More Demi Moore
On pregnancy photoshoots and the prenatal experience of time
A few nights ago, nearly 38 weeks pregnant, I prodded my half-asleep husband awake.
“Should I get professional pregnancy photos done?”
“What?” he mumbled. “No. Why are you thinking about that?”
For eight months, this pregnancy (my second) existed in the background, a white noise machine on low. My growing form asserted itself through swift kicks and to-do list items like “find bottles in attic” and “buy new crib.” Now, with my due date days away, the mattress is still on the floor. The gear is still in the attic. And instead of preparing for the reality of raising two children, I am ruminating on my performance of motherhood.
I blame Demi Moore.
In 1991, Moore posed naked at seven months pregnant with her second child on the cover of Vanity Fair. MORE DEMI MOORE, the headline read. The iconic cover photo was taken by Annie Leibovitz as a last minute lark at the end of the shoot, something for Demi to bring home to her husband Bruce Willis. When the pictures were ready for review, VF editor Tina Brown insisted they send the nudes to the masses.
The issue hit newsstands and immediately caused a firestorm. Some grocery chains refused to carry the magazine, while other retailers covered it in brown paper (a practice usually reserved for porn). The picture’s considered a watershed moment—just last week, T Magazine named it one of the 25 most influential magazine covers of all time—though it would barely register as provocative now. It positioned pregnant women as beautiful and powerful, when before they’d been relegated to gourd-shaped shadows, only worth the lens once holding a baby. Moore’s since said she believes the pearl clutching was puritanical and absurd. “Why is it that we have to deny that we had sex?” she asked. “That’s the fear, right, that if you show your belly, that means, oh, my gosh, you’ve had sex.” Tina Brown’s said that it set the standard for pregnant stars, causing celebs to consider glamorous naked bellies a rite of prenatal passage. See: a slew of covers that followed, dressed up bumps that launched a thousand crises of comparison for us plebeians struggling to pull leggings over our strained stomachs.
In the profile, which received far less fanfare than the cover, Demi discussed her career prospects and parenting philosophies. She refused drugs in labor because “I wanted to feel it all.” She nursed her daughter, Rumer, for two years. She stated, with emphasis, “I am very ambitious and very driven. I want [stardom]. I’m not like ‘Oh, yes, well, if it happens, it happens.’ I really want this.” Moore expressed a level of determination at odds with traditional feminine roles. Her desire to feel it all, to accomplish it all, is a more specific iteration of “having it all.” While I can’t relate to a lot of what she says, I respect the drive. She strikes me as someone who’s intensely aware of the passage of time, running to both stay in the present and get ahead of the future. This take is probably influenced by watching The Substance, her movie about aging and the literally monstrous lengths women travel to halt its drip. That film, which earned her an Oscar nomination earlier this year, wouldn’t air for more than three decades after this VF feature, but I can see its early imprints on her psyche. She’s a force onscreen, with the unstoppable specter of time looming over every frame.
I’ve been thinking a lot about time as I get ready to enter postpartum, a phase that smashes the clock and calendar to pieces. At the beginning of pregnancy, you are strapped to the present, at the mercy of cravings and nausea. Toward the end, you live in a strange, liminal state, head swarming with the future as your body houses a waiting room. Some days, I stay in the clock’s flow, taking walks, working, playing hide-and-seek with my daughter, and heeding my immediate urges (lots of chocolate biscuits and chicken caesar wraps). Other days, I am marooned to a future I can’t see yet, ordering tiny diapers, whirling around my house, and beating myself up that I still haven’t washed and organized those old sleep sacks and crib sheets. Every day, I feel like an aquarium’s attached to my lower half, a concealed ecosystem teeming with a wriggly little life that will soon exit into the great big waterway of the world. A lovely concept when you’re not the one carrying around all the algae.
Sometimes I’ll stop to feel the kicks and rolls. I stretch out on my side in a ratty t-shirt, probing for action. It wouldn’t make a pretty picture, but it feels good to be in my body. Maybe the instinct to take pregnancy photos isn’t all related to social media bullshit—it’s also about capturing a present moment, a glimpse of life on the precipice. It doesn’t tell the whole story, as my friends Carola Lovering and Emily Barasch beautifully described in their posts (here and here) about performative motherhood and the daily grind obscured by coordinated holiday card outfits. But we can have nice things, too. We can accept the edited ideal if we remember the double chin selfies and odd-angled belly shots our toddler took before throwing the phone down, demanding a muffin but refusing to say please, and breaking a glass cake stand in an attempt to get her treat anyway.
I never booked the professional pregnancy shoot; I’m sorry to disappoint the masses. I did, however, insist on a few iPhone pictures the other night at the beach, the closest I’ll get to Demi Moore cosplay. I could say I took them for myself and my family, but oops…I already posted one to my Instagram story. It wasn’t a watershed moment, but it was a sweet one worth sharing.
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Thank you for reading! This will be my last Iced Tea before taking some time off post-baby. What should I watch postpartum?? Need some good (or so bad that they’re good) shows.
Beautiful!
❤️❤️ love this one and you!