I took my six year old son to MoMA yesterday. He is growing up in New York and I often forget the amazing cultural resources that are on my door step. He was initially skeptical but soon he found himself lured in by the dream like jungles of Henri Rousseau, Jasper John's American Flag and Dali's melting clocks.
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| Lady Rosa of Luxembourg by Sanja Ivekovic |
While we were there, I happened to look down onto one of the most breathtakingly beautiful sculptures I have ever seen. It is hard to tell if it was the setting, the lighting, or the sheer majesty of golden vision towering up through the atrium in front of me, but I was transfixed. Then I looked at the sculpture by Sanja Ivekovic more carefully and I realized that it was of a pregnant woman.
It's not that I needed to be reminded of how beautiful a woman is when she's pregnant, I see it every day, but I think I have started to take it for granted a little. A life within a life is nothing short of miraculous. I have experienced it twice before and for every reason under the sun my life will never be the same again because of it.
When I was pregnant, I noticed that people swore less around me, strangers would smile at me (even if they didn't give me their seat on the subway) and strangest of all, my friends would stop discussing their sex lives with me. It was like I had become almost virginal, even when my pregnancy clearly suggested quite the opposite!
It reminded me when I first moved to New York and I went to see a production of Shakespeare's Cymbeline at the Delacorte theatre in Central Park. What made the production so memorable to me was that the actress who played Imogene was pregnant, even though the character wasn't. It made everything seem ethereal and I was absolutely transported by her maternal beauty.
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| Cymbeline, Public Theater |
Even as a bright eyed and bushy tailed twenty three year old who was very far removed from pregnancy, I was captured by it's beauty, just as I was yesterday.
So if you are pregnant and even if you don't feel particularly beautiful or ethereal, trust me - you are.
