After the Q&A at this event, a woman came up to me and told me that she just got out of a relationship with a woman who had wanted her to hit her during sex. She was so fucked up, she said. Came from a background of abuse. I had to tell her I couldn’t do that to her, I could never be that person. She seemed to be asking me for a species of advice, so I told her the only thing that occurred to me: I didn’t know this other woman, so all that seemed clear to me was that their perversities were not compatible.
Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people. This is a crucial point to remember, and also a difficult one. It reminds us that there is difference right where we may be looking for, and expecting, communion.
At twenty-eight weeks, I was hospitalized for some bleeding. While discussing a possible placental issue, one doctor quipped, “We don’t want that, because while that would likely be OK for the baby, it might not be OK for you.” By pressing a bit, I figured out that she meant, in that particular scenario, the baby would likely live, but I might not.
Now, I loved my hard-won baby-to-be fiercely, but I was in no way ready to bow out of this vale of tears for his survival. Nor do I think those who love me would have looked too kindly on such a decision — a decision that doctors elsewhere on the globe are mandated to make, and that the die-hard antiabortionists are going for here.
Once I was riding in a cab to JFK, passing by that amazingly overpacked cemetery along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (Calvary?). My cabdriver gazed out wistfully at the headstones packed onto the hill and said, Many of those graves are the graves of children. Likely so, I returned with a measure of fatigued trepidation, the result of years of fielding unwanted monologues from cabdrivers about how women should live or behave. It is a good thing when children die, he said. They go straight to Paradise, because they are the innocents.
During my sleepless night under placental observation, this monologue came back to me. And I wondered if, instead of working to fulfill the dream of worldwide enforced childbearing, abortion foes could instead get excited about all the innocent, unborn souls going straight from the abortion table to Paradise, no detour necessary into this den of iniquity, which eventually makes whores of us all (not to mention Social Security recipients). Could that get them off our backs once and for all?
Never in my life have I felt more prochoice than when I was pregnant. And never in my life have I understood more thoroughly, and been more excited about, a life that began at conception. Feminists may never make a bumper sticker that says IT’S A CHOICE AND A CHILD, but of course that’s what it is, and we know it. We don’t need to wait for George Carlin to spill the beans. We’re not idiots; we understand the stakes. Sometimes we choose death. Harry and I sometimes joke that women should get way beyond twenty weeks — maybe even up to two days after birth — to decide if they want to keep the baby. (Joke, OK?)
I have saved many mementos for Iggy, but I admit to tossing away an envelope with about twenty-five ultrasound photos of his in-utero penis and testicles, which a chirpy, blond pony-tailed technician printed out for me every time I had an ultrasound. Boy, he’s sure proud of his stuff, she would say, before jabbing Print. Or, He really likes to show it off!
Just let him wheel around in his sac for Christ’s sake, I thought, grimly folding the genital triptychs into my wallet, week after week. Let him stay oblivious — for the first and last time, perhaps — to the task of performing a self for others, to the fact that we develop, even in utero, in response to a flow of projections and reflections ricocheting off us. Eventually, we call that snowball a self (Argo).
I guess the cheery way of looking at this snowball would be to say, subjectivity is keenly relational, and it is strange. We are for another, or by virtue of another. In my final weeks, I walked every day in the Arroyo Seco, listing aloud all the people who were waiting on earth to love Iggy, hoping that the promise of their love would eventually be enough to lure him out.
As my due date neared, I confided in Jessica, the woman who would be assisting our birth, that I was worried I wouldn’t be able to make milk, as I had heard of women who couldn’t. She smiled and said, You’ve made it already. Seeing me unconvinced, she said, Want me to show you? I nodded, shyly lifting a breast out of my bra. In one stunning gesture, she took my breast into her hand-beak and clamped down hard. A bloom of custard-colored drops rose in a ring, indifferent to my doubts.
According to Kaja Silverman, the turn to a paternal God comes on the heels of the child’s recognition that the mother cannot protect against all harm, that her milk — be it literal or figurative — doesn’t solve all problems. As the human mother proves herself a separate, finite entity, she disappoints, and gravely. In its rage at maternal finitude, the child turns to an all-powerful patriarch — God — who, by definition, cannot let anyone down. “The extraordinarily difficult task imposed upon the child’s primary caretaker not only by the culture but also by Being itself is to induct it into relationality by saying over and over again, in a multitude of ways, what death will otherwise have to teach it: ‘This is where you end and others begin.’
Unfortunately, this lesson seldom ‘takes,’ and the mother usually delivers it at enormous cost to herself. Most children respond to the partial satisfaction of their demands with extreme rage, rage that is predicated on the belief that the mother is withholding something that is within her power to provide.”
I get that if the caretaker does not teach the lesson of the “me” and the “not-me” to the child, she may not make adequate space for herself. But why does the delivery of this lesson come at such an enormous cost? What is the cost? Withstanding a child’s rage? Isn’t a child’s rage something we should be able to withstand?
Silverman also contends that a baby’s demands on the mother can be “very flattering to the mother’s narcissism, since it attributes to her the capacity to satisfy her infant’s lack, and so — by extension — her own. Since most women in our culture are egoically wounded, the temptation to bathe in the sun of this idealization often proves irresistible.” I have seen some mothers use their babies to fill a lack, or soothe an egoic wound, or bathe in the sun of idealization in ways that seemed pathological. But for the most part those people were pathological prior to having a baby. They would have had a pathological relation to carrot juice. Remnant Lacanian that she is, Silverman’s aperture does not seem wide enough to include an enjoyment that doesn’t derive from filling a void, or love that is not merely balm for a wound. So far as I can tell, most worthwhile pleasures on this earth slip between gratifying another and gratifying oneself. Some would call that an ethics.
Silverman does imagine, however, that this cycle could or should change: “Our culture should support [the mother] by providing enabling representations of maternal finitude, but instead it keeps alive in all of us the tacit belief that [the mother] could satisfy our desires if she really wanted to.” What would these “enabling representations” look like? Better parts for women in Hollywood movies? Books like this one? I don’t want to represent anything.