And neither did I.
I knew only that my fourth child was not like the others, who needed me and loved me, as I loved them. The fairies had stolen away the human baby and left one of their own. There she moved, every day, among us but not of us, acquiescent when we approached, untouched when we retreated, serene, detached, in perfect equilibrium. Existing among us, she had her being elsewhere. As long as no demands were made upon her, she was content. If smiles and laughter mean happiness, she was happy inside the invisible walls that surrounded her. She dwelt in a solitary citadel, compelling and self-made, complete and valid. Yet we could not leave her there. We must intrude, attack, invade, not because she was unhappy inside it, for she was not, but because the equilibrium she had found, perfect as it was, denied the possibility of growth. We had not demanded; now we must. We had accepted; now we must try to change. A terrible arrogance, for what had we to offer her? Which of us could call ourselves as content as Elly was? The world we would tempt her into was the world of risk, failure, and frustration, of unfulfilled desire, of pain as well as activity and love. There in Nirvana, why should she ever come out? Yet she was ours as well as her own, and we wanted her with us. If what we had to offer was not enough, we had nothing beside Confronted with a tiny child’s refusal of life, all existential hesitations evaporate. We had no choice. We would use every stratagem we could invent to assail her fortress, to beguile, entice, seduce her into the human condition.
2. Ourselves
Elly only seemed to live in isolation. In fact she lived with us. There were five other human beings in her house. We passed, we spoke, we touched, we provided. It is time to introduce ourselves, the family that should have made up Elly’s world.
Elly’s father is a professor. He learns, he teaches, he writes. His work is varied, demanding, and in the main satisfying. The college is small and very good. Professors there are teachers as well as scholars, and their students (note the personal pronoun) learn not merely by watching them operate at a distance but by working with them. It may be an exaggeration to say that these professors work here in this isolated valley instead of at one of the exciting intellectual factories for which their abilities qualify them, because they believe with Forster than ‘the personal is all that matters’. Yet most of the faculty is here by choice, and the choice has involved some such factor. My husband and I have spent almost all our lives in one school or another. Deep inside us, unspoken and unanalysed until Elly made us analyse it, is the conviction that all good learning is at last a matter of what is now called, with a show of scientific objectivity, ‘interpersonal relations’. We believed this, but we could not have guessed how deeply we were to test our belief.
We are a very academic family. My husband is a professor’s son; my mother was sent north to college from a small, provincial Southern town long ago at a time when to educate one’s girls at all was by no means the conventional thing to do. I, who tell this story, was when Elly was born a typical college-bred housewife, of the sort that forms the backbone of the League of Women Voters all over the country. I had had a fine education; I even had an M. A. , picked up at the same university where my husband did his graduate work, but I had gone no further. When David completed his Ph. D. we had been four years married, and although I enjoyed academic work and did it well I had no clear goals of the sort that would have been expected of me if I had been a man. As David entered on his professional life, it seemed reasonable for me to do what almost every other woman my age was doing — to start having babies. Before Elly came I had had three. Sara was seven when I learned Elly was on the way. Rebecca was six, Matthew three. It was a rounded, well-planned family, two girls and a boy.
There are thousands of families like us in this happy land. We live in a big house in a homogeneous community where neighbours are friends, wide lawns run into each other, and children find it safe to roam — a woman’s magazine daydream which happens to be true. Our town is an ideal place to rear children, if an ideal place is one which is free from insecurity and danger. Within two hundred yards of our house were fifteen or twenty children for Sara and Becky and Matt to know. A selection of these streamed steadily through our house, depositing balls, gum wrappers, and anonymous pieces of clothing; our children streamed correspondingly through the houses near by. These children were attractive and alert, brought up with care and considerable success by mothers like me, the mothers of the forties and fifties for whom Dr Spock had replaced the conventional wisdom. Of professional ability, most of us, we had made motherhood our profession. We read, we discussed our problems with each other. We were very knowledgeable. If I was unusual in anything, it was that I was less educated than most in the theoretical ins and outs of the infant psyche. Having studied no psychology in college, I eschewed the more recondite writings on the subject, lost patience with Gesell's heavy detail which never seemed to describe my own babies, and stuck to the common sense of Spock, freely corrected, as time went on, by my own. But I was like my friends m putting my full resources of intelligence and intuition into e task of bringing up my children. Every mother her own Piaget. I had observed, fascinated, their first approaches to language: how one small consciousness would begin with nouns, another with verbs — and speculated on what significance this might have as a key to their orientation to the world. I had watched their first slow movement from the domain of people and objects to the making of primitive abstractions. When Becky, at two, responded to her lot of low man on the neighbourhood totem-pole by remarking, ‘Sara bang me — Johnny bang me,’ and then, slowly and philosophically, ‘Ellybody bang me,’ I had sympathized, and laughed, and rejoiced at the spectacle of a mind unfolding. There had been so much to do. I had looked at books with them and later read them aloud. I had provided them with clay and batter and cleaned up the results. I had kept track of the innumerable but not interchangeable pieces of their educational toys. I had taught them letters and numbers and how to sound out words. I had seen to it that on their shelves were the children’s classics that would feed the imagination as well as inform the mind. I had punished and rewarded; I had tried to make them generous and self-con- trolled and unsuspicious and good. I had washed and cooked and coaxed and wrangled. I had used to exhaustion the full abilities of a grown-up woman in overseeing the first years of these small humans, and I was terribly proud of what I had done. Anyone would have said — many people did say — that I had three lovely children.
If I were to describe them this would be the place to do it. Their separate characteristics, the weaknesses and strengths of each one of them, are part of Elly’s story. But it is a part that must remain incomplete, even at the risk of unreality. Our children have put up with a lot of things because of Elly; they will not have to put up with reading their mother’s summation of their personalities printed in a book. I set down only what is obvious, what is attested by teachers, friends, and neighbours. It is all that is necessary here. Our children were intelligent, responsive, and adaptable. They were also — quite irrelevantly — beautiful, with a pink-and-gold beauty which seemed to belong not to the real world but to the illustrations of old-fashioned story-books. I luxuriated in their beauty; it seemed to me that I had unaccountably given birth to two princesses and a prince. As I looked at them, remembering my own bespectacled childhood, they seemed a special and continuing miracle. It is our eyes that we believe. Irrationally, it was their beauty, with which I had had nothing whatever to do, that summed up my pride in them. It shone around them, an astonishing, almost palpable fact, as if to symbolize their less superficial successes — their intelligence and their affection.
That year, the year of Elly’s beginning, a friend had visited us, one with whom we had long been out of touch. A man with a gift for intimacy, he formulated a single question to bring us close together again: ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what have you done in the past five years of which you are most proud?’ He, a man of considerable attainments as a scientist, was proudest of his successful psychoanalysis.
I was proudest of my children. Clearly he, a married man childless by choice, was astonished and unsatisfied by my answer as I was by his. To each his own achievement, and his own pride in it. I was terribly proud to have produced three such children. But it was my thought that the job was nearly over. Like my husband’s, it had been demanding, varied, and in the main satisfying. I had done it well. Now I would grope my way back towards some of the other things I knew how to do.
I had begun to discover, in the long hours of fragmented attention while I listened to small people’s chatter, what I had been too dim and too timid to perceive in a graduate school. I was no natural homebody. I had the stirrings of a vocation. I had done some teaching while I was at the university — pickup work, freshman composition in the years of the great postwar teacher shortage. I was sure now of what I had only suspected then — that this was what I wanted to do. I had spent seven years teaching little people, with some success. Now I wanted to teach people whose minds could in some measure answer my own. In two years all the children would be in school. My days would be my own again; I could have again the forgotten experience of being alone. I would have time to read, to bring my knowledge up to date. I could perhaps write. I could locate a school in which I could teach part time.
It was in this forward-looking state of mind that I learned that I was pregnant for the fourth time and that the job was to be done all over again.
Except for the initial depression as the gates clanged shut, the pregnancy was uneventful. The household was full and active, I had no choice but to be busy, and depression gave way to an intermittent, semi-comic rage that was much easier to handle. The only way to deal with the jokes played by feminine biology is to agree that they are funny. Nothing unusual happened until I was in my sixth month, when the children picked up measles. I had not had it. For a pregnant woman, ‘measles’ is a frightening word, but my doctor reassured me. It was not the severe disease that was dangerous, but the milder German measles: there was nothing to indicate it would affect the unborn baby, who was in any case advanced beyond the vulnerable stage of development. Besides, I was probably mistaken; most adults had had measles; it was easy to forget these things. I was still worried enough to call a doctor in Boston, a personal friend. She concurred. Accordingly, I received gamma globulin from my own doctor, enough to modify the disease but not to prevent it. When it came, I was very sick, but only for a week, and I recovered without after-effects.
Three months later, on 20 July 1958, on schedule and without complications, the baby exploded into life. Once again it was over, this birthing, this experience unassimilable to any other, in which brain and familiar personality are incredibly harnessed to an enormous body whose work and pain spread from the centre to take in every remotest nerve-end and at last the whole world. Doctor and nurse moving dreamlike above me, I lay in the delivery room worn out, in the state of heightened emotional perception that accompanies an experience that has involved totally everything that one is. What had I made this time? The nurse anticipated my question. ‘You have a lovely little boy.’
But that wasn’t true, I didn’t have a little boy at all. She had made a mistake, a slip of the tongue perhaps, corrected inside the minute. But one is very vulnerable after prolonged pain. Until they took my little boy away I did not realize how much I had wanted him — a brother for Matt, who would now be isolated among three sisters — a boy, because one can dream bigger dreams for a boy than for a girl. But the baby was a girl, and the doctor had been right. The measles had left no trace. She was healthy and perfect.
And then there was the matter of the name. For three days Elly lived nameless, as none of my other babies had had to do. We had thought we had a name ready. She — if she was a girl — was to be Hester, a restrained New England name, which my husband and I thought beautiful. But complications arose, the silly complications of a happy modern family in which everybody’s ideas count. Sara hated the name Hester, she thought it was awful. It had been agreed for months that this baby, born within a month of her birthday, was to be in a special sense hers, as Matthew had been Rebecca’s birthday present almost four years before. Sara’s very own baby couldn’t have a name she thought was awful — we all saw that. So the little bundle went unnamed as we tried to suit everybody and finally settled on a compromise that nobody liked or objected to very much. The baby would be Elinor. It was a strange, uncertain beginning. First sex unclear, then name, in which, irrationally, so much of personality seems to inhere. David Copperfield was born with a caul. A nineteenth-century novelist could have imagined no more fitting introduction for a child whom twentieth-century psychiatrists would see as suffering from a condition which Erik Erikson calls early ego failure, in which the very boundaries of the self are confused and undefined.
But nobody thought of portents then. Elly was fine and healthy, unusual in no respect except that she cried with colic day and night. Even that was not unusual in our family. Becky had done exactly the same thing. There is a section in Spock on three-month colic. Our copy opens of itself to those grimy pages. Colic is a strain on everybody concerned, but it is nothing to worry about. We took turns rocking and cuddling her, my mother and I, so the family could have some peace by day and sleep by night. Elly cried and cried and lay at my breast and ate and cried again and grew. By the time she was three and a half months old the colic was largely gone, by five months she was a gay and cheerful baby, though as late as seven months she would sometimes give a sharp yelp after her milk went down to remind us of those early weeks.
One does not watch the second baby as closely as the first, and the fourth may hardly get watched at all. Nevertheless, I remember that Elly did the usual things roughly on schedule. I remember that at seven weeks she smiled, in a brief interval between screams. At two months she even smiled at her teddy bear. That seemed very advanced to us; none of the others had recognized a human surrogate so early. She reached for objects at the usual time. Photographs of her at five months show an alert, gay baby, smiling up out of her bath straight into your eyes. Memory can play tricks. My children all have the same hair and colouring, and their baby pictures are very much alike. Three years later, in the midst of Elly’s dreamlike remoteness, I went over the old pictures, combing my brain for clues to when it began. I found one of a baby laughing aloud, eyes focused. directly on her father’s face behind the camera. I rejected it altogether. That was not Elly’s empty gaze, straight through you to the wall behind. The pictures had been scrambled. That was not Elly. That had been Matt. But I was mistaken. Two years afterwards, my mother produced her copy of the picture, incontrovertibly dated. That was Elly. The smiling baby had really existed. She had been different then.
I nursed Elly, as I had the others, for nine months. Her head was small and warm like the others’, her body snuggled soft against mine. It broke my heart to wean her. I am a thin woman, grown from a nervous child, a nail-biter, a ring-twister. Serenity is not natural to me; I value the rare experience that brings it.
Beloved, may your sleep be sound,
That have found it where you fed.
The long hours spent nursing my children, relaxed, not moving, only functioning, each of us completely satisfied in the other, were to me the happiest times of their babyhood.
When I weaned her, Elly was still very much a baby. Other people’s children, after six months, begin to do all sorts of things — they sit up, they crawl, they fall down, they eat pins. At an age when other people’s children are pulling themselves to their feet in their playpens, mine are still flat on their backs on a blanket. I had got used to this long before Elly came. Matthew had not sat up until eight months; Becky, who had not crawled till eleven months, was seventeen months old before she stood alone, nineteen months old before she walked. Elly followed a month behind. At nine months she finally sat alone. At a year, she crawled. Months went by and she did not walk. Another family might have worried at such slow progress. We felt no reason to. Elly crawled very well once she bega
n. It was true that even when she became mobile she seemed satisfied with very little, but what mother of four does not consider that a virtue? Does not Spock point out that babies may prefer very simple toys? She did not want to put rings on a stick, but I knew already that not all babies did. I remembered vividly that Becky had taken the educational toys that Sara had delighted in assembling, and methodically dropped the parts, one by one, down the stairs.
So when did it begin? A friend, also a mother of four, tells me she began to wonder as early as eight months, seeing Elly lying in her baby-tender, content without even a rattle in her hand. Has she hit on something significant? And there are pictures from around nine months or so (dates are vague; it did not occur to us that one day Elly would be a case-history). The friendly bubbly smile is gone, and there is only one picture in which she faces the camera. She looks serious. Had it started then? But those photographs were taken on one day. There are often days when a baby doesn’t photograph well. Perhaps Elly was tired that day. If I could go back I’d know in a moment. I can never find out now.
Was it significant that as early as eight months, propped up in a chair, she showed that strange quivering tensing of all muscles in a kind of passing paroxysm — that response to intense interest or pleasure which has been with her ever since yet which no doctor has ever seen? Was it significant that as she approached a year she would not play hide-and-seek behind a diaper? If I held her on my shoulder and her father dodged up at her from behind my back, instead of discovering him, as the others had, with squeals of pleasure, she paid no attention. But children differ, and not everyone likes the same games. Elly seemed independent and cheerful. All this description is based on hindsight. We noticed nothing then.
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