The Body as Ecotone - Part 1 - Pregnant Bellies

I never thought that having a baby was particularly odd until my friends started having them. I very distinctly remember the day that my friend Lili went to the hospital to give birth. The idea that my friends Lili and Ben would go to the hospital but Lili, Ben and A BABY would come home from the hospital seemed just unfathomable. While sort of obvious in an abstract way, it just didn't make any sense to me when it was something I was actually seeing happen.

Around the same time, I was the witness in my friend Sarah's City Hall wedding. It was quiet and lovely, we went out to lunch in Williamsburg, Brooklyn after, the husband, Guy, the wife, Sarah and me, the witness. Even though we were close friends, I felt a little bit like an outsider, like the child, the less evolved one, even though we were all essentially the same age. Now, they were my married friends, not my friends who lived together in sin. And I was the witness to it! Again, getting married seemed so normal until I actually participated in it.

Now, Sarah (in the photo), who lives in LA, just had a baby. It seems less weird when you don't see the person every day, but looking at photos, I am struck with that same uncomfortable sense: this is my friend, her expression is so familiar, but now she has a baby. It is quotidian and yet, mind-blowing. This photo of her sums it all up. She is still Sarah, she has funky taste in art and would put a weird-ass drawing on the wall of her baby's room, but her body is doing the thing that we were put here to do--the least funky thing possible, really.