by Elif Shafak
Today, we do not speak or write much about the face of motherhood that has been left in the shadows. Instead, we thrive on two dominant teachings: the traditional view that says motherhood is our most sacred and significant obligation and we should give up everything else for this duty; and the “modern” women’s magazine view that portrays the quintessential “superwoman” who has a career, husband and children and is able to satisfy everyone’s needs at home and at work.
As different as these two views seem to be, they have one thing in common: They both focus solely on what they want to see, disregarding the complexity and intensity of motherhood, and the way in which it transforms a woman and her crystal heart.
Farewell to a Djinni
Katherine Mansfield once remarked in that captivating voice of hers, “True to oneself! Which self? Which of my many-well really, that’s what it looks like it’s coming to-hundreds of selves? For what with complexes and repressions and reactions and vibrations and reflections, there are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor.” [18]
As the small clerk of my own hotel, I wish I could say that, in the end, using my willpower, self-control or wits, I defeated Lord Poton. I wish I could claim that I beat him with my own strength by cooking up a grand scheme, tricking him into oblivion. But it didn’t happen like that.
This is not to say that none of the treatments had any effect. I’m sure some of them did. But the end to my postpartum depression came more of its own accord, with the completion of some inner cycle. Only when the time was right, when I was “right,” did I get out of that dark, airless rabbit hole. Just as a day takes twenty-four hours and a week takes seven days, just as a butterfly knows when to leave its cocoon and a seed knows when to spring into a flower, just as we go through stages of development, just as everything and everyone in this universe has a “use by” date, so does postpartum depression.
There are two ways to regard this matter:
The Pessimist: “If one cannot come out of depression before the time is ripe, there is nothing I can do about it.”
The Optimist: “If one cannot come out of depression before the time is ripe, there is nothing depression can do to me.”
If you are leaning toward the Pessimist’s approach, then chances are you are in the first stages of postpartum depression. If you are leaning toward the Optimist’s, then congratulations, you are nearing the exit. Every woman requires a varying amount of time to complete the cycle. For some it takes a few weeks, for others more than a year. But no matter how complex or dizzying it seems to be, every labyrinth has a way out.
All you have to do is walk toward it.
Lord Poton: There is something different about you this morning. A sparkle in your eyes that wasn’t there before.
Me: Really? Could be. I had a strange dream last night.
Lord Poton: I hope it was a nightmare! Sorry, I have to say that. After all, I am a dastardly djinni. I can’t wish you anything good, it’s against the rules.
Me: That’s okay. It was as intense as a nightmare anyway.
Lord Poton (more interested now): Oh, really? Tell me!
Me: Well, we were standing by a harbor, you and I. It turns out you were leaving on a ship that transports djinn from this realm into the next. It was a mammoth ship with lots of lights. The port was so crowded, hundreds of pregnant women were gathered there with their big bellies. Then you embarked and I sadly waved good-bye to you.
Lord Poton (confused): You were sad to see me go? Are you sure? You must have been jumping for joy. Why, I’ve destroyed your life.
Me: No, you haven’t. It was me who has done this to myself.
Lord Poton (even more confused): Are you trying to tell me you’re not mad or angry with me?
Me: I am not, actually. I think I needed to live through this depression to better reassemble the pieces. When I look at it this way, I owe you thanks.
As if I have smacked him in his face, Lord Poton flushes scarlet up to his ears and takes a step back.
Lord Poton (his voice shaking): No one has spoken to me like this before. I don’t know what to say. (His eyes fill with tears.) Women hate me. Doctors, therapists, too. Oh, the terrible things they write about me! You have no idea how it feels to be insulted in brochures, books and Web sites.
Me: Listen, that ship in my dream had a name: Aurora. It means “dawn” in Spanish, safak in Turkish.
Widening his slanting eyes, he looks at me blankly.
Me: Don’t you understand? I am that ship. I was the one who brought you into the port of my life.
Lord Poton (scratching his head): Let’s accept what you are saying for a moment. Why would you do such a thing?
Me: Because I thought I couldn’t deal with my contradictory voices anymore. I’ve always found it hard to handle the Thumbelinas. If I agreed with one, I could never make it up to the others. If I loved one a little more, the others would begin to complain. It was always that way. I had been making do by leaning a little bit on one and then a little bit on another. But after I gave birth the system stopped functioning. I couldn’t bear the plurality inside of me. Motherhood required oneness, steadiness and completeness, while I was split into six voices, if not more. I cracked under the pressure. That was when I called you.
That is when the strangest thing happens. There, in front of my eyes, Lord Poton starts to dissolve, like fog in the sunlight.
Lord Poton (taking out his silk napkin and dabbing at his eyes): I guess it is time for me to leave, then. I never thought I would get so emotional. (He wipes his nose.) I’m sorry-you took me by surprise is all.
Me: That’s all right.
Lord Poton (sniffling): I guess I’ll miss you. Will you write to me?
Me: I’ll write about you. I’ll write a book.
Lord Poton (clapping his hands): How exciting! I’m going to be famous!
A heavy silence descends, rushing into my ears like the wind through the leaves. I feel light, as if something has held me and lifted me up.
Lord Poton: Well, good-bye. But what will happen to the finger-women?
Me: I will take them out of the box. I’m going to give them each an equal say. The oligarchy has ended, and so have the coup d’état, monarchy, anarchy and fascism. It is finally time for a full-fledged democracy.
Lord Poton (laughing): Let me warn you, love, democracy is not a bed of roses.
Me: You might be right. But still, I’d prefer it to all other regimes.
PART SEVEN. Daybreak
The Calm after the Storm
One sunny day in August, when the plums in the garden had ripened to purple perfection, Eyup came back from the military, looking thinner and darker. He didn’t say a word for a long time, only smiled. Then I heard him in the bathroom, talking lovingly to the shampoo bottles, perfumes and creams.
“You don’t say hi to your wife, but you chat with your shaving cream?” I asked.
He laughed. “In the army one gets to miss even the tiniest luxuries in life and learns to be grateful for what he has on hand.”
“Perhaps depression teaches us the same thing, too,” I said. “I’ve learned to look around with new, appreciative eyes.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be with you,” he murmured, pulling me toward him. Then he added pensively, “We could have handled this better.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why didn’t we ask for help from our families or friends while you were going through that turbulence? Why didn’t we hire a nanny to help you? You tried to do everything alone. Why?”
I nodded. “I thought I could manage. I thought I could rock the baby to sleep, feed her healthy food and write my novels. It never occurred to me I wouldn’t be able to do this alone. That was my strength and my weakness at the same time.”
“From now on, we will do it together,” he said tenderly.
“Good,” I exclaimed. “Are you going to take care of the baby while I write?”
He paused, a trace of panic flickering in his eyes. “Let’s start looking for a nanny.”
We did. In ten days we found a nanny from Azerbaijan, a woman larger than life-huge breasts, teeth capped with gold, a loud voice and a hearty laugh. A bewildering combination of Mary Poppins, Xena the Warrior Princess and Impedimenta-the stout, matriarchal wife of Chief Vitalstatistix and the first lady of the village in Asterix the Gaul. A woman who could say the sweetest words in Turkish, talk a blue streak in Russian, and believed the main problem with Stalin was that he hadn’t had a good nanny as a child. She taught us the basics about babies-how to burp them, rock them to sleep, feed them, and still have time for ourselves. She helped us greatly. We all helped one another.
The same month, there was the anniversary of a liberal newspaper’s literature supplement. When I went to the place of celebration, I found a crowd of novelists, poets, critics, local and foreign reporters, photographers and academics drinking wine out of paper cups, nibbling cheese cubes and milling about garrulously. As in most social activities in Istanbul there was a thick, gray haze that swirled around in lazy spirals, the smoke of all those cigarettes, cigars and pipes hovering in the atmosphere. But we were on a terrace and the air beyond and above us was crisp, the sky a deep ocean blue.
It was there that, after all this time, I ran into Mrs. Adalet Agaoglu. She broke into a smile when she saw me.
“Do you remember the talk we had a while ago?” she said.
“How can I forget?” I said.
“I think you did the right thing by becoming a mother in the end,” she said, holding my hand in her hand, my eyes in her stare.
I gently squeezed her hand, and offered humbly in return, “And I respect your decision not to become a mother so as to fully dedicate yourself to your writing.”
After all, as even the smallest glimpse into the lives of women writers-East and West, past and present-keenly shows, every case is different. There is no single formula for motherhood and writing that suits us all. Instead, there are many paths on this literary journey, all leading to the same destination, each equally valuable. Just as every writer learns to develop his or her own unique style and is yet inspired by the works of others, as women, as human beings, we all elaborate our personal answers to universal questions and needs, heartened by one another’s courage.
Later on, as I watched Mrs. Agaoglu walk away from the party and the evening come to a slow close, I realized the wheel of life had moved through one full turn.
Rule of the Thumbelinas by the Thumbelinas
I hold the lockbox tightly in my lap, listening. Not a sound. Not a peep. My heart pummels wildly. Are they all right? I have missed them so much my eyes water.
A little bit of twisting and the lock opens with a click.
“Please come out,” I say.
Nothing moves for a full minute. Then, shielding their eyes from the sudden light, weary but otherwise in good shape, the finger-women start to emerge one by one.
“Finally, freedom!” says Mama Rice Pudding. “My back has gone stiff. What a terrible experience. No refrigerator, no microwave, no rice cooker. I couldn’t even brew tea for months!”
Miss Highbrowed Cynic’s head pops up next. Gathering the skirts of her hippie dress, she walks out, a haughty look on her small face.
“You speak for yourself. I’m pretty sure this existential torment we now left behind will generate an artistic breakthrough in me. The Greek philosophers thought melancholy wasn’t necessarily a bad experience. According to Plato, for instance, melancholy could increase the quality of artistic production…”
“Oh, give me a break,” grumbles Milady Ambitious Chekhovian. With her tiny frame she struggles to climb atop the box and manages to sit herself on the lid, fixing her hair. “I can’t believe how much precious time we lost inside this penitentiary. That djinni literally stole eight months of our life! Oh, the things we could have achieved in all that time.”
“Yo, is that ogre gone?” asks Little Miss Practical as she gets out and glances around.
“Yes, don’t worry. He has gone,” I say.
Little Miss Practical smiles, something of her old mischief twinkling in the depths of her eyes. “Wait a sec. Did you rush here to release us first thing?”
“Yes, I did,” I say. “Because I missed you very much.”
“Did you miss me, too, darling?” asks Blue Belle Bovary, blowing me a kiss with her cherry-red lips. “Even me?”
“Also you,” I say. “There is no ‘even’ about it. I missed all of you equally.”
“What do you mean?” says Blue Belle Bovary. “You never treated us equally.”
“You’re right. It was a mistake and I apologize to all of you. From now on, I’m not going to censure any of you, you will all have an equal say. We are a democracy now.”
“At long last,” says Dame Dervish with a genuine smile. “That’s what I wanted all along. That’s fantastic!”
For the first time in my life, I realize, I see them as One-inseparable pieces of the same whole. When one is out in the cold, they all shiver. When one is hurt, they all bleed. When one is happy and fulfilled, all benefit from her bliss.
When Milady Ambitious Chekhovian and Miss Highbrowed Cynic launched a coup d’état that long-ago night, it was because I wanted to suppress my maternal side. I wasn’t ready to meet Mama Rice Pudding. And the oath I took under the Brain Tree was because I was not at peace with my body. I wasn’t open to Blue Belle Bovary. Mama Rice Pudding’s absolute monarchy during the pregnancy was a result of my belief that my other inner voices were not compatible with motherhood. At every turn, I would put one finger-woman on a pedestal at the expense of all the others.
I am all of them-with their faults and virtues, pluses and minuses, all their stories make up the book of me.
Hélène Cixous-scholar, essayist, literary critic, writer and one of the most original and critical voices of our times-says her text is written in white and black, in milk and night. Patriarchy, for her, does not exist outside the realm of aesthetics and poetics. She analyzes the Freudian approach that sees woman as “lack,” replacing it with “woman as excess.” She describes women’s writing by using metaphors of childbirth, breast-feeding and allusions to the female body. “It is important to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an importance that will remain, for this practice will never be theorized, enclosed, encoded-which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.”
For Cixous motherhood is a fulfilling experience, the most intense relationship that a human being has with another human being. Though she draws a line between the cultural and the biological, the latter is not insignificant for her. Female biology is an inspiration for her figurative way of writing. “I’m brimming over! My breasts are flowing. Milk. Ink. Nursing time…” Cixous is a scholar who is both critical of and supportive toward women writers. She thinks instead of “undermining patriarchy from within,” many female authors have chosen to write like men, repeating the same codes and stereotypes. She advocates a new writing based on the libidinal economy of the feminine, an écriture féminine, that is critical of logocentrism and phallocentrism and operates outside and under these terrains, like underground tunnels made by moles.
There is no social change without linguistic change. Women need to break their silence. They need to write. “We should write as we dream,” she says.
Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favorite women writers. When asked what she would be if she weren’t a writer, she answered: dead. From the day she started writing at the age of five to the present she has never slowed down. Though always prolific and creative in several genres, she said writing was never easy. “The difficulty of trying to be responsible, hour after hour, day after day for maybe twenty years, for the well-being of children and the excellence of books, is immense: it involves an endless expense of energy and an impossible weighing of competing priorities.” Despite the difficulties involved, she says the hand that rocks the cradle wr
ites the book.
Placing the finger-women on my writing desk, I hug all six of them. Giggling, they hug me back.
Miss Highbrowed Cynic, Milady Ambitious Chekhovian, Little Miss Practical, Mama Rice Pudding, Dame Dervish, Blue Belle Bovary and voices that I have not yet met stand next to one another. No one tries to rule the others, no one is a dictator. No one is wearing a crown or carrying badges. Not anymore.
This is not to say that they agree on every issue. But by listening, not just talking, they are learning the art of coexistence. They now know that to exist freely and equally, they need one another, and that where even one voice is enslaved none can be free. Together we are learning how to live, write and love to the fullest by simply being all of who we are. Sometimes we manage this beautifully and artlessly; sometimes we fail ridiculously. When we fail we remember the moments of harmony and grace, and try again.
That, pretty much, is the pattern of my progress in life: Take a step forward, move on, fall down, stand up, go back to walking, trip over and fall down on my face again, pull myself up, keep walking…
Epilogue
The next year I finished my new novel, The Forty Rules of Love, which became a record best seller in Turkey. I went back to giving interviews, writing columns and essays, attending literary festivals and commuting between cultures like I always did. I stopped teaching at the University of Arizona, as it proved impossible to travel with a baby for so many hours. Instead we made a new beginning in London, spending half the year there, half the year in Istanbul. I learned to fuse a nomadic existence with the requirements of a settled life.