Baby

Last weekend camping Martha and I woke up to ashes. I coughed from the smoke and chronic vaping, the whole sky smudgy and grey. I spent the afternoon in the great outdoors by the river on a bed of rock and blankets like marigold, turning over like hot dogs in a greasy gas station rotator. We watched the water shimmer gold with brittle flecks edged in black like chipping nail polish. Winking yellow, the sun was high and I was feeling good.

We went into town for drinks, and I put on a mask that reeked of cigarettes and line danced to Brooks & Dunn. I woke up wet the final morning, dripping with sweat, to the Park Ranger tapping on the tent. We had to evacuate for the incoming fire, so I drove pedal to floor on my way to get laid before the man I’m seeing left town again. 

An artist in another desert covered my hip with a jackalope, and I shrank from the needle—overwhelmed with the feeling I could choose my future. Choose a new, brighter beginning, one without unnecessary torture. When the same artist visited LA, I parked in front of a converted K-Town health shop and signed some papers. They laid me down on a massage table, and I turned my face away from the familiar pricking, controlled pain at the hands of a stranger, holding my arm down gently. The longest physical closeness I had experienced in months. 

I needed to deal. I hated the body I held but loved the one they took, blessed with newness, physical change, total regeneration. Such transformation for women is at its peak in childbearing, the ultimate newness. 

I talk about children with my female friends. They tell me I will be a good mother. After all, my mother was the best of them. Without her, there would be no well of resiliency or self-worth, an inexhaustible silver lining, returning, again and again, new and bright and beautiful. Whatever lies I tell myself, I never fully believed I was incapable of loving. I owe this to her. But sometimes, I wonder if I have sucked out something essential to her livelihood in loving me so deeply. In loving my father and me, she disappeared. Is invisibility a tenet of good motherhood? It’s undoubtedly purported to be. 

When I think of mothering a child, I can never imagine the actual bearing of one—a nearly year-long invasion both wholly alien and familiar. Holding a creation of the self and the other just below the stomach, I don’t know if I could keep the weight of something else so acutely for a whole nine months.

Bearing a child is expansion almost to infinity but not quite. And then the child leaves, and it grows, continues to expand upward and outward, you are left diminished, wholly altered by the experience. They breathe and scream and kick, the literal tie now severed. No longer an extension of you, they are not precisely yours, but they are your responsibility. 

Even with every workout trick in the book and tummy tucks from expensive doctors, the trauma reverberates. It’s a beautiful thing to gift life, but it’s not without immense hardship. Such constant gift-giving must take a toll. Maggie Nelson calls it “falling to pieces,” your physical body still recovering from an excruciating separation, as we ask you to go back to normal. To shrink, but not drip; become soft, small, invisible again. 

Pregnancy is one of the only times when a woman taking up space is a miracle to the culture. So when a mother’s holding becomes less literal, we ask them to disappear again, obliterated in the shadow of new life—an heir apparent has arrived. Whatever a mother can be, she must be a mother first. And maybe this is true. 

Without this hierarchy, does a child fall apart? My mother quit her job, so should I? 

Beyond whatever else a woman must be, she must remain the primary protector of her child. Not that mothers can’t do terrible things to their children; they do, and often, but we are much more comfortable with absent or abusive fathers because we have raised them to be such. But a mother must be protector, feeder, lifter of trucks all in one; we write her like an animal, so primal in her love, it supersedes all else. But what if it doesn’t? 

I am privileged enough to afford child care and friends who would be fiercely supportive, but even with these burdens significantly lightened, I still fear being unwilling to let myself go entirely for the care of another. In falling to pieces, is there still room enough for me? Is there any room at all to love something completely without relative abandonment of the self? I don’t think so.

When I consider which sins I might impart on a child, I hope to contain them to that of the world and not myself. I fear the threat within and not without. Can I protect them from my sadness? My outbursts, trauma? Holding them demands withholding my worst parts. Can I make it work? Could I be better? Happier?

Bringing any child into the world could be read as massively irresponsible: the planet is seven years from bursting into flames, and the economy has gone to shit. I think of babies born last year, thrust into a world of disease and major upheaval, and I wonder if it’s too late for personal happiness. When my outlook is already so cynical of America’s future, babies seem uncharacteristically optimistic. 

But when I see women carrying children on their chests through the grocery store, I am willing to believe that new life, when brought forth willingly with good intent, is hardly ever a bad idea. A glittering personal future separate from the hellish one I expect for the country at large. And I catch myself in that selfishness; because I will always be okay.

My resiliency and privilege, both rooted in my whiteness and comparative financial freedom, allows me to remain above the shitstorm. I will nearly always have options. I might be from Texas and have a uterus, but the heartbeat laws do not touch me. And they were not meant to. Whatever gift a child might be to some, it is an unconscionable burden to others. My qualms with motherhood pertain entirely to me. The basics for a stable, functional life are entirely the parents’ burden and what they are “willing” to give. As if such things were easily obtained.

And so when we talk about the right to choose and the gift of bearing a child and falling to pieces for love of an unknown thing, I think it is a gift perhaps greater to remove such a burden.