The joys of giving birth? That’s brainwashing. Except for the very few women whose bodies are tube-shaped, childbirth hurts. A lot. Yes, an epidural is an enormous help, but even with that the delivery itself is far from fun. Speaking for myself, it was the most painful thing I have endured in an admittedly sheltered life. Women who say, “Giving birth was the most beautiful moment of my life,” always seemed suspect to me, and once I had actually gone through it, I knew they were lying. Some women will say, cautiously, “I don’t remember a thing,” which is just another way of saying, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
The reality is that a delivery takes hours, sometimes a whole day. You’re immobilized like some giant beetle with a pin stuck through your back. The contractions make you feel like you’re exploding…Labour is pain, blood, and exhaustion (and shit, too, it seems, but that’s a gift to the midwife or the doctor). You’ve seen the film Alien, where a monster rips its way out of the body of one of the characters through his stomach? Do you know why this scene is so memorable? Because it is very, very close to a real-life delivery.
But the worst part comes after the actual birth – the feeling of total exhaustion. The stretch marks on that poor stomach, which will never again be that of a young girl. The encounter with a messy little human creature for whom you are going to be responsible for an endless number of years. Michel Houllebecq, in The Possibility of an Island, writes of the “legitimate disgust that overwhelms a normally made man upon the appearance of a baby.” In fact, a newborn infant is frighteningly ugly: red-faced and flushed, with no facial features, its eyes veiled with a bluish opacity – everything about it should fill us with revulsion. Yet more and more young parents are turning childbirth into a photo op, and don’t seem in the least aware that they’re the only ones (well, along with their own parents) who take any pleasure from those photos.
Society in general worships babies. Apparently it’s the thing to do, to adore any human larva a few days old. I’m sick and tired of it, and when I admitted to my new-mom cousin that I don’t have the least interest in newborns, she looked horrified, faced with this crime of lèse-bébé.* Enough with the babies! On TV, on billboards, they’re everywhere – not, by the way, actual newborns, but rather the more presentable version that is already a few days old. And while we’re glorifying babies more and more, old age and death are being hidden deeper away and feared. Is there a cause-and-effect connection here? Infantomania and gerontophobia – do they go hand in hand? Probably. Long live youth! Down with age, and especially death, which no longer means anything to us. Back in the 19th century, effigy-lovers were having a field day, painting and sculpting and photographing the dead. But today it is only the celebrity dead who appeal to us.
* A play on lèse majesté, which means “high treason.” (Ed.)