"Baby Love" and Baby Love and baby love

I finally saw my friend Christen Clifford’s play “Baby Love” last night at D Lounge (where I usually go for The Kissing Booth – first one of ’07 is this Saturday!) and even though I knew what it was going to be about, it was still intense and disturbing and startling and amazing. It’s about her trying to get pregnant, then doing so and feeling over-the-top sexual, and then having her son and spending more time focused on him than her husband, and the many feelings that brought up for her. There’s one point at the beginning where (and I didn’t have my pen out at that point so this quote may be slightly off) she says about her husband, just after sex, “At that moment, I loved him so much it hurt.” Wow.

At one point she brought out a Kegelcisor and started lifting it in the air to “Physical” while some people nodding knowingly and some just looked at her in a puzzled way, like, “What? There are muscles in the vagina?”

The play was funnier than I expected it to be, but also really poignant. At one point, she’s giving a blowjob to her husband while reaching behind her to pat her baby back to sleep and then concludes that she’s in the ultimate threesome. She turns the notion of sensual vs. sexual breastfeeding on its head. She taunts us that she has a photo of her perineum post-stitches but doesn’t show it to us. Christen was so lively on stage, dancing and emoting and sounding just as engaged in the material now as when she wrote it. I find it very interesting that it evolved from an essay on Nerve. I think one of the most gasp-worthy moments is this:

He was tentative. "I saw a baby come out of there, " he said. "It's not for fun anymore."

She then said something like she’d be squeamish too if she saw a baby come out of his dick, but still, omg.

I think the show brings up a lot of issues about sex in general and love and children and how those heightened feelings, which I can only imagine, get morphed and confused and crossed, both between mother and child and mother and father and all three. Some of it I probably didn’t want to hear because I know it’s easy for me to romanticize all of it and not really think about the actual practical matters. And I also know that if I ever am lucky enough to have a baby, I’ll have (hopefully) nine months to prepare, but I’m really try to do that work now because I feel like it’s not the preparation of buying crap that I need help with, it’s being a good person, choosing good people to surround myself with, figuring out who I am and what I want out of life and trying to live up to my potential. Sometimes I worry that I’ll be a terrible mom despite my clear desire for kids because I’m not the person I wish I were, and then I tell myself that all I can do is take everything day by day, minute by minute if I need to, the courage to change the things I can and all that.

At the end, she tells us that she’s not trying to discourage anyone from having kids. Which is good because even I got squeamish at a few points, though the best was when she brought out this giant baby photo of Felix. Now, I’ve known Christen since she wasn’t a mom; I saw her do her play “17 Guys I Fucked” while she was hugely pregnant, and then later did her HEAT series at Makor, and then she did In The Flesh. But I don't know her all that well and I'd imagine it'd have been odder if I did.

What’s also interesting is that Rebecca Walker’s forthcoming memoir is called Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence. It’s at the top of my “want to read” list and I’ll be interviewing her for Memoirville, but what I found interesting is that Ariel Gore of Hip Mama (who’s pregnant again and taking suggestions for names), wrote this about Walker’s book:

The way the mother in the book is depicted tripped me out--brought up a lot of those old questions about memoir-writing. What is the difference between telling your own truth/holding people accountable for their actions and selling them down the river?

So we'll see once I get my hands on a galley what I think.

Also, speaking of babies, Ani DiFranco gave birth to a baby girl yesterday named Petah.