Joanna Wolfarth
Birth of the Ouroboros
Bare skin is fusing with the lime pleather chair, which I’ve turned to face the window. I watch the sky turn orange then pink before it settles into the deep sapphire of late summer nights as an-yet-unnamed baby squirms in my arms. Unsettled, I’m dwarfed by the chair, the sunset, and these new responsibilities. I’ve not been outside since I braced myself against the rough brick hospital wall at dawn four days ago, held fast by my husband’s steady count from somewhere behind me.
Now, I am beholden to the rhythms of feeds and sleep, like the cyclical ebbs and flows of the moon and tides. But this is an irregular beat. His cries can last aeons, whole lifetimes are lost to nursing, and me in the churn of it all.
I attempt to tether myself by logging time: work back to calculate how little sleep we got, to time our feeds, to note wet nappies, to chart the baby’s weight gain each day. 720 hours and 7 minutes. This is how long one-half of the graphic design duo Conway and Young spent nursing her baby. You can check the maths in Milk Report (2019), a slim, A4 publication with each page divided into ten columns of biro-scribbled durations. The baby’s first feed lasted seventeen minutes. The last documented feed – six months and four pale yellow pages later – was precisely ten minutes. I can’t help but admire her commitment to keeping track and holding herself in time. I keep getting lost.
As he suckles at my breast, I run my finger across his tiny palm, surprised again by the softness. All I can think is: where will these hands go? What will they carry? What things will they touch which haven’t yet been invented? Whose hand will they hold when he no longer holds mine? Will those hands be kind? These are moments, in this infinite, elastic looping, when linear time creeps in and I can see the life of my son stretching out into the horizon, a ball of wool unravelling as it rolls into the distance. And time is suddenly measurable in a way it wasn’t before. How old will I be when he is 10? 21? 45? Oh…
My own absence comes hurtling towards me. His fingers grip mine. A memory of an undergraduate class in metaphysics flickers into view and I recall how the Scottish philosopher John MacTaggart Ellis MacTaggart argued that time does not exist. The specifics of his logic are lost to me now, but I can truly see how all time is contingent. And that the philosopher never gave birth nor breastfed a baby.
As time slows and stretches, the rising and the setting of the sun is a welcome yet forbidding beat. We are surviving, so far.
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Joanna Wolfarth is a UK-based writer, editor and art historian with a PhD in Southeast Asian art history. She currently teaches global art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Open University. Her first book, MILK: An Intimate History of Breastfeeding was published in 2023. The book grew directly out of her strange and profound experience of becoming a mother and noticing how little cultural and historical context is spoken about today.