(Written in 2020)
I am 35 and I have a vagina. In this city, in this time, there are a number of different roles I can play. I can be the go-getter, the career woman; I am single, with a fringe and I spin at the gym 3 times a week. I can be the vamp, the sexual deviant; I have painted nails and the outline of my nipples shows through my tops sometimes. I can be the mother-to-be; I have a partner and a duffer jacket, we are ‘thinking about it’, we were ‘thinking about it’, now it’s happening. That’s about it. All three are dependent on my relationship to men. But that’s a different essay.
I teeter on the edge of the latter: the mother-to-be. I teeter because I stopped taking contraception 5 years ago as it fucked so much with my body and my mood, and because I have sex. I am petrified of tipping over the edge. Where I stand right now, I can dip my toe into any pond of any role at any time. A career pond, with spinning classes, a vampy pond and a weekend clubbing, a could-be-mamma pond as a girl-friend with a dog. The former are well-represented; it is basically Instagram and pop culture. I see women my age who have chosen those two all the time. Or who are playing between the three with unabashed deftness.
What happens when I go there? What does it look like? What does it move like? What do I have to be careful of and who can I look up to? Every mother-that’s-had that I know speaks only of the babies, the reality of childbirth or the mothering pains; the lack of sleep, the exhaustion, the nipple chaff, the excitement when they do this or that, the possibility of another. The period in between in vastly under-represented. I rephrase. The reality of the period in between.
A woman sits stage left. Kneeling. Her belly is bare, 25 weeks pregnant, round and defined, like a suit she has stuck on to the front of her chest. Her side ribs are visible as she moves, the vertical lines of her now stretched abs catch occasionally the shadow, her hair is pulled up away from her face and she rubs cacao butter into her arms and belly in slow symmetrical movements.
It is moving to see a pregnant woman on stage. I have never seen it in before. I have seen so many different bodies on stage, and I was bought into the world through such a body, so was everyone in that room, and yet I had never had the permission to watch a pregnant woman’s body before. I could let my eyes scan her form, their form. Two souls in one body. And the vastness of what that means. The timelessness. I was allowed to look at them. I was allowed to wonder. I wonder if it hurts to sit like that for 5 minutes. I wonder what it does to the baby to be squeezed and massaged from outside the womb. I wonder if she feels her mother’s performance nerves. I wonder if she is ashamed. I wonder if she is perturbed. I wonder which ‘she’ is moving.
During the dance, I find myself thinking, “Turn sideways. I want to see what you look like from the side.” There is a strange fascination to observe from all angles. To assess. The woman starts to dance and I wonder if she should be doing that. If it isn’t dangerous. If I would do the same. And I realise, every image I have ever seen of a pregnant woman is of someone stationary. Life is movement, life is change, and yet everything I have seen of the body in the bringing of life involves restriction, inertia, immobility.
There is nothing slow about the way she moves. There is nothing restricted. The two musicians accompanying her on stage mix together looped beats with sounds of pouring water and the dancer’s muscles flow and undulate with the music, and with something else, with her. A duet. As if she is pushing her on. A quintet. As if they are pushing them on. And all my preconceptions about pregnant women are blown away.
Sara Lu dances once a month, every month of her pregnancy, until the birth. She incorporates her training in ballet and her study of butoh into the performance, seeing each one as part of the same piece. The performance area is small, and packed and afterwards we have the opportunity to talk with her about the piece. She tells us its a girl. She puts her body up for show, but off-stage she says is when it is constantly under critique. All my wonderings fall into that category. Assessment. Opinion. Advice, should I choose to express it. But did she ask for that? Since when does this stage of a person’s life automatically mean you are up for appraisal? Will pregnancy force me onto the stage?
There comes a beat, strong and steady, like a heart. The last segment of her fingers pulse open in time, white hands against her black skirt. Tiny movements in the middle of a black stage. That other pulse. Mesmerizing. She retreats, slowly moving further and further back away from us into the depths of the stage, and one hand trails up, claw-like towards her open mouth. Before it falls inside and makes her vomit, it changes course, and creeps further up. It covers her face. There isn’t a woman. There are two feet. A black skirt. A belly. And a hairpiece.
I am 35, with a vagina. I have spent over half of my life in daily, hourly self-debate about the size and shape and attractiveness of my physicality. My mother’s words echo in my ears. Her wedding dress up in the loft. “I was so thin when we got married. I never fitted in the dress since. I never got my body back after I had your sister.” She is lying in the bath. She looks at her thighs. As Sara Lu’s pulsing hand engulfs her face, beheading her, I recognise how scared I am to get pregnant. For one main self-absorbed reason; losing my body. She embodies what I fear, walking forward towards me now like a pregnant ghost on stage, chin held so high that her neck is now her face and her face is looking backwards. This baby kills part of her and I am watching life killing life. I am watching pregnancy killing a dancer’s body. I am watching that body become.
It is so important for me to see a moving pregnant body. It is monumental to see it move in a way I don’t expect. It is so important to me that Sara Lu shows death and life and conflict all together. Packaged in a stage of development which I only ever knew as perfect and gift-wrapped and pink. That she lets the stage be black and the music be dark. I let her repaint my expectations of that role: the mother-to-be. And somewhere inside me feels more relaxed, because this is closer to what I somehow know it will be. Not this classical music, softly spoken, white washed walls with a touch of baby blue pregnancy which is the only one I have seen before. But this real, this raw, this pulsing, creating, echoing, mystifying, powerful transformation of a woman, into a woman.