And it does burn as I suck in the metallic night air. I look at my arms, pilloried in the screen, white in the light from the passing cars. They are thin and, I realize, cold. There is no one to tell about this, not even Jake: This is not the kind of thing that the moms in the park discuss. This is what we don’t tell, for shame or for pride. Or for fear. I open my mouth, but only squeeze out a strangled squeak. It dies on the wind.
I don’t know what I will tell Jake about the screen, or even how soon he will notice it. He will come home tired from the week of extra hours at work. I will pull myself back inside, scratching my arms open again on the jagged edges. I will clean up the mess, put the house back together again, and the blood will dry. I will listen to Riley cry himself to sleep, and when he is quiet I will crawl into bed and curl up under the covers in the dark, ready to consume sleep like a meal so I can have the stamina to do better tomorrow. Tomorrow, when I will want to read to Sam when she climbs into my lap and lifts my arm up around her small, hot shoulders. Tomorrow, when I pull Riley’s slick-soft baby hair to my cheek and nuzzle across his head, breathing in his milky scent. Tonight I will fall asleep listening for my children’s breathing, their growing, imperceptible but real. Later, when Jake crawls into bed and eases his tan arm around me, I don’t know if he will feel the crustiness of my arm and wonder what caused my wounds, or if he will think fleetingly that my skin has dried out this fall, that I have aged, and then fall heavily asleep on the pillow beside me.
Afterword
In a masterstroke of poor timing, I decided to work on my master’s degree during precisely the five-year span when I was pregnant and nursing my babies. I managed to squeak in just one class in which my body and brain were all my own, but by the final weeks of my second class, I was using a rubber band to expand the buttonhole on my jeans and marveling at my voluptuous new bra size.
From then on, all of the writing I did—whether an academic deconstruction of Shakespeare’s comedies or scratching out my own stories and poems—happened during a time when my body was doing extraordinary work of its own. Always hungry, always thirsty, and nearly always tired, I kept plugging away at creating something on the page while the rest of me worked at building baby parts or making milk.
Just when I was finished nursing the first one, I signed up for a second round. My younger one was weaned as I began work on my final project, so my most fertile period of writing neatly bookended the most fertile years of my reproductive life, too. They say to write about what you know, and plans I had to work on a novella about an antiheroine who crashed cars on purpose and had an affair with her student fell by the wayside as I found myself coming back, again and again, to the most singular experience of my life: carrying another human around in my body.
How could it be any other way?
In her book The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Everything and Why We Pretend It Doesn’t, journalist Susan Maushart maintains that early pregnancy is often difficult for women because they are “left stranded” without “witnesses” to the physical and emotional exhaustion of hosting a growing fetus.[1]
Because the physical strain of early pregnancy is not obviously on display the way it is in the third trimester and during childbirth, it does not garner the same respect—or even acknowledgement—by society at large: “there can be no audience… The drama is entirely offstage.”[1]
This unwitnessed drama has been performed a million times across history by women who have been actively discouraged from telling that story. That’s an awful lot of unsung heroines muddling through without a model. As Maushart eloquently describes it, this gap on the library shelves leaves a woman to fend for herself “like a new Eve, making it up as she goes along.”[1]
And make it up we do. Despite having all the advice in the world just a keystroke away, there’s a real loneliness to pregnancy. If there’s one thing that unites the characters in these stories, it’s their isolation from the outside world as they focus on the drama playing out in within their own bodies. There’s Nicole, literally alone as she waits to find out the results of her pregnancy test, and Abby, who struggles to get through another day alone with her very young children while her husband is at work. Emmie is isolated because she’s in conflict with her husband about terminating her pregnancy, and Julia is left alone by Rick after the delivery—though she has the glimmer of an opportunity to reconnect with her mother at the end.
So many women doing their work alone. This may not be how women throughout history have done it, but it’s par for the course in twenty-first-century America. We don’t have a village to help us keep an eye on the baby while we catch a nap, or a live-in lactation specialist to talk us through that first terrifying week at home. (I would have settled for a relative closer than a six-hour drive away.)
What we do have is an impossible standard and a generous salting of guilt.
In The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women, Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels explore the rise of the celebrity mom. The image of the beautiful celebrity mother who has work and career perfectly balanced presents a one-sided portrait of motherhood that “banishe[s] all … negativity: No ambivalence, not even a mouse-squeak of it, [is] permitted. Celebrity moms love … their kids unconditionally all the time; they love … being mothers all the time.”[2] The image of perfection, not only of lifestyle but of maintaining perfect love at all times, is impossible to live up to.
Nicole knows it, even when she can barely contain her rage at David for being so messy and leaving her to keep up appearances. Abby knows it, and she waves off the overtures of a fellow mother at the park, even though she could desperately use an adult to talk to. The supermom who is effortlessly superloving is the height of perfection that Abby cannot meet, and this causes her to feel isolated from other mothers, the very people who could understand her best.
This is her tragedy, and—though quietly tucked into an ordinary afternoon—it is not small.
I wasn’t quite prepared for my first readers’ reaction to these stories. I don’t think any writer is, really, but early workshop discussions surprised me.
If you’re one of the many sane and happy people who have never participated in a writer’s workshop, here’s how it works. The hopeful writer brings a new story to a group of other writers, and they read it. Then they gather around a conference room table and say—out loud, in brutal detail—everything they liked and didn’t like about the piece. Suggestions fly for fixing problems with the setting or holes in the plot, and people pick apart the characters’ psyches like so many armchair psychiatrists.
If you’re lucky, your fellow writers are gentle, kind, and insightful, and their advice gives you new ways to think about your writing and a road map toward a finished product. I was blessed with, for the most part, truly excellent readers.
Still, each round of discussion brought up questions about how we read fiction, especially how men and women may read differently. My readers were often divided, and many were uncomfortable. Regarding “Recognition,” one (childless, male) instructor said, “I’m not certain that these ideas about the parent-child relationship are an important enough revelation to build a story around.”
This seems to me pretty clear evidence that men and women read texts differently and have some different priorities when it comes to deciding what makes a good story—or one worth telling at all. And if that’s the case, to what extent should stories of women’s experiences follow the traditional, “masculine” advice given to writers?
In the traditional structure of fiction, the protagonist is a person whose choices and actions give rise to the drama of the story, not someone who is tossed about by external events. Think of Huck Finn on his adventures and making his big choice at the end to free Jim, even though it’s illegal. Think of all those tough Hemingway guys in their bullfights and battles. Author John Gardner expresses this view in The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers when he says, �
�No fiction can have real interest if the central character is not an agent struggling for his or her own goals but a victim, subject to the will of others.”[3] He goes on to describe a successful climax as one in which “we must be shown dramatically why each character believes what he does and why each cannot sympathize with the values of his antagonist.”[3]
This assumes a lot about what kind of main characters are worthy of being written about. For one thing, it suggests that the central character always has agency—always has the power to change things. It also assumes that there’s always an antagonist around to get in the way and create juicy conflicts. But what happens when all the drama is taking place inside your own body—and you don’t have any control over it?
I would argue (and did, frequently) that this prescription for writing stories is limiting because it is a masculine construct that highlights the hero’s journey and traditional man vs. man conflicts that have made up most of literature as we know it. Plenty of feminist scholars have criticized this masculine story construction, including Nancy K. Miller, who states that while “the plots of male fiction chart the daydreams of an ego that would be invulnerable … the heroine’s posture might well be a variant of Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will.”[4] Miller takes issue with critics who dismiss women’s stories as implausible because female protagonists lack clear motives and argues that the motives are unclear only to men, who are limited by the traditional view of a hero.
This rang true to me as I absorbed what readers had to say about these stories. For example, one of the difficult aspects of “September Air” for some readers—typically the ones without a uterus or children of their own—was their impatience with the pace of the beginning. Generally, the childless reader’s criticism of the story is that “nothing happens” for the first nine pages, and when Abby finally “snaps” at the end, there is not a clear cause for it.
But for women and mothers the world ’round, the details of a daily routine aren’t just exposition: they are the story. Abby’s anger is not caused by any particular event; rather, it’s the cumulative effect of daily frustrations and exhaustion. One reader, in discussing the pace, suggested that I “didn’t have to tell the story exactly as it happened.” Instead, I could speed it up by glossing some things. But my purpose in pacing the opening so slowly, with such claustrophobic detail, was to wear on the reader in the same way that Abby is worn down by her routine. To me, then, the complaint that the opening doesn’t have enough happening is a sign that I have achieved my goal of making the reader as uncomfortable with the routine as Abby is.
I don’t want to speed up and gloss over the so-called “boring” parts of women’s lives because for many women who become mothers, boredom and frustration are major antagonists. Society’s penchant for action in the quest or battle format of stories, which we have accepted for so long as the benchmark of fine literature—that story with the neat little triangle of rising and falling action that John Gardner presses upon aspiring writers—needs to be challenged. We need to tell women’s stories, especially those of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, which men can by definition never experience. My experience revising “September Air” left me, like many feminist authors and critics before me, calling out for new forms and a women’s language of storytelling that would not be seen as problematic but as right and natural for the story I wanted to tell. If the traditional form of the short story demands what feminist scholars see as a masculine protagonist, how is a story of the quintessentially female act of pregnancy and birth to be written?
Of the four stories included here, “The Second Time” strikes me as the most traditional in many ways. Its conflict is more external than in the other stories, pitting a wife’s emotional desire to preserve her pregnancy against her husband’s intellectual, practical desire to terminate it. Here the personalities and desires of the characters are clearly counterpointed, and the female protagonist operates with a greater sense of free will than in the other stories.
Unlike the others, this story does follow the advice John Gardner offers to aspiring writers in On Becoming a Novelist. In Gardner’s definition of plot, a “central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, loss, or draw,”[5] and here Emmie wants to have her second child, despite Michael’s arguments for the abortion. The end results in a loss for Emmie, and she is left to come to terms with the loss of the baby and the strain on her marriage. Gardner also maintains in The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers that in “serious fiction, [the] highest kind of suspense involves the Sartrian anguish of choice; that is, our suspenseful concern is not just with what will happen but with the moral implications of action.”[3] In “The Second Time,” Emmie and Michael struggle with the issue of ending the pregnancy: Emmie is greatly troubled by the thought of ending her baby’s life, whereas Michael is concerned about the quality of life their daughter Sophie will have if she grows up with a brother with Down syndrome.
It is interesting to me, given the hot-button political and moral questions raised by the abortion in this story, that workshop readers in general found this story more “readable” than the others. Readers’ acceptance of this story may have far more to do with its form than its content. There are no doubt readers who are not comfortable with Emmie’s abortion, but because Emmie’s conflict and choice follow the traditional—that is, masculine—pattern Gardner discusses, the story is less controversial than the other stories in the collection: the story meets traditional expectations of storytelling.
But surely this is not the only acceptable way to write a story, especially the largely untold stories of pregnancy and birth. There must be room in the world and on our bookshelves for a wide range of ways to wrestle with our humanity and struggle with what it means to live the life in the body you’ve been given. If your story doesn’t fit the form, you need a different form. But tell it you must.
So what does it mean to be a protagonist when the events in your story are beyond your control? Susan Maushart defines pregnancy as a “blurring of the boundaries of selfhood, of where ‘I’ leaves off and ‘You’ begins [that] is a primary biological fact of pregnancy” [1]—and the main thing that separates stories of motherhood from any other trope. Each of the women in these stories has to come to terms with what, exactly, she can and cannot control, starting with her body. Julia feels completely unready to give birth, Emmie can’t control the health of her baby, and Nicole waits in suspense to find out whether her body has gone ahead and conceived without her permission. Their bodies and their experience of motherhood are always, inevitably, just beyond their control.
In the end, it’s Abby—despite her desperate moment breaking through the window screen—who is most in control. She does not, after all, harm her children, and the cuts on her arms are accidental. “Everyone wants to throw the baby out the window at some point,” my sister-in-law told me when my daughter was born. “The only difference is that sane people don’t actually do it.” When Abby feels herself losing control, she gets away from her baby as quickly as she can. I would argue that she acts heroically by seizing control of her urge to strike her child and fighting it down to protect the baby. In the inevitable conflict that bubbles up in the parent/child relationship, someone must get hurt: a child physically, or the parent emotionally. Abby chooses to inflict these wounds on herself. She makes a choice; however constricted her options are, she does act.
The mother hero doesn’t have to slay dragons—though she may do that too. She may also travel no farther than the nearest park with a swing set and a bench. Her work is internal, and that’s as it must be. Having experienced what feminist Hélène Cixous called “the not-me within me,”[6] how could it be any other way? There is no manual for where the self ends and the new life begins in those early days, and you may spend a lifetime figuring out who you are now that you have had this experience.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper”—the
seminal story of a woman coming to terms with an utter lack of control over anything in her life—Charlotte Perkins Gilman describes the protagonist’s husband as a man who “has no patience with faith…and scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.”[7]
But I have felt things that I haven’t seen: a tiny fist knocking on the far side of my ribcage and the ripples of hiccups that weren’t mine. These things may have happened in darkness, invisible to the world, but they did happen, as they do every day to women around the world. Is any such miracle minor? I think not.
So tell your story. Seek them out from other women, too, because honest stories about real women and their pregnant bodies need to be told. When we do, we will also teach readers to understand them as they are, not as the readers assume they should be.
Notes
1. Susan Maushart, The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Everything and Why We Pretend It Doesn’t (New York: New Press, 1999).
2. Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women (New York: Free Press, 2004).
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