When you have a baby, there is no more question as to whether you are separate. The baby body comes out of your body and remains connected to your body for a long time. Any mother puts that relationship, and the needs of her child, before anything else. The role of mother on this planet has some very, very deep wisdom. Taking part in that has really reblossomed my feminist understanding.
J: There was another chapter in In a Different Voice that was about women post-Roe and how they were grappling with power. They characterized their reproductive decisions, once they had the power, as “selfish,” whether or not they were continuing the pregnancy or having an abortion. Gilligan noted that putting self first is—or at least was—really difficult for women.
A: I feel that women have grappled with that since the dawn of time. I imagine that most of the backlash towards women gaining power in society was not the fear women had of their own power, but the fear men had of women’s power.
J: You wrote the introduction for the natural-childbirth leader Ina May Gaskin’s latest book, Birth Matters. The central premise of her book is that giving birth is an incredibly powerful experience, and that when women fully engage with that experience, that power and confidence will help them for the rest of their lives, essentially. I can imagine birth is a core experience of empowerment. At the same time, I’ve seen a lot of my friends profoundly disappointed when they ended up having a C-section and feel like they didn’t even give birth.
A: I know. It’s tragic. It’s very hard to speak on, because there are so many women out there, all around us in our society, who have been denied that experience. I have done very little talking onstage about my own child’s birth, because the potential to make women feel bad is so much greater than the potential for teaching and sharing and growing together. I’m surrounded by educated feminist women who have all had C-sections. There are, of course, many different levels of intervention, and not one thing is right for everybody, certainly, and women should be free to have choices.
I don’t think you need to give birth naturally to be a fully empowered or realized woman—there is more than one way to skin a cat—but in terms of the whole of womanhood, we cannot do without it. When you disrupt the flow of natural childbirth on a mass scale, you cut off one of humanity’s essential connections to creation and you dampen the overall level of consciousness.
J: Describe your experience.
A: The experience of childbirth, for me, ironically, was humbling instead of empowering. That lesson in itself is so important. You really feel small. You feel helpless. You feel insignificant, because you are. It’s such a colossal, physical event. It’s bloody, it’s violent. Nature is unconcerned with your individual survival. Those are important blows to the almighty ego.
I seem very strong and willful on stage, but in the one-on-one, I’m not that way, and I knew that for me, if I went into a hospital, I would have had at least an epidural, and I probably would have had a C-section because they certainly wouldn’t have tolerated three days of labor. I definitely would have been a statistic, just by going into that environment. The only thing I knew to do for myself was to stay away. Beyond that, I had no idea.
I read all my Ina May and I was gunning for an orgasmic birth. This is going to be beautiful! I am going to have rushes and it’s going to be powerful and I’m going to feel one with all mothers and I’m going to smile as she comes out! Of course, it just kicked my ass. I was terrified. I was alone. It was the most awful thing ever, but the fact that I went through the most awful thing ever and came out on the other side . . . I have that in my pocket. That’s the female experience that, when it’s denied on a mass level—of course, you must allow for emergencies—but on a mass level, the denying of the female experience is going to be a denial of female psychology.
Speaking on birth in a culture like this is very tricky, because the last thing women need is more people telling them that they fucked up and they were weak or something. The whole point is that we’re not weak.
J: Can you talk about growing older and the self-critical voice with which many women and girls are very familiar? You write about it in your song “Present/Infant.”
A: I’ve had that voice my whole life, although it’s sort of getting quieter now that I’m older, because I just throw a blanket over it. I learned it from society and I learned it from my mother, who hated the way she looked. She just didn’t stack up well in a society where a female’s face is her currency and it’s all very explicit what is a valuable female and what is a not-so-valuable female. My mother was somewhat crushed by that, and she taught me to be, too.
J: So you grew up seeing your mom look in the mirror and not like how she looked?
A: No. None of it was spoken. It was all learned without words. There were no mirrors in my house growing up. There still are no mirrors in my mother’s house. I learned that pretty women are the best women and I’m not one of them, without any words spoken whatsoever.
J: What do you think your daughter is learning from you?
A: My daughter, Petah, is a little bit of a tomboy. She’s four, but she’s not about princesses at all, whereas most of her little female friends are. She’s into purple, not pink. I am very conscious, when people give me books or things for her that are of the culture that female beauty is female worth. I give them away. I ache for her to not learn certain things about this world, the social heirarchy. There’s that. There’s also the race thing. Another thing I’m very conscious of is to not label people in front of my daughter—black, white, this, that, the other—because she doesn’t label people that way. She talks about people’s gender incessantly, but never their color.
J: How does Petah understand gender?
A: At about the age of three, she became transfixed by gender. She went through her whole class at preschool: “Piper is a girl, Christian is a boy, Josephine is both.” I’d be like, Whoa, really? Josephine is her classmate, another three-year-old. One of her two female teachers, she designates as both. My friend Animal, who is a female but very much a tranny, she designates as a boy. So her understanding of gender is that it’s very important, that it’s a fundamental part of your nature, and that the distinctions between the two sexes are important but also very fluid.
I say, “Don’t you think Animal’s both?”
“Hmm. No. Animal’s a boy.”
Wow, cool. Her grandmother, my mother, she designates as both, and I agree.
J: Can you tell me how you define feminism when you’re forced to define it?
A: My personal idea of feminism is more complex than rights and opportunities. That’s the social meaning of overcoming patriarchy, but the purpose and the importance of feminism are bigger than liberating women. Feminism is a philosophy that favors interdependence and cooperation over hierarchy and competition. It’s the feminine sensibility, based in the maternal experience, of prioritizing relationships and other people over individual pursuits and self. And it’s the social movement against patriarchy and towards balance between the masculine and the feminine in all aspects of human society.
J: That’s good! I’m learning so much about what feminism can be by asking others to define it. How has marriage affected you as a feminist?
A: My marriage has, in many senses, saved me, because it’s a marriage based on true, true love and mutual respect. Before I met this man that I now call my husband, I had terrible TMJ. My jaw would snap every time I bit a cracker. I had a very poor immune system. This was my idea of myself, that I get sick all the time; if anybody is sick anywhere, I will get it. I couldn’t sleep. I’m an insomniac. All these things I knew about myself changed after he started loving me. It took years for my jaw to loosen, for my immune system to start working again. Basically, his love has made me happier and more relaxed than I’ve ever been, more okay in my skin, more okay in my life,just the way his love holds me up. That’s the beautiful thing marriage, love, respect, and security can do for somebody and have totally done for me.
&n
bsp; J: Any negatives?
A: Well, I do all the dishes! I clean the house. My mother was an early feminist. She was outraged to be doing all the housework, taking care of the children, and cooking when she got home from work. I inherited her outrage, and that righteous anger has been a part of my art and my growth. Coming back around to standing at the sink, doing dishes without outrage, has been a long journey for me.
In the beginning, I was like, “I’m doing dishes? But I should be writing a song! What are you doing? You’re on eBay! You should be doing dishes while I write a great song.” Then I realized that great songs are not the only things the world needs. The world needs food. The world needs love. The world needs clean dishes. The fact that I actually have to dedicate my time to these humbling caretaking activities that women do is good for me and good for my soul. It’s been a really interesting, circular journey. I’m part of the amount of care that women put out in this world. I labor to keep my self-respect and keep an understanding that this is important.
J: You are an artist and a big success, a breadwinner, so I’m assuming you don’t feel reduced to domestic activity. The issue with the domestic sphere, or at least it was for my mom, was, she felt her effort wasn’t really seen. She cleaned and cooked and created the home, and at the end of the day, we’d just mess it up.
A: Yes, and that’s the problem with patriarchy. Women can become reduced to caregivers, and giving care is not honored. When women do that daily service, daily caregiving, it’s not seen or respected in the way that running a Fortune 500 company is. The problem is with the society that doesn’t honor, value, or listen to it, not with the female role in itself. The problem is with the society that does not care for the caregivers and insure their freedom.
J: I’m married too, and I feel it’s been interesting, not from him but from others, how much my sexuality is questioned: “So, you’re straight?” It has been gratifying to have my sexuality continuously directed toward my husband, this person whom I love and helped create my family. The fear I struggle with is having profound relationships in my past blotted out.
A: “I always knew you were straight” is coming from a place of “you were pretending” and “you’re a faker.” All of that defensive “us” and “them” thinking comes from an unsafe society, where you need to know who is on your side and who’s not because that could be life or death when you walk out on the street. If we had a society that understood sexual fluidity and was not afraid of people changing as they grow up and older, then we would be able to freely talk about our experiences and our own changing nature. When I married my first husband, I heard, “Fraud! Sham!”
J: By this marriage, you just must be so over that critique.
A: I say to “straight girl!” the same thing I say to “dyke!”: “Whatever.”
—Interviewed on March 18, 2011
BREAST FRIENDS
When my son was a few months old and my dear, dear friend Anastasia was at the end of her pregnancy, she turned to me one day and said, “I have a request.”
“Anything,” I said. After all, she had come over two or three times a week since my baby was born to help me as I finished writing a book. She’d done everything from returning phone calls to burping the baby to vacuuming. When she tipped over in the course of trying to rock my son, Skuli, she bonked her head rather than drop him, prompting me to wonder if it was fair to relegate administrative tasks and baby-care to a woman who was nine months pregnant.
“I want us to nurse each other’s babies,” Anastasia said.
“Okay,” I said, immediately.
“They’ll be milk-siblings,” she said excitedly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Wow.”
What I didn’t do was yell, “OMIGOD! THAT IS SO BIZARRE THAT YOU WANT TO DO THAT!” But that was my first internal reaction. Second internal reaction: How am I going to get out of this when I already said okay?
The issue for me seemed clear. It was one of health. You can’t let other babies drink your milk. Skuli certainly couldn’t drink her milk. I practiced in my head how I would explain that to her. Anastasia, my milk is specially formulated with antibodies perfectly designed just for Skuli . . . But then the whole history of wet nurses popped into my head—obviously babies can and do drink other mothers’ milk.
On the web, both the Centers for Disease Control and La Leche League discourage “cross-nursing”—both citing the possibility that either mother might have serious communicable diseases. (Many diseases, including HIV, hepatitis, and syphilis, can be transmitted by human breastmilk.) But neither of us has any of those diseases. So I called my father, who is a doctor and not a hippie, to see if there were any medical reasons not to let a healthy friend nurse your baby. “None that I can think of,” he said matter-of-factly.
Oh. At that point, I had to face facts about my own relationship to health consciousness: I didn’t alter my diet or quit drinking based on being a nursing mom, and I was no poster child for hale living, existing as I do on coffee, seltzer, and candied cashews. According to La Leche League, I shouldn’t even be giving my own child my tainted milk, let alone another woman’s.
So, maybe the problem was more an issue of being normal, decent parents. What if we did cross-nurse and people found out? What if our children found out?! I felt deep shame at the thought of telling anyone we had done it. Surely we would be identified as gross and perverted, the parenting equivalent of wife-swappers. Anastasia was sort of the Angelina Jolie type in my friend group, so she could possibly pull this off, but I was more Gwyneth—superficially serene, but essentially uptight. Why did Anastasia want to do this? She asked and I was so flabbergasted, I agreed. After all, she had vacuumed my apartment.
I worried about the milk-siblings offer for a few days, and then called Amy Richards. Amy is very logical. She’d know what to do in this situation. “My instinct is that Anastasia sees nursing each other’s babies as a way for you two to bond,” she told me. “You’re very close and this is an expression of that intimacy.” Amy’s take was so different from the hysterical rant in my head, I at once felt more relaxed. “If you don’t want to do it, I think you can just acknowledge how beautiful it is that you are so close,” continued Amy. “And you don’t have to let her nurse Skuli to demonstrate that.” Just hearing Amy frame it as bonding took the pressure off of me and with that, some of the judgmental thoughts I’d been having about Anastasia. If anything, I thought, my resistance is more of a limitation on my part—I should just own up to that. We are close. I can tell her that I’m just not comfortable with our kids being milk-siblings.
Soon after our conversation, Anastasia had her son. Her delivery didn’t go at all as she’d planned. She had a midwife and a doula and a birthing ball, but after three days of stalling labor, she had an emergency C-section and was utterly flattened by the experience. Her boyfriend, who had practiced for months to coach her through natural childbirth, didn’t know what to do to help his shivering, shellshocked partner. She lay there on her side after having her stomach and uterus stitched back up, but when her doula brought her son in and rolled him onto her breast, he latched on and began sucking hard. Just like that, she started to heal from the difficulty of the past three days. Anastasia’s luck—even talent—with nursing held. She could squirt milk into Lionel’s mouth from several inches away, like a fountain. She could nurse standing up, talking on the phone, and while making homemade ravioli. Meanwhile, I had to “get into position”—propping up a pillow and cupping my breast as if screwing together a pipe—for several weeks before nursing was even remotely casual.
A few months after Lionel was born, I returned from a particularly draining two weeks on book tour with Skuli. I had lurched past the point of looking slim again after pregnancy and was scarecrow-thin, with staticky hair and a zitty complexion that bespoke red-eye flights and Starbucks dining. I sunk into an armchair at her apartment, watching gratefully as she effortlessly entertained Skuli. She listened sympathetically as I told her bo
ring tales of the book tour. Then, just as she was bringing me fresh coffee and making Skuli laugh, I was overcome by how fortunate I was that we were friends and could share this parenting experience. Lionel began crying from his room. “Hey,” I said suddenly, when she returned with him, “we never did that nursing thing you mentioned back before Lionel was born.”
“I know,” she said.
“Maybe I’ll nurse him right now,” I said, feeling sort of vulnerable in the offering, as if I was actually the weird Angelina friend. “If that sounds okay to you.”
“Well, I just read Lionel’s horoscope and it said he was going to get nourishment from exotic sources this week,” Anastasia said. “So that would make his horoscope true.”
I took him and rearranged my shirt and bra to expose my breast. Skuli sat on the floor, not seeming to think anything weird was going on. I put Lionel on my nipple and he began sucking. The familiar tug made the milk rush in; his sucking strength and style were different than Skuli’s, his little face so incredibly sweet. It felt really . . . normal. Anastasia fed Skuli, too, and because he was older and had teeth, she got her first bite.
A few months later, over drinks and a bit tipsy in that way that makes me confess everything, I revealed to another friend, Gillian, that Skuli and Lionel were milk-siblings. “You’re kidding,” she said.
“No,” I said. “It’s true.”
“I’m so jealous,” she said. “I was too afraid to bring that up to any of my friends.”
F 'em! Page 13