The Baby Group

The Baby Group (pen & ink with pastel)

The Baby Group

I have for a while belonged to a group of artists who occasionally exhibit together in North Wales. For Easter Saturday, the group was invited to produce an exhibition of work illustrating the concept of ‘Liminality’ — the in-between space between one life experience, career, or similar, and another. The artwork was to accompany an afternoon of readings and meditation on Easter Saturday — those who are familiar with the Christian faith will recognise this as the day between Jesus’s crucifixion and death and his rising from the tomb on Easter morning. As we act out the events of the Passion, God, in a sense, is now dead, and the Saturday before Easter Sunday is a holy and breathless day as we await celebrating his Resurrection.

Thinking about Liminality, I knew I wanted to create something positive to illustrate a time of suspended life and ‘waiting’, and sifting through my thoughts I remembered something from many years ago. Something which I suspect has become rarer — or doesn’t now exist at all. The Baby Group.

The Baby Group, I discovered when our firstborn arrived, was a lifeline across that liminal space between becoming a Mum and hopefully returning to work and a career. Of being tied into an existence defined by feeding, nappy changing, and, as the baby grew from a newborn to a little person full of curiosity, constant busyness at a few-months-old level. Where to meet others similarly tied!  The relief of grown-up conversation!  

I made a quick sketch (above) from the memories. We Mums would meet, maybe weekly, in someone’s home, and, provided with an assortment of rugs and baby toys for our children, and mugs of coffee and plates of biscuits for ourselves, would put the world to rights. We also had permission to rant about sleepless nights, colic, endless uninterpretable crying, and to show off at the same time how wonderfully our offspring were developing.

We bonded over these things. It didn’t matter if you were an Oxford academic, an interior designer, a teacher, a bank clerk, a dental hygienist — we were all sailing in the same boat. How we looked forward to the morning the Baby Group met!

And, later as our children began to grow, there was the Baby-sitting Group — exchanging an evening out with another member, paying her by the hour in milk tokens. 

Looking back, that culture has all gone — yet back then nobody ever thought their children might be abused by the sitter, or come to any harm. At the age of 14 our daughter joined the ranks of teenage babysitters — paid, I forget how much — but certainly paid some pocket money.

How the good times seem to have gone, and in today’s culture, somehow trust has disappeared, community has vapourised — along with whatever made for some sort of unspoken rules which, crazily, we thought would keep our little ones safe…