by Lee Gutkind
“Not really,” she answered with a nervous laugh.
Sacrificio, sacrifice, spilled from the lips of Italian American women of my mother’s generation like sugar poured into espresso, as they resigned themselves to sweeten life’s bitterness, usually at the expense of their own desires. From a daughter’s point of view, one whose mother stepped back allowing me to step forward, I had no use for this subservient role. It wasn’t until I became a mother that I better understood how the sacrifice of one provides strength for the other, as well as the familial difficulties inherent in having a parent who claims most of the attention for him- or herself. And it was then that a feminism emphasizing rationalism, reason, and personal autonomy, but failing to probe the fundamental thread of human relationships—how the development of the child is shaped by the guidance, strength, and humility of the parent—felt terribly lacking.
My model of maternal care was greatly skewed because a finite period of dependency stretched into a lifetime—my brother’s emotional behavior and learning abilities have stayed at the level of a young boy, so the burdens of dependency were never relieved. Those who have experienced daily the limitless demands of the disabled child are more sensitive to the giant holes in the American social service system, continually seeing how the world’s richest industrialized country provides the least support to the young and needy. Philosophy professor Eva Feder Kittay, who is the mother of a profoundly mentally retarded daughter, set forth a political theory in her book Love’s Labor to reconcile the conflict of dependency and equality in the lives of women. Kittay argues that equality-based policies have mostly failed women in both the public and private sphere—only a tiny number of women represent us politically, and whether working or at home full-time, women perform more than three-quarters of household chores and child-rearing responsibilities.
Indeed, if female identity is intricately tied to providing care, then a half-century later Simone de Beauvoir’s declaration still rings true: “I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’; on this truth must be based all further discussion.” Kittay has put forth a concept of equality based on the simple and profound truth that everyone is “some mother’s child,” a phrase that recognizes the “fundamental connection between a mothering person and the fate of the individual she has mothered,” and whose iconic representation, she suggests, is found in the image of Christ through the suffering figure of Mary. Kittay rejects the notion of justice as individual, or based on the premise that each person has a conception of the good and competes equally for resources, in favor of a “connection-based” equality. Her formidable proposals point out the dilemmas of a feminism based on Enlightenment ideals and aim to shift the very language of Western thought from “I” to “we.”
Kittay’s theories reveal the intricate thinking of a woman, philosopher, and mother of a disabled daughter whose daily struggles have reinforced for her the reality that dependency and equality are mutually exclusive unless society offers resources for both the dependent child and the one who provides the care. By suggesting that the goal of a common societal good replace the credo of self-reliance, Kittay offers a theoretical rationale for paid family and medical leave, more flexible work time, and payment for dependency work—rationalized and routinized like worker’s comp or unemployment—that would compensate mothers for their time caring for children or allow them to use the money for day care. Some of these ideas have long been adopted by countries to which conservative commentators refer as the coddled old Europe, and Kittay repeats the well-known fact that the (forever?) young United States is the nation in the world most capable of employing a public policy fairer to women and children, but also the most recalcitrant to do so.
“The encounter with dependency is rarely welcome to those fed an ideological diet of freedom, self-sufficiency, and equality,” writes Kittay. “We have to use our multiple voices to expose the fiction and rebuild a world spacious enough to accommodate us all with our aspirations of a just and caring existence.”
Women of my generation were raised on this diet, the lovely ideological truffle of having it all. So many of us found ourselves perplexed experiencing the emotional tug of balancing work with the reality of raising a child. The original feminist solution affirmed the model of male sovereignty by rejecting the caregiving role. These feminists became caught in the paradox of championing the rights of women while failing to adequately consider the needs of mothers and children. In her book The Equality Trap, Mary Ann Mason, now dean of the graduate school at Berkeley, explained, for example, how the National Organization for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the early eighties in favor of the California Federal Savings and Loan after the bank fired a receptionist for taking a four-month unpaid maternity leave.
Fair is fair, the feminists argued; pregnant women should be treated the same as disabled men who under California law would not have been able to keep their jobs after a four-month leave. Similarly, courts created nofault divorce in the name of equality, which left many middle-class women with children near poverty after the dust of the legal papers settled.
Feminist thought would evolve to question such concepts of liberal neutrality, but the fatal flaw in this early thinking about equality was the inability to reconcile the reality of dependency. The situation of a new mother cannot be compared to one of a disabled man. The California receptionist was requesting an unpaid leave to take care of her newborn, not herself, a selfless twenty-four-hour responsibility. Feminism, too, bought into the rhetoric of capitalism and rugged individualism, ensuring that American women as well as men can now work longer away from family than workers in the rest of the industrialized world do.
I used to think linearly, longing for the conclusive end of the sentence, a leap of faith that the future, not the past, offers the vital solution. But today my thought process feels circular, perhaps a crude version of Hegel’s rhythm of history, that every idea posited needs also to be opposed. The feminist movement’s historical and pivotal achievement was to create an antithesis to women’s traditional subservience: autonomy against caregiving. Today’s challenge remains finding a sustainable synthesis of the two.
My friend greets the mentally retarded man responsible for cleaning her neighborhood playground. He interprets her friendly hello as an entree into a longer conversation and stays by our side, unaware that the awkward pauses reflect a desire to talk among ourselves. It’s the weekend of our twenty-fifth high school reunion, and my friend, recovering from a recent operation, has generously hosted a brunch for a few of us who now live in New York and Boston. We’ve left our crumbs on her dining room table and she rightly wants time to relax and talk while our children climb and slide. My friend tells the man politely but firmly that she’s going to talk to us for a while. He quietly walks away.
Watching his head hang low, his eyes searching the ground with a well-honed loneliness, I know that I will eventually restart the conversation. I imagine injuries large and small inflicted by any person who has shunned this man or grown bored and irritated by his failure to recognize social cues. My childhood plays out before me: the memory of coming home one day from a supermarket with Henry, who lags behind me and walks fast to catch up. A man notices my brother’s edges: crew cut, rail thin body, and fervent stare, and assumes that this figure threatens me.
“Is he bothering you? Do you want me to walk with you?” the man asks, cutting off my brother as he approaches me.
“No, no,” I respond, humiliated that my trailing brother is confused for a dangerous man.
“What did he want, pigeon?” Henry asks a minute later.
“Nothing,” I reply curtly, angry at everything: my brother, the man, suburban normalcy, and its stark absence in my life. So it is my nature to live in a city and carry on conversations with people who seem to be wounded sideline players in a life taking place before them.
A short time later, the mentally retarded man walks out of the playground�
��s small equipment shed holding a navy rubber ball between his hands. Walking up to him, I ask him about the ball, the weather, any small talk that comes to mind. He has the worst set of yellowed false teeth I’ve ever seen. His upper plate lacks an adhesive, which causes his teeth to click and clatter each time his mouth opens, exposing the pink gums of a baby. The slipping teeth divert my attention from the conversation, for now I can only focus on these choppers as they dice words like a busy food processor and crumble sentences to meaningless letters. The man’s hair is greasy, his uniform dirty, and he looks in desperate need of a scrubbing.
Yet he is some mother’s son. Does she still exist? She must no longer be capable of caring for him or he wouldn’t look this way. Who is his family and how worn have they become supporting a life that needs constant supervision and care?
Because Henry is my mother’s son she takes him to the dentist for periodontal work to save teeth weakened by gum disease. Watching the man in the park, I think about my past frustrations with my mother’s decisions, how she has seemed more concerned about addressing my brother’s dental problems than the state of his mental health. But one is more easily fixed than the other, and as his mother, she must care for him, washing his hair and combing out the tangles, placing his freshly laundered clothes on the bed for each new day.
Being a mother who in her eighties still does not want to disappoint, she agrees against her own best judgment to fulfill Henry’s wishes. She lugs a large ladder up the stairs to wash all the windows in the house because Henry finds satisfaction in dust destroyed and a job well done. She will also climb the ladder for him because my brother lacks the coordination to steady himself and he is prone to seizures. A few days later, a dark purple bruise covers her entire upper arm; the chorus of blood vessels that she ruptured by carrying the ladder frightens the eye and we tilt our heads slightly upwards when talking to her, not wishing to directly confront her vulnerability. In mothering Henry, she has always sided with her primal instincts, plumbing the depths of sacrifice’s deep, dark core to the detriment of her own health.
In the heart of southern Italy, an impoverished eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher named Giambattista Vico sought to counter the values of Enlightenment rationalism, which he found coldly worshipful to the creed that truth is found only through the laws of science, and is ultimately antithetical to the textured layers of human experience and the symbolic ways in which people have viewed the world and expressed themselves. Man is doomed to misunderstanding, argued Vico, if instead of attempting to decipher the language and myths of the past, he uses contemporary social and moral values to imagine those who lived before. Vico’s humanistic philosophy, little known throughout his lifetime and illuminated in the twentieth century by the brilliant Russian-English thinker Isaiah Berlin, suggested that history doesn’t universally march toward progress, but rather evolves in cycles of cultural development.
“The myths and poetry of antiquity embody a vision of the world as authentic as that of Greek philosophy, or Roman law, or the poetry and culture of our own enlightened age—earlier, cruder, remote from us, but with its own voice,” writes Berlin on Vico’s theories. “Each culture expresses its own collective experience, each step on the ladder of human development has its own equally authentic means of expression.” To Vico, there is no timeless natural law—a keystone to Enlightenment belief—and knowledge can only begin to be obtained by understanding nuances, examining how people used language, symbols, and poetry to respond to the desires, fears, brutality, and hopes of their day.
As inheritors of an Enlightenment vision of history, we optimistically assume that a vigorous and certain march toward progress continues, as long as barriers like ignorance and superstition are removed from its path. In some ways, America’s myth of the melting pot extols this belief—that shortly after the early immigrants came here, they adopted the values and mores of the younger, stronger, ultimately more capable culture, and success was based on their ability to assimilate. The notion that people would no longer live by, teach, or pass along the values upon which they were raised was, of course, absurd, but nonetheless a fiction absorbed by the culture until only fairly recently challenged by the emerging voices of African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians.
But any hyphenated-American will feel, if attuned to the notes voiced by her relatives and ancestors, the pull and tug of these competing values. Italians, for better or for worse, think about personal sacrifice differently than many Americans, viewing it as they do through the prism of their particular culture and past. For impoverished southern peasants, life and sacrifice were synonymous, a daily fight for food and survival. Catholicism reinforced, as the mystery of the communion host dissolved on the tongue, that pain and suffering were inextricably bound to the hope of transcendence. Nothing was considered stronger or more important than blood ties, and honor was found in family responsibilities, not individual achievement. In some ways, the old world seemed fairer than the new in its call for sacrifice among men and women. At least men’s hard manual labor and women’s rigorous housework and childrearing balanced out more evenly than today’s professional divide, in which fathers continue their office work and give up some former freedoms while working mothers end up handling most of the household work and child care.
My parents, in good southern Italian tradition, placed no limits on the sacrifices they made, or what they would expect of Bob and me. As we grew older, and the contrast in our abilities sharpened, my brother and I were denied the pleasures that eluded Henry. Henry, who loved cars and could name every model that GM produced, was not capable of driving, which meant that my brother and I couldn’t drive in suburbia. Henry could not do well in school, so it was better not to acknowledge our academic achievements. “You know we’re proud of you,” was the most my parents offered.
Henry could not get married and have children; therefore my brother and I were denied both the pleasure and ability to discuss the future with our family. I would announce a boyfriend with the same trepidation my gay friends faced when they came out of the closet to their parents. Accepting my marriage was a complicated, heartbreaking struggle, as my parents clung to the past, refusing to admit that the only certainty in life is knowing that it will change, a reality that hit my mother with the cruel gust of a sudden wind tunnel.
My mother’s sacrifice placed a tremendous burden on her, which will eventually be handed to my brother and me. But in the gray zone of life, in which two competing truths coexist, preventing a neat and happy ending, I have come to accept that no group home affordable to my parents could have delivered the same compassion and care to my brother.
My parents did the best they could within the limits imposed by their culture, religion, income, and what society had to offer them. The beauty and pain of parenting a child is tenderly laying the bricks of self-confidence, ability, and independence upon which he’ll eventually walk, creating the steady foundation to leave the family who raised him. But what if the child is damaged? Someone must make the sacrifice and the mother usually approaches the altar first, and stays for the duration.
You must have a really strong mother, the feminist’s shy daughter remarked to me nearly twenty years ago. Back then, I was incapable of understanding a fundamental truth of human relationships, that the sacrifice of one is the gift to another. A gift that American culture, fixated on personal achievement and unbridled prosperity, takes more and more for granted.
My friend, the poet and writer Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, moved to Parma, Italy, two decades ago with her Italian husband and their daughter. Her memoir, Mother Tongue, describes the cultural chasm she experienced between the values of her American birthplace and her newly adopted land. In a moving chapter on the death of her mother-in-law from cancer, she wrote about the decision of her husband, the chairman of the biology department at the University of Parma, to wipe clean his schedule once he learned of his mother’s illness.
“He canceled all conferences. He decided h
e would give her medicine or baths or whatever was needed, day or night. He started cooking to tempt her to take a mouthful or two. His colleagues concurred. They left him alone or caught him during his kamikaze visits to his office. What is the distance between cultures? What is it like—that freedom that starts so early in the States—where a mother and father want you to become … to go. Why would it seem unnatural to give over an unmeasured amount of time to someone who is dying?”
Wilde-Menozzi has observed Italian behavior in a prosperous part of the land, where sacrifice may be a choice. She mused in a recent essay about a Parma grandmother, a psychiatrist and mother of six, who proudly reported on her three-year-old granddaughter’s precocious insights: “Her little mind hums like a top. You know what she said? ‘My mother was in your stomach. And I was in her stomach. And so I was a little bit in your stomach.’
“That beautiful continuity—that strong rooted space for the most basic and traditional links—is one reason Italy seduces in powerful and authentic ways,” writes Wilde-Menozzi. “Human relations have as much space as work, and professionalism has different dimensions in terms of being a role. Family is not a sacrifice but an inevitable part of life, with its discomforts and adjustments, but also with its rewards of continuity, and the pleasure of knowing people through time, and having the right and privilege of taking care of them.”
Sacrifice—a thorn in the side of reason, a balm to life’s unfairness—is the very contradiction of sovereignty. It opposes values embodied in phrases like self-reliance, individual choice, and ownership society, ideas that dominate today’s political discourse and the way we live. An engagement with sacrifice, the recognition that each of us carries an obligation to help the young, elderly, and needy, can serve as an antidote to a vision of equality fashioned on the cold, bottom-line mentality of the marketplace. To acknowledge that we are not free individuals but depend, and are sometimes dependent, upon each other is the essential journey of the human condition, filled with both joy and sadness. The decision to accept this with magnanimity, instead of laying it stingily in the arms of women, may be the fundamental test of those parlor game nouns that aim to declare who we are.