by Meghan Daum
Poor boy. I realized I didn’t know if he’d ever seen a vagina up close, and now he was in charge of making someone feel okay about hers. We steered into a consoling Krispy Kreme drive-through with the “Hot Now” sign lit up. I had the feeling that the next time he’d ask me for advice would be in a decade, when the dreaded menses loomed.
Elsa was no longer than my forearm, and there was just so much turbulence ahead. Girls are born with all the eggs they will ever have, enough to populate a small city. But these start dying off at birth, and only a few hundred of them will kick off into the fallopian tubes and mature into the big chance. Women have, I would guess, about two decades of genuine, galloping fertility. With twelve periods a year, that’s 240 shots at making a baby without enlisting a team of professionals and some lottery winnings. Why was I thinking about this already? She was a few weeks old. This was the telescoping nature of human endeavor. All the flailing around, the mad activity—going to parties, falling in love, buying houses, striving at work—could be smashed like a soda can into this flat fact: we have children so they can have children so they can have children. I had a blast of vertigo, as when you look into a puddle and see the stars falling away behind your head.
Elsa got her passport, Sharla’s milk dried up, and we all dispersed, exhausted: Mikey and Christian to a wholly altered life, with unrecognizable hours and fears and blisses, and me back to mine, where there was still a sock lying in the middle of the rug and an empty glass in the sink.
* * *
I’m no Facebooker, but I started checking in daily to see photos of them settling in, 3,500 miles away. One morning, Christian posted: Last day of my paternity leave. Devastated. My little angel is five weeks old today. From this moment on, everything I do is for her and her wonderful daddy.
Here it was: I’d been kicked out of our tiny Narnia. The wardrobe held only coats. The cold stone in my chest was the rightness of what he’d written. In his novel On the Black Hill, Bruce Chatwin describes grown twins: “Because they knew each other’s thoughts, they even quarreled without speaking.” Now my brother was thinking and feeling things I never would. In college he’d taught me how to speak, but this was something I could never say aloud: Don’t leave me behind.
The only recourse was to love this little scrap of a human, and in the first really adult way I would love anyone. Without expectations of returned affection. Without wounded vanity. With foreknowledge of impending boredom, of exasperation, of anger that I could not allow myself to nurse. In the understanding that I would sometimes be ridiculous in her eyes. Knowing I did not have the rights of parenthood, I could make no demands of her beyond those any grown-up would make of a child: Hold my hand; we’re crossing the street.
* * *
The ruthlessness I feared, the ruthlessness I knew in myself as a child, turns out not to be the point of the tale. There are times when the parent enjoys being feasted upon.
When Nathan, my boyfriend of five years, held Elsa for the first time, he wept—big sparklers caught in his lower eyelashes, too light to drop. “Not sadness,” he said, “just big feeling.” Now the decision is made. But the decision is not past. No matter how it came about—was it my procrastination; disinclination; anxiety; self-absorption?—we live with its consequences every day. Nathan is younger than I am, and it’s a little odd to be dealing at his age with the question of whether he will have his own children or not. For as long as he chooses to be here with me, it will be the latter. I want him to stay, but it is, as they say, a big ask.
I’ve learned from the work of the primatologist Sarah Hrdy that aunts exist in nature. Of course they are everywhere, biologically speaking, but some (marmosets and langurs, I’m looking at you) truly behave as the aunt I want to be, the aunt I have already become, and this is called allomothering. They will feed, groom, hold, and carry a child when they have had none of their own. So there is a word for what this is that I’m doing, I and all my sisters of the genetic dead end. Whatever I’ve learned in this life will not stop with me; I’ll teach it to Elsa.
From feeling we move to thinking, and then to doing. “If there is a kindness instinct,” writes Adam Phillips, “it is going to have to take onboard ambivalence in human relations. It is kind to be able to bear conflict, in oneself and others; it is kind, to oneself and others, to forgo magic and sentimentality for reality.” As night falls in the forest, Hansel crowns Gretel Queen of the Woods and sings to her, “I give you the strawberries, but don’t eat them all.” It is hard, so hard, to let go of a story you’ve lived by. Brother, good-bye; father, hello. As in the fairy tales, there must be a gift at a christening, and this one is my offering: for her, the wild strawberries will only be strawberries, and sweet. “Fraises des bois, Elsa darling,” my brother will say. “Try one.”
MATERNAL INSTINCTS
by
Laura Kipnis
“LIKE SHITTING A PUMPKIN” is how radical feminist Shulamith Firestone famously described childbirth, though she hadn’t had the experience herself; it was a friend’s report on what labor was like, shortly after the happy event. It only confirmed Firestone’s view that childbearing was barbaric, and pregnancy should be abolished. Beyond the personal discomfort, her larger point was that women aren’t going to achieve social equality until some technological alternative is invented to save us from being the only sex expected to go through it. If men were the ones forced to endure this ordeal, obviously such a technological solution would long ago have been devised.
Firestone was clearly no fan of Nature, an animus I find myself reliving whenever I hear people, especially women, espousing such supposedly “natural” facts as maternal instinct and mother-child bonds. It’s not that I think these things don’t exist; they certainly do. They exist as social conventions of womanhood at this moment in history, not as eternal conditions, because what’s social is also malleable.
But what’s with all the sentimentality about nature anyway, and the kowtowing to it, as though adhering to the “natural” had some sort of ethical force? It’s not like nature is such a friend to womankind, not like nature doesn’t just blithely kill women off on a random basis during childbirth or anything. No one who faces up to the real harshness of nature can feel very benignly about its tyranny. Sure, we like nature when it’s a beautiful day on the beach; less so when a tidal wave kills your family or a shark bites off your arm. If it were up to nature, women would devote themselves to propagating the species, compliantly serving as life’s passive instruments, and pipe down on the social demands. It’s only modern technology’s role in overriding nature—lowering the maternal death rate, inventing decent birth control methods—that’s offered women some modicum of self-determination. If it comes down to a choice, my vote’s with technology and modernity, which have liberated women far more than getting the vote or any other feminist initiative (important as these have been), precisely by rescuing us from nature’s clutches.
But my quarrel with the concept of maternal instinct isn’t why I never had kids myself. I was never particularly opposed to the idea of having kids—let no one say that I don’t love kids! It always seemed like an interesting future possibility, the same way that joining the Peace Corps someday seemed like an interesting future possibility. And though neither possibility ever consolidated into action, I still feel I’ve done my share when it comes to ensuring the future of humanity. Let no one say that I didn’t spend the equivalent of a year’s college tuition hauling my beloved niece and two nephews to the movies regularly during their formative years, bribing them into good behavior with pricey buckets of popcorn and gallons of soda. Let no one say that I didn’t do my best to imbue them with my values (social rebellion, critical thinking), and subtly shape them in my image, a project that continues to this day—at holidays I like to slip them hundred-dollar bills with my picture taped over Franklin’s. “Who’s your favorite grown-up?” I wheedle, when their parents are out of earshot. Under my careful tutelage, they’ve evolved into fast
-talking and ironically hilarious little wiseasses, tolerating and mocking my improvement campaigns; pocketing the cash; pretending to note my reading suggestions and life lessons. I think we understand one another.
No, despite my proven talents at nurturing, I don’t believe in maternal instinct because as anyone who’s perused the literature on the subject knows, it’s an invented concept that arises at a particular point in history (I’m speaking of Western history here)—circa the Industrial Revolution, just as the new industrial-era sexual division of labor was being negotiated, the one where men go to work and women stay home raising kids. (Before that, pretty much everyone worked at home.) The new line was that such arrangements were handed down by nature. As family historians tell us, this is also when the romance of the child begins—ironically it was only when children’s actual economic value declined, because they were no longer necessary additions to the household labor force, that they became the priceless little treasures we know them as today. Once they started costing more to raise than they contributed to the household economy, there had to be some justification for having them, which is when the story that having children was a big emotionally fulfilling thing first started taking hold.
It also took a decline in infant-mortality rates for mothers to start regarding their offspring with much affection. When infant deaths were high (in England before 1800 mortality rates were 15 to 30 percent in the first year of life), maternal attachment ran understandably low. As historian Lawrence Stone pointed out, giving a newborn child the same name as a dead sibling was a common practice; in other words, children were barely regarded as distinct individuals. They were also typically sent to wet nurses following birth—so much for the mother-child bond—and when economic circumstances were dire, farmed out to foundling hospitals or workhouses (“little more than licensed death camps,” said Stone). But then childhood as such really didn’t exist, or at least it wasn’t a recognizable concept, as historian Philippe Ariès documented; this, too, is a social invention. Children were viewed as small adults; apprenticed out to work at age five. It was only as families began getting smaller—birthrates declined steeply in the nineteenth century—that the emotional value of each child increased. Which is where we find the origin point for most of our current ideas about maternal fulfillment.
All I’m saying is that what we’re calling biological instinct is a historical artifact—a culturally specific development, not a fact of nature. An invented instinct can feel entirely real (I’m sure it can feel profound), though before we get too sentimental, let’s not forget that human maternity has also had a fairly checkered history over the ages, including such maternal traditions as infanticide, child abandonment, cruelty, and abuse.
But the real reason I’m against the romance about maternal instincts is that what gets lost amid this fealty to nature is that nature hasn’t been particularly kind to women, and I say we owe it no favors in return. If women have been “ensnared by nature” as Simone de Beauvoir (no fan of maternity herself) put it, if it’s so far been our biological situation that we’re the ones stuck bearing the children, then there should be a lot more social recompense and reparations for this inequity than there are. The reason these have been slow in coming? Because women keep forgetting to demand them, so convinced are we that these social arrangements are the “natural” order of things. The willingness to call an inequitable situation “natural” puts us on the royal path to being society’s chumps.
Even though I never actually ruled out having kids, I suppose I wasn’t that deeply identified with the prospect of maternity either, which meant that I was always a little more casual about birth control than a fully cognizant anatomical female probably should be. I never entirely connected sex and procreation—it didn’t help that I generally used methods you don’t have to actively think about, like IUDs—which resulted in a few pregnancies over the years whenever I took a month or two off between the previous model and its successor. Pregnancies are useful for clarifying one’s life priorities, of course, but they also clarify a lot about the prevailing conditions of motherhood when you’re deciding whether or not to sign on for the long haul.
The second to last time I got pregnant, I was in a long-term relationship, which is one of the usual practical considerations for those contemplating motherhood. My boyfriend and I had been living together for about five years at that point—we’d stay together for twelve and eventually even buy a house together—meaning we were stable enough, and financially comfortable enough. Except that he was the bass player in a well-known jazz band and thus on the road about half the year, and I’d just received a three-year fellowship at the University of Michigan and was planning to commute by train between Ann Arbor and Chicago when my boyfriend was in town (though he promised to come up for weekends when he could). Contemplating the result of the pregnancy test, I envisioned myself on the train lugging a baby, a computer (they were a lot heavier in those days), books, and the requisite ton of baby paraphernalia, and I couldn’t imagine how I’d carry all that stuff. I thought about giving up the fellowship (for about a nanosecond), but this didn’t seem like the wisest life choice, as I’d been lucky beyond belief to get it. My boyfriend, too, had his dream gig—he wasn’t about to give it up (and even if he had, then do what for money, play bar mitzvahs?). It took me about ten seconds—far less time than it took to type this paragraph—to conclude that having a baby was unfeasible, or not feasible under the current conditions of isolate do-the-best-you-can parenthood. I had an abortion.
I realize, looking back, that the image of myself struggling on the train with too much baggage was analogous to my sense of what being a mother would feel like: weighted down and immobilized, though my ambivalence surely had as much to do with my perception of the social role of “mother” as with diaper bags. (I probably could have bought a car for the commute instead of struggling on the train—I later did just that.) But one of the pleasures of living with a jazz musician was picking up and meeting him in far-flung places on short notice, or traveling as a band girlfriend for stretches: jaunts to Japan, Europe, Omaha. I learned to pack light and not carp about delays. (Also to go through a different customs line than the band unless I wanted every last toiletry opened and sniffed.) I liked having the kind of life where you didn’t know what was going to come next; the opposite of what life as a mother would be, or so I presumed.
Some might adduce that my getting pregnant (yes, more than once) suggests that I was more eager to embark on the path of motherhood than I’m letting on. Maybe so, but I think not—it’s not like I agonized about having abortions or regretted them later. I was willing to contemplate kids, though if I’m being honest, among the factors militating against it was my profound dread of being conscripted into the community of other mothers—the sociality of the playground and day-care center, and at the endless activities and lessons that are de rigueur in today’s codes of upper-middle-class parenting. It terrified me. For one thing, I’ve never been good at small talk, or female conventionality. Also, the mothers I met struck me as a strange and unenviable breed: harried, hampered, resentful. I didn’t want to accidentally become one of them. I know there are unparalleled joys in having children—the deep love for another creature; the connection to a greater human purpose. But then there are the day-to-day realities. Let’s face it: children’s intellectual capacities and conversational acumen are not their best features. Boredom and intellectual atrophy are the normal conditions of daily life for the child-raising classes. All of which I could see all too plainly on the faces of the other women around the swing set when I hauled my beloved niece and nephews to various playgrounds or trotted them around to kiddie museums over the years. Not to mention (how to put this politely?) that child raising is not what you’d call a socially valued activity in our time despite the endless sanctimony about how important it is, which those doing the labor of it can’t help being furious about—quietly furious about being dropped down a few dozen rungs in the soci
al-equity ranks. You have to wonder: Is it really such a great idea to rely on the more aggrieved sex—those whose emotional needs are most socially disparaged, whose labors are most undervalued, and who may consequently be a little … on edge—to do the vast majority of the child rearing?
Lately I’ve been hearing from childless female friends and acquaintances about their sense of being judged by this community of other women for not having children, as though their not having children betrays all the women who took a hit for the team. I can’t say I ever felt any such disapproval myself (maybe I was just oblivious), or family pressure, but apparently it can be intense. (I recently said to my mother, “How come you never pressured me to have kids?” She rolled her eyes and said, “What good would it have done?”) But then you also hear from friends and acquaintances who have had kids about feeling judged by the community of other mothers for such things as not pureeing their own organic baby food, or other failures to comply with the many heightened requirements set by today’s former careerists turned full-time moms.
Apparently, the more “progressive” the community, the more intense the inducements to do it all “naturally”—once again, nature and women locked in some sort of master-slave dialectic. I listen, I ponder, and in my darkest heart, I think that motherhood today is no less deforming than when Betty Friedan detailed maternal malaise in 1960; it just takes updated forms. Women are still angry about feeling duped and undervalued, but instead of ignoring their kids and downing cocktails all day, as in Friedan’s time, now we have the angry overdrive child-rearing style: motherhood as a competitive sport.
Back to women and nature. Let me say something possibly controversial in the hopes of clarifying something else. When it comes to female anatomy, it’s not only being saddled with the entire excruciating, immobilizing burden (sorry, “privilege”) of childbearing that we’re dealing with (a privilege that can kill you, thanks). It gets worse. Among nature’s other little jokes at women’s expense is the placement of the clitoris, a primary locale of female sexual pleasure, at some remove from the vagina, a primary locale of human sexual intercourse. Perhaps this mainly affects women who have sex with men, but that’s still a majority of us, because apparently some percentage of men don’t automatically fathom these anatomical complexities, or so say researchers who collect data on women’s orgasm rates compared to men’s. On this score, women lag far behind. (I realize that orgasms aren’t the sole index of sexual pleasure, but surely they’re something.)