What We Carry
A few years back, my friend Grace told me that when you’re pregnant with a girl, the female foetus already has her eggs, and so in a sense the mothers of daughters carry their own grandchildren. You can’t trust everything your friends tell you, even wonderful friends like Grace, so I looked it up. Sure enough dozens of reputable .orgs confirmed the story. (Here’s one.)
As the daughter of a mother and the granddaughter of a grandmother, and now a mother of two daughters, I just delight in this concept.
That means I–or the potential of me–sprang into existence as my grandmother danced to the Big Bands.
My grandmother used to say in hushed tones, to hide the disrespect of happy memories, how much fun she had during the war. Likewise, the post-war years and even her personal baby boom were for her a time of great expansion and opportunity. She became a champion of the mobile home movement, when they were designed to be truly mobile, and she dreamed out loud of driving out to Alaska with her husband and one, then two, small children. Basically, she was living the #vanlife when the only platform she had to influence was Mobile Living Magazine, in which she had a few pieces published.
She and my grandfather made it in their mobile home to Central Pennsylvania but even that seemed sufficiently distanced from her Irish Catholic family back in Hartford. My grandfather was her second husband. The first, as far as I can tell, she married in an attempt to codify her independence from a domineering father who had wanted to cast her as a surrogate mother of her three siblings when her own mother died of tuberculosis in the middle of her teen years. Sadly, neither the frying pans nor the fires of men in the late 1930s, whether they were fathers or husbands, allowed for the independence my grandmother craved. Women’s rights had progressed sufficiently to allow her to divorce that husband but not so far as to codify any parental rights of a female divorcee. Her ex-husband, therefore, won all legal rights to their then 5 year old daughter. And so the State deprived my grandmother the right of motherhood. She did not see that child again for almost 60 years.
Nevertheless life moved on. She met my grandfather and danced her way down the Atlantic seaboard through the war years before embracing #vanlife around 1950. However, as I said, the mobile home parked in Central Pennsylvania and that is where my mother spent most of her childhood and adolescent years.
My mother’s puberty hit around the same time as the Beatles, and the potential of me, along with the potential of 6 or 7 million other eggs, began their monthly assertion. Women’s rights had progressed sufficiently to make hormonal birth control available around that time, but not so far as to extend them to unmarried women, and certainly not to teenage girls. When she complained to her doctor about the painful intensity of her menstrual cramps, the doctor, situated so completely as he was in his era and sex, assured her that they would ease in a few years, after she had a baby or two.
The late years of the Vietnam War were, for my mother, a time of great expansion and opportunity, though without the motherhood or mobile homes. She is less likely to whisper about how much fun she had during these years, dancing as also did up and down the Atlantic seaboard, as well as down in Lousiana and out west in California. Family was formed with her expansive peer group of leftist, anti-war college friends. They made a communal home first in an old Boston brownstone then in a structure they built on a hill in rural Maine.
That structure remains to this day. My mother kept a room in it for decades, until recently. A good twenty five percent of the expansive square footage of her quarters was dedicated to her personal archives memorializing the movements of her moment. When she decided to clear out the space I went to help her.
There were a few artefacts from the mainstream–Life Magazines with their effortlessly iconic covers and enormous bundles of New York Times newspapers, so much broader than what is printed today–but the vast majority of her papers were from young, local, independent publications. One, entitled FREE LIFE, from November 1970, has a bare front page. In the lower right-hand corner is inked a small fellow urges the reader to “Draw your own cover.” Next to him a human/dog thinks “Power to the Imagination.” There was “Monday, MIT’s Artspaper: a Thursday production,” which featured a man running on the front page, dick above the fold, accompanying a story about campus streaking.
The bushy dicks of engineering students aside, an enormous proportion of these papers were concerned with women’s rights, or as it was more often referred to in these publications, “Women’s Lib.” One entire page of a full-size newspaper contained a dozen cartoons depicting examples of what “women’s oppression is…” and what “women’s liberation is…” Women’s oppression, for example, is being helpless when things fall flat and being afraid to walk in the street alone at night. Women’s liberation, on the other hand, is knowing how to fix things yourself and knowing how to defend yourself. Women’s oppression is all-girl typing classes and all-boy shop classes. Women’s oppression is witnessing the learning process instead of participating in it. Women’s oppression is taking care of everything in the house yourself; women’s liberation is everyone pitching in, whether at home or in the classroom.
The second to last of these scenes jumped out at me. A man is on top of a woman in the backseat of a car. The only visible part of the woman is a worried thought bubble picturing her standing alone, pregnant. Its caption reads, “Women’s oppression is worrying about getting pregnant.” The accompanying scene to the right is captioned, “Women’s liberation is being able to take care of this beforehand.” In that sketch, a woman in pants sits in a female doctor’s office. On the wall is information about the pill, IUD, and diaphragm. She has options, and she’s sitting back, feet on the doctor’s desk and hands behind her head with a smile on her face. She’s liberated.
Of course it doesn’t take long, looking through these papers, for that picture to be complicated. At the top of an alphabetical list called “Good things phone numbers” is printed “Abortion Information …. (212) 245-0122,” below which was listed “Planned Parenthood 757-1955.” In another newspaper, under an article called “gettin’ stoned…THE BONG GAME” [sic], I spotted an ad: “PREGNANT? We can Help you obtain an ABORTION up to 14 Weeks. SAFE – LEGAL – CONFIDENTIAL – LOCAL FREE PREGNANCY TESTING $100. Total Cost. Call Collect For Price Information 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday-Saturday.” I spotted a clipping from the Boston Phoenix from 1973: “Childbirth: It’s Still Dominated by Males.” The front cover of a 1977 edition of the New Age Journal ran a headline called “birth without violence.”
Never before had it been clearer to me how in the two decades before I was born my mother and her peers were in deep conversation–amongst themselves and with the world–about their right to control their bodies, from conception through birth.
Conversation is maybe too genteel a word. They were in battle–the latest in a millennia old struggle to assert their fullest potential as women. The rights to own property, to vote, to an education have been secured; but til the right to choose when and how to become a mother, that potential remained perilous, insulting even.
//
More than a decade after slipping these clippings into a carton box in her old room at the hippie commune, my mother became pregnant with me. She was 38 and I was very much a planned pregancy and a wished for child. Though it hadn’t been her only pregnancy, I became her only child.
Pictures taken during her pregnancy show my mother’s beaming face amid tumbles of curls worthy of the pre-Raphaelites, a resplendent goddess of fertility if goddesses of fertility wore 1980s legwarmers. Pictures taken shortly thereafter show her equally radiant, holding me in her arms or pushing me in a carriage, joyfully tired. My grandmother, likewise, showered me with love, as she had before showered love on my mother and before that the little girl she’d had to leave behind. Motherhood, born out of love and joy, can be such a magnificent gift.
//
I have fewer paper archives than my mother. On one hand that makes my life nimbler, in so far as I have many fewer cartons of yellowing paper to schlep and store. But on the other hand, records and memories have a way of making themselves ephemeral, no matter the medium.
For example, for 12 years I worked somewhere I thought I’d work forever. But things you think you’re going to have forever have a way of ending. When I decided to leave my job last summer, I didn’t consider what an enormous number of electronic files and communications I was going to lose access to. I’m not talking about the institutional secrets or departmental records, those I was walking away from gleefully. But emails with my mother–casual banter with my mother in response to an article she’d emailed–and flyers to my kid’s 2nd birthday and free writing saved to my work computer’s desktop–within a couple hours of resigning, my access ended and my memories contracted.
I had said to my boss, when I left that job, that it was like breaking up with someone you’re still in love with, not because you don’t love them but because you need to move on by yourself. In that sense, I felt like I’d left behind boxes of virtual memories with hardly any time to sort through and save the important ones.
And so I found myself in multiple states of grief, for the job and its community and its rhythms and joys, and for the files left behind on someone else’s server, locking away my memories and projects and unfinished drafts. It was nowhere near as brutal as what my grandmother had to walk away from all those decades ago, but I grieved for the essay I wrote shortly after my first daughter was born, the essay I started and never quite finished after my grandmother died, and a handful of other pieces written on my work laptop and left there when I left there.
Nevertheless, life moved on.
What a surprise when, a few days ago, as I was searching for a file that my husband AirDropped to my phone, I found a folder in my iCloud of documents. My thumb tapped a place on my phone’s screen it had tapped a thousand times before, but this time I could see so much of what I’d thought I lost. The birth story was there, the death story, a personal statement for an MFA program application I never submitted but loved, a piece I wrote about sex education for a community-sourced Vagina Monologues like production, and document of poetry. I couldn’t believe I had these pieces once again.
Too often once something is lost it’s gone. Sometimes, however, you get a second chance.
Can I read you an excerpt of what I found? A page or so from the birth story? It is, just about, Mother’s Day, after all. When I found this piece Monday night I was so excited to share it with you for Mother’s Day, that is until an hour later when a news alert about the leaked U.S. Supreme Country draft decision to strike down Roe v. Wade foisted another narrative upon Mother’s Day, in so many ways. Maybe I’ll read the whole piece some other time when I feel more celebratory, but for now I’d like to share the middle section. The piece is called “Dear Aurelia” and the names I use in it are her names for the people in our family, Papa, Gramma, etc. Here goes:
Gramma came over and, seeing how far there was to go, wisely napped on the spare bed in your room. Kathleen came too, bringing a bag of tricks and good spirits. She, Papa, and I sat in our bedroom talking, laughing, swaying. The rooms pink walls had never felt warmer. Soon it would be time to go.
Then it was! Contractions were a minute on, four minutes off. Up Gramma got and we all piled into our cars: a caravan of Subarus traversing the darkness. It was midnight and raining, almost icy. My body protested at leaving the warmth of home and being plunged into the cold of the car, and I was a little sad driving away from our home with its rosy glow.
I felt every crack and hollow in the asphalt throughout my bones and muscles. I shivered and my teeth chattered. I huddled into the seat, willing new life for its defunct electric warmer. No sooner had the car warmed up than we were out of it, back in the rain, walking across the parking lot to the building carrying a small mountain of possessions. All the movement down you had made during the warmth of the previous hours was then surely reversed as my muscles tensed against the cold, drawing you closer, back into our shared warmth.
From here on out my memory becomes more fragmented, remembering certain moments so sharply, with others lost. The moment I refused a wheelchair—strong and capable of walking—and another moment when the whole group refused to let me climb the stairs, herding me into the elevator. Meeting the admission nurse, a woman of strong hands and brow. I asked her to break protocol and not to draw my blood; it speaks to the empowerment of labor that in the ensuing battle of wills I won over this veteran warrior. Then walking. I remember the hour of walking. Round and round the ward, past the same surreal paintings and quiet nurse’s station. Papa walked with me, then Gramma, then Kathleen. After that I was taken into a room, number 11, and immediately got in the bath. Another fragment: the purple popsicle, chilling my mouth while the warm waters heated and soothed the rest of my laboring body. And another: James putting on the faded blue Superman labor-support shirt given to us by my sister. And another: looking in the mirror as I climbed out of the bath and seeing myself in the mirror, composed and beautiful with clear skin, thick hair in a bun with lovely dark tendrils falling out, and simple diamond earrings framing my face.
Then transition. Purple tinged vomit, then clear, then dry, empty retching, again and again past the point when anything would come up. Over and over into blue plastic bags. I suppose my water broke at some point, I don’t really remember.
And then my being fell quiet. James began to sleep. The room around me withdrew.
—
My mind eased, floating submissively like a buoy on a slack line amid intensifying waves of widening stretches.
I had nothing to say to anybody in that room.
I went inside.
Did I visit you? Did we talk? Did I speak words of encouragement and love, tell you all I knew of the world and its wondrousness? Did I kiss your forehead and squeeze your hand? Did I weep, marking the end of the unity we’d known the last nine months?
In those quiet moments I think I did all those things.
And, when it was time, the spell lifted and I returned to myself. My lids eased open. I saw from the window dawn had pushed back the night and the day had begun, cold and stiff from its nocturnal respite. Papa woke, too, hardly refreshed but readied.
The midwife Angela examined me. Nine and a half centimeters, she declared. We could move into the water tub and begin pushing.
The piece actually doesn’t end there, because the birth didn’t end there. It got complicated.
I mean, it worked out. I lived, my baby lived.
But I labored for 12 more hours.
My body and my spirit did not break, but it came closer than I thought it could.
My baby’s head, it turned out, was tilted sideways, a look I see on the daily from that child when she is questioning any number of directions I give her. But in birth you need the baby to be looking straight down, chin to be tucked so the crown of the head pushes against the cervix.
And so as she gave the world that quizzical look I endured a third day of labor.
Fortunately, I live in a time and a place where we accept that my labor did not need to be the manifestation of Eve’s sin, the ultimate “she had it coming, she got what she deserved.”
An epidural brought me relief, the ability to sleep, for my muscles to relax just enough for my baby to straighten her head and tuck her chin. Eventually the epidural was removed and, reenergized, pumping my fist to Lady Gaga, I gave birth to my beautiful star child. A girl. A girl I carried, along with all her eggs, a generation within a generation within a generation.
What will the course of this girl’s life bring, I wondered, even in those first exhausted moments.
I wonder it still.
My daughter, on the brink of puberty, inhabits a body whose control she has less control of, as of last Monday night, than when she was first born. Her body, instead, may move through this world less like her mother’s body than her grandmother’s. Like her great grandmother, the State is positioning itself to deprive her, not of the right of motherhood but of the right of not-motherhood.
//
As I already said, I love the concept that mothers of daughters carry their own grandchildren.
No. Wait. I should be more precise with my language.
What I love is that the mothers of daughters carry the POTENTIAL for their own grandchildren.
But there is no right to grandchildren.
If my daughter never has children, her body and her being, her existence, is no better or worse. If our line ends with her, that is her right. Her right. Alone.
And I will fight for that right. For no one–not anyone’s mother, nor anyone’s doctor, nor anyone’s representative to a legislative body, state or federal–no one should deprive a body the right to determine whether her own body carries another body
For what we carry is not carried for 9 months alone. We carry these generations within generations within generations. We carry the expansion and opportunity of our grandparents’ dreams, and in turn we must preserve these opportunities and expand them further for the generations to come. Expansion and opportunity are not possible when motherhood contracts lives and limits opportunities. Children born by lack of access step into a different world than those welcomed amid an abundance of choice.
The old hippie papers got it right. Women’s lib NOW. Then now. Now now. Future now.
What’s more, those papers got it that women’s rights don’t exist in a vacuum, they are part of a larger social conversation about rights. We have moved on from the debate about the draft, but can men imagine if that were revisited and reinstated? And what of the debates that remain as entrenched now as in the 60s: the exploitation of immigrants, agricultural laborers, and the working poor; the slow walking of civil rights; the neglect of the environment in supplication to the polluters; the imprisonment and disenfranchisement of generations of black and brown people; the rising cost of living, not to mention education, housing, and health care.
In that alphabetical list of “Good Things phone numbers,” “Abortion Information” is listed just ahead of the ACLU. Below that are the phone numbers for the Draft information services, the FBI national office, the Pentagon, Planned Parenthood, Vietnam Veterans Against the Warm, a place called Walter’s Coffee House, and finally the Society for the Unexplained–don’t ask me to explain what that last one is, you’re going to have to call them at 210-496-4366 to find out. (While you’re at it, ask them why Susan Collins voted to appoint Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barret to the Supreme Court, would you? Maybe they know.)
//
Too often once something is lost it’s gone. Sometimes, however, you get a second chance. Is there opportunity to hope? Is the moral arc of the universe going to bend toward justice?
History suggests yes. History also suggests no.
But we women are in the business of fighting history as we create the future. So I’d say we have a pretty good chance.
But what a waste of fucking time that we’re still fighting this fight, that a page of cartoons about women’s oppression is as true now as it was 50 years ago. We’ve got other shit to do. But ok, if you want to have this fight again, we’ll have this fight again. We carry in us the fights of our grandmothers, and we carry in our daughters the fights of our granddaughters.
Let’s go.
