WINTERING — Birdie Hall X

Last night in exquisite vividity I dreamt of meeting Louise Bourgeois during her last months on earth. She held my daughter’s tiny, fat baby fingers in her long and withered hands. I asked the almost blind LB in tears what to do about my anxiety; she smiled wryly and told me to write everything down on any paper I could find and to store the collected scribbles between the pages of books around my house (I already do this with letters from my friends). Meanwhile, downstairs in Bourgeois’ home a team of researchers were archiving all of her personal objects for a future museum. The dream was more real to me than most of the stupidity we are all subjected to during waking life (like The New York Times). I awoke at 5 am to my baby squirming next to me, ready to nurse. One of the great joys of being an artist is talking with dead people, and one of the great joys of being a mother is sleeping next to my daughter. In America, the latter is considered dangerous.

I often wonder what other bipedal mammal puts their baby in a different room to sleep, and cribs to me resemble baby cages. My baby slept in her very pretty little basket bassinet a total of four times.

Bassinet in question (no I didn’t leave the book and rumpled blanket in there while she was sleeping)

The common practice of “sleep training” a months-old baby in a different room, even when the infant screams hysterically in fear has always seemed savage to me, but is widely accepted in our society. Health authorities living in the shadows of brute behaviorism claim it is a humane way to train children not to be so clingy or dependent on their parents, but you don’t need Gabor Maté (or maybe you do) to understand this can literally traumatize an infant. The American Academy of Pediatrics regards sleeping with one’s baby, or “co-sleeping”, as a reckless hazard to the baby, and the body of the mother who sustains her mammalian offspring as a deadly, hundred-pound rolling pin that could crush their baby in a split second. An infant could be smothered by a pillow, roll off the bed, get suffocated by blankets, or fall into a wall crack and die, we are warned. This is of course feasible if the parents are drunk, on drugs, or extremely obese, but is highly implausible and unheard of in the hundreds of other countries where babies sleep in bed with their mothers.

Pediatricians almost universally chastise parents for such behavior, but hell hath no fury like me being lectured by a family nurse practitioner about “bed sharing”. There’s no evidence that co-sleeping increases the risk of every baby parent’s nightmare, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). There’s an increased risk of a baby dying when their 400lb parent gets drunk and passes out with them on the sofa, however. All the evidence demonstrates that sober mothers who breastfeed can safely sleep with their infants in a proper bed. There’s even a safe sleeping position for this, called the cuddle curl. So cute, but unfortunately, the AAP considers all the above situations as equally dangerous. What they don’t tell us is that outside of our totally savage and backward country most parents can and do sleep next to their babies.

Bear mother co-sleeping with her cubs, against the recommendations of the Milwaukee Health Dept.

Thankfully I have never been one to take the advice of American health authorities, especially one that until last year told toddlers to avoid peanuts to reduce allergies (turns out this advice from the AAP actually increased peanut allergies in children, whoops). I don’t have the fortitude when people ask if I’m afraid of sleep-rolling over and crushing my precious baby, the Divine Light of my life and gift from God, to recite research. Dr. James Mckenna and his infant-mother sleep lab at the University of Notre Dame, for instance, have shown over and again for decades that breastfeeding mothers and babies actually sleep lighter than formula feeders, and communicate with each other when not awake. I think sometimes my baby and I’s dreams join together. Coincidentally enough there’s a children’s book by Leonora Carrington called The Milk of Dreams.

There is nothing sweeter than falling asleep with your nose in your baby’s warm hair, and nothing easier than just popping your nipple in their mouth while half-asleep at 2 am when they wake for a feed. I will remember the sweetness of snuggling with my baby at night until I die, and remember to call upon it during trying times, Hope for a darkened heart. I asked my best friend, another artist named Joseph (Josef) Vaughn, what he thinks babies dream of, and he said probably “the sacred primordial miasma of which they were so recently apart of.” I agree. My husband once recalled a rabbi saying they always kiss the feet of babies because they were the ones who were most recently with God. A wonderful older woman in my town who recommended a book on the Anthroposophic approach to childhood vaccines told me after the baby’s birth that she could likely still see Angels.

It’s clear babies and their switched-on mothers can occupy two worlds: physical and etheric. When I was in labor (THE TRANSITION) and in so much mind-bending agony that it felt like my bones were being pulled apart in angry ringings of pain (turn out I am a primal screamer), I kept seeing images that strikingly resembled Josef’s luminous egg tempera paintings: Psychedelic, primordial rib splitting vibrations in glowing color.

*Joseph Vaughn,* ***Coeur d'Alene***, 2021, egg tempera on panel, 14 x 11”

This best friend and gay brother of mine who I survived Belgrade Montana High School and New York City with is responsible for introducing me to the universe of egg tempera painting. At first, I hated it. JV is a meticulous worker and very patient. I am the opposite, sloppy and impulsive most of the time. I work fast and couldn’t handle the delicate handling of the pigments and hundreds of layers of transparent glazes. It felt like I was pulling off my own fingernails, slowly.

Then I met a Serbian icon painter named Ugljesa who changed my mind about the medium, and bought a book on tempera painting by Koo Schadler, a master tempera artist whose meticulousness (in my mind) sometimes borders on insanity. Turns out she’s a very warm and welcoming teacher with a good head on her shoulders. I also saw a beautiful, super-meta egg tempera painting by Leonora Carrington made while SHE was pregnant that sent me over the edge. I live for color, and so the ability to work with pure pigment and using the rich greasy life-giving Egg as a medium started to sound like a nice challenge.

Leonora Carrington, *The Kitchen Garden on the Eyot*, 1946

I also knew I couldn’t paint with baby in studio if solvents were being used (no oils). My former drawing professor always told me I needed more layers in my work, and I hope he’d be pleased to know that the new painting I’ve been working on has about 20 layers of underpainted sky alone.

I don’t know why such a slow, time-consuming medium has taken over my consciousness after the birth of a baby, who requires almost all of my time and care. As long as I’m not working with toxic pigments or pigment dust (Koo ingeniously demands her students work with pigment pastes and cakes) then she will be in my studio with me. Babies and children until becoming commodified 150 years ago were made useful by their parents. There is no other option for my little Poppy, until she develops her own hobbies and schooling (hopefully Waldorf) she will garden, work in the studio, and write with me. There are worse fates for a baby. She’s not in daycare, and will most likely get to see original Beatrix Potter illustrations as a five-month-old at The Morgan Library.

Beatrix Potter (b.1866), 'The Tale of The Flopsy Bunnies', Watercolour, 1909.

I will spend spring working in egg tempera and an Illuminated Book of Hours for my show at Wheatgrass Books in Livingston, Montana later this summer (and my first book project). After childbearing, time moves at the speed of light. All the urgency of my work, stulted by the dangerously low vibrations of pandemic and collective misery in slow-motion, has returned. (Liver cleansing helped a lot). I don’t want to waste a second of my life worrying about whatever variant of covid we’re on now or the movies and shows people watch. Unfortunately I’m still a little addicted to Twitter, but through the Grace of Divine Providence I will hopefully be spared from that too because there is nothing more pitiful than frittering one’s sacred existence in such a dark circle of phone world hell (“social media”). Currently I’m reading the authoritative biography of William Blake by G.E. Bentley Jr. and Nabokov’s Speak Memory (gorgeous but the chapter on his family’s coat of arms is miserably boring), rereading The Master and Margarita, and listening to Maggie Gyllenhal’s fabulous audiobook of Anna Karenina (baby loves it).

I recommend daily Vedic meditation practice and Iyengar yoga, which has brought my abdominal muscles back together very gently and with good success. My Echinacea and Milkweed flower seeds are in the freezer cold-stratifying. The bees are flying. They taste the spring.