me

http://sameoldart.tumblr.com/post/55136644707/ron-mueck-at-the-fondation-cartier
I came across this sculpture entitled "Woman with shopping" by Ron Mueck, the other day.
And I felt like I was looking at myself.  Not because she has features like me, or dresses like me, but because she feels like me.  It is almost as if the artist saw me one day a couple of years ago, and decided to make a sculpture of me. 

http://sameoldart.tumblr.com/post/55136644707/ron-mueck-at-the-fondation-cartier
You can almost see into her head, the more work that must get done, than she can even think about.  Life has fed her so much at this point, that she literally doesn't have even enough energy to enjoy the newborn baby on her chest.  It is long since she has been a person.  It is long since she was a living plant, making decisions based on anything to do with herself, she is now the dirt a living plant needs to grow.  She has been the soil for so long that the thought of when this change happened, is not even relevant.  She is a mother.  And she is that baby's world.  Whoever she is, whatever she is, that baby adores her, not just more than anything in the world, but she is the only thing it cares about.

I do not feel sorry for her.  It is the way things are.  And this artist has captured the beauty of reality.  I feel as if someone, on seeing me, instead of wanting to throw stones, instead of pointing a finger and saying "Bad Mom!", saw the beauty of the millions of moms around the globe, who have given all for their children. 

I see myself also in the smile of a lady, not yet old, but wrinkles pulled tight against the overexposed bones of her face as she waits in a food line.  Wrinkles from ages of worry about enough food, or enough shelter to prevent frostbite.  But she is living, and there is a happiness in that living, a joy in compulsory determination.

I see myself in the lady at the park whose arms are so covered in freckles upon freckles that one could not tell what color her skin originally was by looking at them.  Resilient hands rough with creases from well used bones and veins.  Intriguing hands, that could tell so many stories, if only they were asked.

It is an exhaustion.  But exhaustion beyond thinking is not bad, it just is.  There is a fulfillment in exhaustion beyond exhaustion, that will never be found another way.  A feeling I would not want to have never known.  When you're hiking down a mountain trail, and the sun set hours ago, and you gave up being able to put one leg in front of the other even before that, but you have no supplies to stay on the mountain overnight, and you know you must get down.  So you have long ago lost consciousness, just muscles grating on tendons, and blisters on your feet, and perhaps more than a little thirst on the top of the back of your throat where cautious sips from a too empty canteen will never reach.  What would life be without a feeling like that?  What would life be without living?

Or running a marathon, and wondering if animals' fur rubs them like your clothes rub you.  Wondering if walking is not only faster than your stumbling gait, but if it would rub your hipbones in their sockets the way each landing on the pavement does to yours.  Shifting your weight to be caught on a bending leg before you know for sure whether or not it is a phantom leg, and your real one, muscles frozen, finally refused to move forward.  The heat of your blood draining through your body, and refusing to believe that you are dizzy, though you are not sure that you are awake.

Or childbirth, a hard one, a first one.  Never having known your limits.  Never having known that what you thought was enough exhaustion to kill you a million times over, would now be something you had long left behind, not by choice, but because your body will do this work whether you bid it to or not.  Finding bruises on yourself days later, from repeatedly pressing into something with the pain.  The lulls between contractions taunting you, as you know another will come, and another, and another, and another.  Your muscles stronger than you knew, stronger than anybody could know, stronger than they are.  No sport could get this out of you.  No life or death situation, no being chased by something that will consume you.  Then you would merely be consumed.  But in this case you aren't.  And you realize for the first time, the impossible things, nobody is capable of motivating themselves to do, that you can do, now that you are a mother.