-wave feminist artists.  And if you’re familiar with many of those artists – Marina Abramovic, Carole Schneemann, Judy Chicago, and others who we’ve looked at in the past – then you, like I, would be predisposed to dismiss Kelly.  Come on girl, you would say with all the inflated confidence of a co-ed, you’re working alongside women artists who pour their souls into reclaiming their women bodies.  These are artists breaking out of the gaze, or subsuming it, or subverting it.  And here you are, obsessively tracking the birth of your son.  Because this is what Post-Partum Document is on its face: a series of six sections, mounted as a seemingly endless series of individually framed works, essays, images, and footnotes, documenting every inch of her baby’s development: his feedings, his diaper changes down to the poop-stained cloth liners, his babbles, his scribbles, every little token gifted by his chubby toddler hand, all charted and described with a precision that I, at the time, could have only described as psychotic.  And, worse, un-feminist.  To devote your freshly liberated female body to another person, and to devote your artistic life to tracking something that only the mother of that specific baby could ever possibly be interested in, it felt retrograde and trivial.   I mean, Schneemann was painting canvases with her own goddamned vagina.  All you did, Mary Kelly, was become a mom, and worse, the kind of insufferable mom who shows us the entire photo burst when one would have more than sufficed.

Okay, both college-aged Tamar, and everyone else, let’s sit with that for a moment, shall we?  The idea that all a woman did, that all our moms did, was become a mom?  That making and caring for new life is so common that we stop seeing it for the tremendously profound thing that it is?  How can something be so transcendently life-altering in theory and yet so mundane in practice?  I was thinking about this as my son sat calmly on my lap this morning, sucking down a bottle.  This was the leap off the side of the world, this small, innocuous body with the sweet-smelling curls, swinging his little pajamaed legs?  My greatest joy these days, seriously, is to watch him happily shake a container of cupcake sprinkles.  Parenting exists in these contrasts, at once everything and nothing, obvious and obliterating.  But unlike all the other existential paradigm shifts that humans experience like death, or falling in love, parenting is treated differently.  It’s treated like a choice.  We choose to take the leap, we choose to undergo the Copernican Revolution in our own lives, to no longer be the center of our own universes.  And it stands to reason that if something was a choice, then there’s a clear metric for determining if it was the correct choice, or if it’s being done correctly, or incorrectly.  That it’s possible, as all the mommy sites try to tell us it is, to rationally track motherhood.

These contradictions, these metrics, the tedium, the work, the leap, these are the issues that Post-Partum Document tries to unpack.  And it’s the contradictions in particular that give the work its spine.  Like with motherhood itself, Post-Partum Document is both everything and its opposite.  It’s an attempt to view an exposed human heart through an objective filter.  It’s an anthropological project that elevates motherhood to an academic social science that can be understood through enough observation and dissection, through the authority of theoretical analysis.  And it’s a deeply ironic parody of such an approach, from the formal typewritten cataloging that’s covered with crayon scribbles, to the pleasing, Rorschach-like aesthetic of poop stains.  And, at its core, it’s a comfort, a quiet tethering, for a struggling new mom named Mary Kelly, who is clearly trying to understand something that transcends our understanding, our language, to pin down feelings that can’t ever be processed in real time, only exquisitely remembered with a whiff of baby shampoo.  This attempt at objective rationalism is her own attempt to make sense of what cannot be made sense of, and to feel a little less unhinged in the moment by manufacturing an anthropological framework around it.  Measuring stains on diapers with mathematical precision, as she has described, helped to fend off the anxiety that she’s wasn’t feeding him correctly.  Deciphering his babbles, as only a mother can do, reinforced her own value.  “It was all evidence of how well I was doing,” Kelly said.  If you track his progress, she’s telling herself, you can track your own.  And you can reassure yourself, as every mother must, that you’re not fucking it all up.

And we need to consider how Post-Partum Document’s intrinsic contradictions met their historical moment.  Images of mothers and children are perhaps one of the most primal pillars of visual culture, given the biblical references of the Madonna and Child.  The genre essentially peaked in the 19th century with the tender French Impressionist paintings of Berte Morisot and Mary Cassatt, who had been confined to their domestic settings by dint of their sex and class, and therefore mostly painted what they had access to, that is, children.  But these images had fallen out of favor by the middle of 20th century, and certainly by the 1970s, when the artistic discourse of second-wave feminism, as we said, saw itself as explicitly about liberation – from the body, from the gaze, and especially from the home, that is, from homemaking.  So when Mary Kelly first began to show the series in 1976, its perceived anti-feminist backsliding was laughed out of the room; moreover, like with most newcomers to the work, all people could focus on were the diapers.  “After the Tate’s bricks, come the dirty nappies!” the headline of the London Evening Standard blared obnoxiously, as though the move from Minimalism to motherhood was something to mourn.  But little by little, the discourse deepened and textured, and the work’s revelatory nuances began to shine.  Hiding elements of motherhood had become such a fixture of feminist art that to show them became the bravest thing a woman could do.  And not as an idealized 19th century love letter to domesticity, or as a 1970s bragging right of a woman “having it all.”  But showing it off in all its invisibility, in the profundity of what is so easily dismissed.  Many women artists in the 70s, as we looked at in the fiber art of episode 15, were also exploring what it meant to reclaim what had been derided as “women’s work,” the typically unseen labor of simply being domestic, the exhaustion and the dignity, the creativity of the craft.  And these diaper linings, so easy to mock at first glance, were unlike any account of motherhood that the art world had ever been exposed to, especially after the gauzy Impressionist paintings of mothers and children.  Those stained diapers represented not only the relentless tedium of the work of motherhood – the strand of beads, as it were, with no knot – but of the corporeal reality of motherhood, of the bodies themselves, their functions and fluids and smells that moms, because they’re moms, don’t actually mind so much.

And this larger plea to take the work seriously is reinforced, and maybe satirized, by Kelly’s use of arcane theoretical frameworks.  From the first section onwards, this little fluff-headed baby is being cranked through the cogs of Lacanian and Freudian analysis, sexual compulsions and phallic associations, gendered labor, and the foundational aspects of adult socialization.  It’s a lot.  She stamps onesies with Lacanian visualizations, she takes the not-exactly-unfounded erotization of breastfeeding to a totally overreaching Freudian conclusion.  It becomes difficult to take this aspect of the work seriously, which is maybe her point: as any feminist artist will attest, art theory and philosophy in general have been unequivocally shaped by a patriarchy.  By men.  And maybe Kelly is revealing that using this methodological framework to explain, objectively, the relationship between a mother and her baby is just as absurd from a distance, when they do it, as it looks up close, when she does it. 

That said, there is no question that the formal, clinical language of this framework lends an academic authority to the subject matter.  Not only does the endless cataloguing and analysis draw awareness to work itself, that is, the labor, but it methodically creates an empirical lens through which to view the sacred, the profundity of existence itself.  It elevates these objects, the onesies and diaper liners and the Rosetta Stone of her son’s scribbles.  These objects that are so easily forsaken, so inevitably thrown away, become invaluable artifacts of human archeology, a testament to the way that we as a human species develop, measuring out humanity in plastic baby spoons.  On a macro level, these objects are a way of articulating why we matter at all.  And on a micro level, they also explain why, to our moms, those musty old receiving blankets are more valuable than diamonds.

Because again, it’s the mother’s perspective here that we really care about.  She is the author of a text that is tracking her own evolution alongside her child’s, documenting her own internal conversations alongside the conversations with her son.  And so we see this empirical framework kind of dissolve from objective to subjective, from anthropological to anxious as the rocket ship leaves the atmosphere.  In every one of the six sections of the work, each tracking an overarching developmental stage that aligns with her son’s age, each observation is so detached and pragmatic and concludes each section with a sweeping, heartbreakingly vulnerable question about what it all amounts to.  “What have I done wrong?” she asks, following the first section on feedings and fecal analysis, and echoing every mother ever who has stood, vexed and tearful, over her newborn’s empty diaper.  “Why don’t I understand,” she asks, after the second section on speech development.  The third section, on markings and scribbles, pivots self-consciously outward: “why is he like that?”  The fourth, on transitional objects: “what do you want?” And onward to the final section, when he is five years old, and now able to write the alphabet, which, to her, signifies the completion of the artwork.  Her son now capable of becoming the author of the text.  And she, the mother, asks “what will I do?”

And this is maybe the most powerful aspect of the work: loss.  Separation.  Both a mother from herself and then a mother from her child, having devoted herself so assiduously to her baby and then losing him, quite appropriately, to the natural terms of his own development.  And this speaks to what is actually the most striking contradiction in the series: the idea that an experience so ephemeral can be recorded, captured in its tracks, placed beneath glass, able to be revisited.  For all of the comfort, maybe, that the charting gave Kelly in real time, for all of the larger societal elements that her art was tapping into, one also has to imagine that she was simply trying to hold onto moments as they were slipping away.  Motherhood is rightly referred to as the longest shortest time, moments and phases that feel interminable go by in a flash.  Maybe she was trying to capture the feeling of being caught in those moments.  Or maybe she was recording them so that she could revisit them when she actually had the emotional wherewithal to, even though by then, they’d be long gone.

I mean, that was certainly my hope.  Because I also recorded everything.  And it’s not like I was thinking about Mary Kelly, at least not explicitly, when I brought my microphone into my doctor’s visits, or into my delivery room, or when I hold my phone up to my son’s giggling face before he tries to grab it away.  It wasn’t an intentional artistic project – like, hey, I’m an audio producer, maybe I can get some good tape for a future project.  But because it’s why I’m an audio producer at all: because I know that recreating a sense of time and space, after a moment has passed, is invaluable.  Nothing takes you back there like sounds.  Nothing else can so powerfully envelop you and recreate a lost moment, especially a moment that’s meant to be lost.

[RECORDINGS: Like the ultrasound of a being I’d felt but whose face I’d never seen, whose heartbeats were speeding up and slowing down depending on where the nurse was prodding.  Like the cheers of the women holding me, encouraging me, as my body pushed him into the world, his first little cries.  Like the quiet of the middle of the night, the garbage trucks grunting down my dark street, driven by the only other people it felt like were awake at that hour.  And then it becomes this collaboration as we learn each other.  He teaches me to decipher his different cries, the change in his pitch as his little lungs and bones grow from the newborn squawk to a proper baby wail, the way crying with tears actually sound different from no tears, to his own little whisper babbles, his Dadaist playing with sound, and the magical fairy dust of baby giggles.]

But I think I did it for at least some of the same reasons that she did.  You do this kind of thing in the moment because it makes the moment feel real when you can’t trust your own headspace.  You do it because the idea of a future in this impossibly untethered, relentless present is so absurd that you’re almost daring time to pass, for these recordings to hurry up and become nostalgic.  You do it because you can’t pay the attention in the moment that you’d want to, because the sacred is completely swallowed up by the mundane, because there’s too much to think about, and it’s too new, and you’re too tired.  You do it because it these moments, there are no words.

And I can’t help but think about Kelly when I listen back to these now, because what actually strikes me the most is hearing myself change, as a mom, doing it all for the first time, which I’ll never do again.  I’m struck by how comfortable I sound, how increasingly un-self-conscious in my role, even though I remember feeling like I was flailing, and failing.  I’m struck by how much these sound like tapes of my own mom with me; it’s amazing how our voices are almost indistinguishable now.  And maybe these recordings aren’t interesting to anyone but me, or maybe him someday, but maybe they are.  Maybe they make a new mom feel a little less alone.

Because though Post-Partum Document, and my own recordings, all speak to a kind of loss, they’re also ultimately, and with the much wider and wiser lens of experience, about gain.  About stretching out your own surprisingly elastic life to make room for someone else’s, and for more love than you’d ever thought possible.  And not only making enough space to keep them alive, but all that extra wiggle room to help them thrive.  Someone had to do that for you, and it was, in all likelihood, the most poignant experience of their life.  So let’s not think about this as an artwork just about motherhood, or a mother, when it’s really about everyone who has ever had one.  In other words, it’s about everyone.

And for that matter, let’s also stop rolling our eyes at Mary Kelly.  Let’s stop dismissing her as some obsessive mother, as just a mother.  Let’s think instead about the hard-earned wisdom that moms, and especially new moms, can teach us about this moment that we’re all in, right now, if we just look to them.  Because we are all surviving a global pandemic, one day at a time.  And I say this, of course, as someone lucky enough to both be a mom when I wanted to be, and lucky enough to have been able to stay home, but, look, no matter what, it’s hard.  We have all just lost an entire year of normalcy to blursdays, and it feels like we’re all hitting a wall.  The darkness of this winter is beginning to close in on us, and even though we know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, it only makes this time of interminable stillness even more potent, even more oppressive.  And new moms, they see you.  And they’re here to tell you, as only moms can, that you’ll get through this.  There’s a new normal waiting on the other side, with weekends and train schedules, and once we get there, because our adaptable lizard brains leave us no choice, we’re going to forget how this felt.  We won’t be able to just conjure up this untethering from time, what it really feels like when you don’t know what day of the week it is.  And because we forget, we need to actively try, really, make a conscious effort, to come away a little wiser, and with a little more empathy, a little more compassion, for each other, for ourselves, and, hopefully, for all those new new moms, who are, as we speak, sitting in their divot on the couch, staring at their babies, simultaneously weightless and crushed, and isolated from the very species they’re perpetuating.  Maybe even more isolated than you are.  We see you right back, moms.  And maybe it took this pandemic to understand, maybe the only thing that could make us understand, on a molecular level, what you go through.  And we’re sorry that it took the mother of all reminders to get here.