Ansel spent most of the first year of his life snuggled cozily against my body, or Chris’s body, wrapped in fabric and love. I knew little of the tradition of babywearing before becoming a mother, and I could never have imagined how it would save us, how intense this child’s need for closeness would be. He would not allow us to set him down. Ever. The surprising element of this was that I did not want to set him down. Particularly during those first months of the “fourth trimester” or what anthropologists call “exterogestation,” we both seemed to feel that we were still one being.
I felt some trepidation around the rather charged topic of instant bonding with a newborn as I awaited my son’s arrival. When he finally came, however, and we spent our first hours together floating in a warm bath surrounded by herbs and morning light, I realized that we do not love babies as we love other people. It is not the same as loving your spouse or your mother and all the depth of their gifts and flaws and experience. It is a deeply internal and profoundly simple love. I loved Ansel as the part of myself he, in essence, still was. On the outside now, connected not by a physical cord but by the entanglement of our nervous systems—and our souls. I felt hollow and incomplete without him.
Nothing could have prepared me for the intensity of this connection. It was more than familial love, more than romantic infatuation. Different. It was perhaps what we yearn for in the depths of all of these: perfect union with another. In this way, the past two years have felt like falling in love in reverse. We began as a single being, then ever so slowly came to know each other. We began to individuate, coalescing once again into separate bodies and souls. The fourth trimester, for me, was a period of falling out of love with my baby as part of myself, and falling into love with him as a wonderous, autonomous person, with sweet smelling skin and funny preferences and a surprising, beautiful mind.
This painting comes from that threshold. I was emerging from the rawest part of postpartum, Ansel just four months old. Our lives still felt a bit unreal, and I was consumed by the new love and closeness that permeated each day. It took me exactly a year to complete this painting, and I was astonished to find that the peaceful baby in this image had somehow become a curious, hilarious, and rambunctious 16 month old toddler while I painted it.