In a series of photographs called New Mothers, Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra shows three women in the moments following childbirth. The photos are named by subject, city, and date: Julie, Den Haag, Netherlands, February 29 1994; Saskia, Harderwijk, Netherlands, March 16 1994; Tecla, Amsterdam, Netherlands, May 16 1994. The mothers stand nude, addressing viewers directly with their eyes. Each faces forward, with no coy curve of the hip or subtle placement of the hand to hide herself. The only thing she protects is her baby, holding its red flesh close to her chest. The photographer has found her subject in a profoundly private moment, and has exposed her. 

Tecla was photographed the day after she gave birth. Her portrait is formally coherent for its vertical lines. Our eye is drawn to the exact centre of the photo, to Tecla’s linea nigra, the line that bisects the pregnant and postpartum belly. Nearly hidden behind a shock of hair, we see the line between the mother’s labia. And we can trace that same line down the seam in her legs, where it veers, at the calf, into a thin stream of blood—presumably the lochia that flows for days after birth, emptying the body of the blood that sustained the baby in utero. Finally, underfoot, vertical lines in the floorboards reach toward the viewer, as if extending into the space we occupy. 

The floorboards, for me, are the thrust of the composition. As they reach toward us, they transgress the boundary between the privacy of the postpartum period—the fragile body, its endless fluids, the nascent mother-child bond—and the viewing public. 

The day we return from the hospital, a sacred stillness falls over our home. The nurturing interruptions of nurses are on the other side of the city now, and it’s just the three of us here in our second-storey apartment. 

There is nothing more savoury than a baby born in May. The bare skin—mine, his. The breeze that blankets our midday sleep. The damp nape of a summer baby’s neck. And the lengthening light that leans toward solstice, giving us the sense that there is time for all of this, that there is nowhere to be but here. 

We speak in hushed tones. The baby sleeps deeply as though he knows he is home, as though the sounds and smells and the light through the western windows—once barely discernible through the scrim of my skin—are familiar to him. He is still unfamiliar to us, but our only task now is to get to know him. My husband Austin and I sit on the couch and study. He’s nine and a half pounds. His hair is fine and dark. He thrusts his tongue forward like he’s tasting the air and opens and closes his hands, slow as jellyfish. Everything he does is slow, and we settle into step. We study his slender fingernails. The way his lips turn down from the weight of his cheeks—these delicious cheeks. His discerning brow, the outsize length of his lashes, the slate of his eyes. We are utterly focused. We have entered the sanctum of his infancy. 

One of the greatest challenges facing mothers in the arts is the conflict between the privacy optimal for early motherhood and the exposure necessary for connecting with audiences. More than many other professionals, artists must orient themselves toward the public. 

They have to be part of a scene, collaborating with peers and rubbing shoulders with the curators, editors, and producers with the power to champion their work. Musicians tour. Actors show up night after night to face an audience from the stage. Writers give talks to hype their books. And today the pressure for exposure extends beyond promotional sprints into our daily lives, as we amass followers online to market our own work or to impress institutional gatekeepers with the size of our audience. It will not do to stay home and study infant faces; we must face outward. 

For a young writer to become established, she might pitch stories to magazine editors, publishing in incrementally more prestigious outlets until she lands a piece that gets the attention of a literary agent, who gets the attention of an editor at a publishing house, who convinces the house’s marketing team to greenlight her first book. Meanwhile, she amasses an online following of readers poised to purchase said book. This is how she faces outward. And in the couple of years before childbirth, in the margins around museum work, I had begun this hustle in earnest. 

But as I enter motherhood, everything in me wants to turn in. Our apartment becomes a world unto itself. Its terrain is bare breasts, blood, and milk. Its sun rises and sets, rises and sets as often as the baby dozes. “Sleep when the baby sleeps,” they say. Baby time is incompatible with the working world, and I want to set my clock to his rhythms. I am content to keep writing on the shelf until my child is sleeping well, which I expect will happen by the time I return to the museum in three months. 

In the earliest weeks, Austin and I alternate resting and waking so that one of us can observe the baby at all hours. He’s perfectly healthy, but we’re new to this and don’t yet believe he’ll keep breathing on his own, so we set up a night watch. At midnight I nurse him and go to sleep. Austin keeps vigil over a bassinet in the living room. While our boy dozes, Austin reads to him—Walt Whitman, the Quaker mystic Rufus Jones. Then he meditates. Studying the baby becomes a new form of contemplation, an attempt to be absolutely present. Austin studies the cadence of his breath, the way his face shifts from a smile to a whimper in sleep. What does he dream of? we wonder. When the baby cries, Austin brings him to my breast. Then Austin sleeps, and I cradle our boy and watch shows until sunrise. 

The Greeks called time like this kairos. Unlike chronos, or time metred out evenly—sixty seconds to the minute, forty hours to the workweek—kairos is a density of time that invites absolute focus. In ancient rhetoric, the term described the well-placed appeal, the perfect timing. In the New Testament, it’s the word used for times when the sacred breaks into the mundane. In the earliest weeks, it’s just the three of us here on this kairos plane, hedged by visits from family and close friends, the people who put us at ease. I become oblivious to the world outside this one, for I have absolute clarity about where I am supposed to be. 

I remember another season like this. When I met Austin, my father was sick with brain cancer. At a house concert in South Philly, Austin and I talked all night then got drinks the next weekend. He struck me as wise, smart, and deeply kind. His mother lived with ovarian cancer, and there was kinship in the way we’d come beside our parents in their need. Our love grew quickly; time folded onto itself, an accordion of talk and touch and laughter. Six months passed. And on our wedding day, an infinity. We were planning to be married in September; it was June and my father was dying. When doctors sent him from the hospital to hospice, we planned a ceremony for the very next day. That afternoon, I bought a dress. That night, Austin formally proposed, and in the morning my friends and neighbours and aunts and cousins came to the house with cakes and veils. We were married in my parents’ living room at sundown, my dad looking on from his hospice bed, my mom perched beside him. As we made our vows, my parents showed us how to keep them.

In the month that followed, my vision narrowed around my family: my husband, my father, and the people who encircled us in the final days of his care. I was present for his final breaths. I knew exactly where I needed to be; the rest of the world fell away. 

Life’s end and life’s beginning—time that sharpens our focus around what most deeply matters. 

In the month that followed, my vision narrowed around my family: my husband, my father, and the people who encircled us in the final days of his care. I was present for his final breaths. I knew exactly where I needed to be; the rest of the world fell away. 

Life’s end and life’s beginning—time that sharpens our focus around what most deeply matters.