A LONESOME BIRTH DAY
& Camille Henrot at Hauser & Wirth
JANUARY 30, 1980
Labor began in her fifth month of pregnancy. Saturday night, 11pm. She’s getting ready for the night out. ‘You never went to Studio before midnight,’ my mother says now, nonchalant.
Instead of Studio 54, she went to NYU Medical Center. It would have been December, in Manhattan, 1979. The trees were hung with light.
The doctors told my mother she could go home, have a miscarriage, try again. She was determined to keep me. Over the next five weeks, she endured relentless contractions every five minutes, and watched, she says, from a pain free haven on the ceiling of her hospital room. When her contractions quickened, her medical team gave us everything imaginable and unimaginable to slow labor and help me grow: alcohol shots intravenously, cortisone shots every two hours to develop my lungs. My paternal grandfather kept her room stocked with Rolling Rock, Jack Daniels and ginger ale, and the residents would drink with her as they came off shift.
Of her weeks in the maternity ward, seeing families coming, going, and growing surrounded by loved ones, my mother remembers a powerful loneliness, fighting hard to hold onto reality, dignity, and a baby the world wanted too soon.
On January 30th, when I finally arrived, transparent, weighing less than a pound, breathing independently, she held me in one hand and named me Monique. She says I told her, that I looked into her eyes and introduced myself.
They rushed me via underground tunnel to the NICU at Bellevue. My mom’s best friend Vicki traveled with me. Later, she told my mother (feverish from alcohol poisoning and dehydration), ‘That little baby’s never going to make it.’
Ninety days in an incubator, hooked to fetal monitors that mark my upper arms to this day. When I reached four pounds I could go home. Whatever else I say about my mother,1 hear this: thank you for the gift of life.
Camille Henrot: A Number of Things opens tonight at Hauser & Wirth, 22nd Street (through April 12, 2025). Large scale bronze sculpture evoking Ancient abaci and children’s bead mazes explore the ‘friction between a nascent sense of imagination and society’s systems of signs’. As a mother currently choosing Kindergarten for her child, this message hits. I first met Camille on this day last year, when Elizabeth Jaeger brought the artist over to celebrate, photo below.2
Lonely fans, I’ll see you tonight.
Happy birthday!