sophieingleby - Tumblr blog

[sophieingleby]

Egg Collection

We are waiting here; the mothers who can’t mother, in a room with no windows and too many doors.

Below the tide line of our navels, ovaries bloom rounding like grapes and pressing blood lips in fat, unseen kisses.  They beat and pulse

against the red-hot inside, smiling at their sisters across the way. They are throbbing a delicate Morse-code

in concentrated female form, carrying our ancestors, our progeny in wet pockets;

secretive baubles of flesh and blood.

[sophieingleby]

[sophieingleby]

The Embryologist shows a couple their five day old blastocyst, magnified on a screen, before it is implanted inside the womb.  The woman reaches for her phone, and takes a photo.  The baby’s first portrait.

[sophieingleby]

A friend was passing the Centre for Life with her three year old daughter. She pointed up to the lights shining brightly from the waiting room ‘That was where the special doctor put you in my tummy’.  On their way back, her daughter yanked on her arm, pointing up again at the same window and asked ‘Mammy - are the doctors still making Mammies and Daddies up there?” 

[sophieingleby]

Mary Kelly. The Primapara, Bathing Series (1974)  I'd like to reference this intimate and intense document of becoming a mother; creating a series that explores how the advances in clinical imagery used during the IVF process is changing the timing of when parenting begins.

[sophieingleby]