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| ISBN-13: | 9780819225351 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2001 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Motherhood in the Balance
Children, Career, Me, and God
By CATHERINE M. WALLACE
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 1999 Catherine M. WallaceAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2535-1
CHAPTER 1
Fiat Lux
APRIL, 1979
It was a leap all right: around the perimeter of that enormous bed, down the hall, past the footed tub with its patched-in shower head. Surely I had not touched down once. I sat shaking on the cold hexagon-tile floor, leaning back against the small radiator. I had, I had ... what? What had I done? I had rolled over. My breasts hurt so much that then I sat up again, recoiling in pain. And then this nausea.
Oh damn. A pattern. Gastritis again. It must be back. A couple of days before, we had gone out to eat at a familiar campus place; and after dinner I had felt the same sudden wave of nausea. Panicked, I ran to the street rather than try to wend my way back to the bathroom. But in the cold late-winter air, I was suddenly fine. Cigarette smoke, we had decided. But as the radiator softly clanged to life, I admitted that this nausea was getting chronic. Nothing tasted right. Everything left me slightly queasy.
Slowly, dimly, the pain in my breasts repeated its wordless question. I could hardly climb stairs without holding both my breath and my breasts. Who was I fooling? Pigheaded denial had always aroused that gastritis. I tried to feel for lumps, but it hurt too much. I closed my eyes against the nausea, thinking pH-corrected thoughts.
And I remembered our packing for a spring break vacation, just ten days before. I complained of mittelsmirch. Warren said nothing. But later he tossed aside the contraceptives I had set out.
"You're pregnant already," he laughed. I didn't. Yes, we were planning a child—but at some time in the far uncertain future. Me, pregnant now? Nonsense. I knew a metaphysical impossibility when I saw one. I packed the contraceptives, which we dutifully used.
The radiator clanged loudly: surely soon there would be heat. Me? Pregnant? Who? No. I'm a hotshot young professor with a heavy schedule: I don't have time for this. Furthermore, English professors are balding men in their fifties, with pipes and herringbone tweed jackets—and not, for God's sake, PREGNANT WOMEN. Oh, but in some dark, beleaguered corner of my soul, a hitherto-silent voice cheered wildly, a warm, inarticulate delight making a primitive, potent, sexual claim. A brilliant flower opened slowly and with exquisite grace, a time-lapse Georgia O'Keeffe. I sat flat on the cold floor, bewildered. Ah yes, I thought, Motherhood 101: queasy and conflicted at five A.M.
The radiator was warming at last, but now I was shaking too hard to lean back against it. I dragged myself and this growing panic into the living room. Warren covered me with a bathrobe and brought tea.
"Could I be pregnant?" I asked. His serious medical professor look dissolved. He beamed. He laughed—loudly. He reminded me of his earlier prediction, and he laughed again. I wondered whether I could heave my teacup at him without splashing myself, and if so whether there was more tea in the kitchen. Then I noticed that in fact I held a real tea cup with a saucer—should I fling the saucer, Frisbee style?—from Warren, who so emphatically preferred mugs to cups and saucers. An old argument between us, long settled: server's choice. What? Just in time, he sobered; and we sat there staring at me. Slowly, I warmed up.
I'm Not Pregnant: I'm Crazy
I wasn't even late yet. Surely this was all a mistake. On the way in to campus, I bought a jug of antacid, the brand recently taste-tested in the New England Journal of Medicine. Gastritis, no doubt about it. What about the full professor of gynecology who had so solemnly, so gently told me that my test results were "incompatible with fertility"? What about that, huh? Huh? Treatable, he had said—but don't wait until you are 35 before you start. I zipped the jug into my briefcase and strode on, resolving to buy myself a herringbone tweed jacket.
I walked into my first spring quarter class and thought, "These were each someone's baby." My eyes filled with tears. Shock and outrage brimmed in me as well: tears withered, blood drained from my face. But then I blushed and fumbled and couldn't find my voice or my notes. I should have been able to do that introductory presentation in my sleep. But I was, heaven help me, not asleep. This was not just a first-day nightmare. No, this was certainly real. Twenty-five ex-babies were sitting in a circle staring at me.
I handed out the syllabus, read their names off a list, and let them go. I crept queasily back to my office, determined more than ever to get control of myself. I drank some Mylanta (regular mint). I drank some tea (Keemun). If thinking I might be pregnant did this to me, what would the real thing be like? Or is this the real thing, and if so what does that portend? And I drank some more tea, and I realized that if I were not pregnant then I would mourn this phantom child who had driven me crazy for days. I sat in a huddle, terrified of being pregnant and equally terrified that I might not be. I drank some more Mylanta, straight from the jug.
My abdomen soon felt leaden, and I was sure I would menstruate momentarily. And a week passed, and another week passed, and this insanity continued. Warren began calling every few hours to know if anything had "happened." I stared unabashedly at every pregnant woman I saw, and the world was suddenly full of them. What about childbirth? I remembered each of the awful stories I had heard at cousins' wedding showers, then fought the urge to run screaming down the street—and then panicked all the more profoundly. I don't have urges like that. I'm a rational, scholarly sort, an intelligent woman who makes well-planned decisions and copes adeptly with contingencies and complications. I know how to lead my life. Furthermore, for eighteen months we have been planning a family—or at least planning to start trying, prior to the expected infertility work-up. What then is going on here?
If this is not pregnancy, I worried, it is probably a nervous breakdown. Every sad story brought tears. I could not open the newspaper without finding some morbid account of maimed, abused, or dying children. Strangers on the train unnerved me with gruesome tales. One description of the lability of pregnancy neatly matched everything I knew about schizophrenia: women, kids, and crazies, beyond a doubt. Sudden, "inappropriate" responses were nearly unstoppable, as if my professional demeanor had evaporated. Obsessive thinking— "Am I pregnant? Am I? Am I?"—interfered with concentration. No line of thought could be pursued: they all got away, sometimes mid-sentence; colleagues stared.
"But of course it is not really this bad," I told myself. "It just feels this bad because mature judgment and a broad perspective are impossible."
"Or maybe it is this bad," I countered, "and I just don't see it." Having been professionally trained in the philosophic pursuit of my tail, I could keep this up for days. And I did.
In comparison with all this, the classic nausea was far less disconcerting—although as the days inched past, my stomach problems rapidly developed from chronic to acute. Or maybe, I worried, worrying about being pregnant was in fact giving me the ulcer I had flirted with all these years. My mother had always teased me that with a stomach like mine, I'd never know when I was pregnant. One morning that spring I lay in bed, tears running down my face as I listened to Warren get the crackers I needed to eat before I dare lift my head. Our eyes met as he handed them to me; he startled lightly.
"Your crackers," he said, his inflection proposing an apostrophe if I were willing to admit the possibility of a verb on the semantic horizon. I laughed so hard I choked on the silly things, spewing crumbs all over the bedsheets. He looked down at me in mildmannered professorial surprise at my misreading of his wholly innocent comment.
"Well, that's what you get," he said, "sleeping with crumbs ..."
I nailed him with a pillow. And then I got up and got sick.
Reading Lists
At one point during the endless days of wondering if I were pregnant, Warren looked up an exotic, early, expensive pregnancy test. If we really had to know, we could. But we decided that we would be embarrassed to ask one of his colleagues to run it for us. It would look anxious. And if we were not pregnant, then someone would know about our anxiety. But as The Date moved further and further into the past, the truth became plain enough. All the signs and symptoms checked out. It became important to be certain on our own, to be certain as people had been certain for centuries before us. Lab results are convenient affirmation. But one also has a body, which is in its own way quite articulate. I felt passionately, stubbornly committed to believing my body, to making up my own mind that I was pregnant before submitting to some test.
But finally came the day when I could submit a morning urine sample, get a blood test, and thereby get myself established with an obstetrician. Unfortunately, we had had asparagus with dinner the night before. The urine smelled awful. I almost spilled the precious stuff when I leapt off the toilet to vomit. Warren, who was showering at the time, struggled but failed to contain his amusement. I clutched the rim of the toilet and imagined headlines about the police finding him naked in a pool of his own blood. Crimes of passion. Dementia of pregnancy. I flushed and made some tea and accepted his humble and guilty apology with no grace whatsoever. If I am truly pregnant, I thought, it will be a long nine months.
I delivered the holy stuff to the HMO clinic, then headed—still fasting—across the street to the local public library. Since I was certain I was pregnant, since this lab test was just a formality, I should of course begin where one always begins: a bibliography. But there were no stools by the card catalogue, no chairs in sight anywhere: I muttered to myself about community libraries and exerted all my scholarly self-discipline to fight off the dizzy nausea. I climbed the stairs to the appropriate ranges, then sat on the floor trying to force the wrought-iron railings to stand still. I was not about to faint in the public library! But the only way to combat such lightheadedness is to lie flat—and I was not about to do that either.
Once the railings stopped shimmering, I went to look for the books. But they were all gone. Other people wanted them. What a thought! I could not imagine who. Emboldened by this news, I walked over to the local franchise bookstore, where the manager offered me a chair and a glass of water. I really should have stopped for breakfast, but eating felt out of the question. What I needed most was a reading list.
But here I might be seen. What if—I selected a few likely titles, then edged quickly down the aisle to stand by some safer category than "Pregnancy and Child Care." I kept the yet-unexamined selections spine-down, face-in under my arm. How would I get through the checkout? Oh, no! I hadn't thought of that! I scanned the racks and grabbed the first safe title I saw, a safe title beneath which to hide my choices for the exposed moment when they would sit on the countertop. It was the Dover edition of Blake's Songs of Innocence, shelved under "The Occult." What would Professor Wright say! I laughed, and in one bright labile flash Wright's whole seminar appeared in consciousness.
Fortified by the memory, I stood for a moment in the aisle remembering a seminar paper I had abandoned. In Blake's The Book of Thel, a young virgin laments the transience of her life. Various naturally transient elements—a cloud, a clump of clay in the road, a flower—respond to her lament. They urge that her life will achieve meaning only if she gives of herself to others. In the end, she flees. Critical consensus condemned her for fleeing, for refusing the self-sacrifice inherent in mature feminine sexuality.
But one of the supposed models of mature womanhood is a lily of the valley, who willingly allows the innocent lamb to crop its fragrant flowers. Except, of course, that lily of the valley contains potent amounts of digitalis. Such an altruistic, self-sacrificing flower would poison the heart of any lamb who accepted its gift. I wanted to write a paper arguing that Thel rejects not mature feminine sexuality but rather various images of self-destruction and self-denial. Unfortunately, Blake was as ideologically misogynist as most men of his day. But there was no question that he denounced self-destruction parading as morality and maturity. Furthermore, Blake elsewhere describes the effects of such behavior as "poisonous."
I spent weeks on the phone and in the library, seeking good evidence that Blake believed that lilies of the valley are poisonous to sheep. The relatively easy first step in such an inquiry is to verify that they are poisonous to sheep. Is the digitalis bio-available? Or is it broken down by sheep digestion? Sheep have been domesticated for millennia: somebody, somewhere, would know if you could kill your whole flock by letting them graze on Convallaria majalis. And facts that somebody knows and others need to know eventually show up in print. But where? There would be no point in tracking down the details of Blake's knowledge of sheep, after all, if in fact the critters can eat all the lilies they want without harm.
What this means, of course, is that I had to ask, over and over again, whether lilies of the valley are poisonous to sheep. Such questions are hard on one's professional self-image at such a tender age. Even my friends among the reference librarians laughed at me: the Rackham Graduate Library at The University of Michigan is not noted for its holdings in animal husbandry. That sort of stuff belongs over in East Lansing, at Michigan State. When they were done laughing, they wanted to know why I wanted to know. The more I tried summarizing Blake's symbolism, the more I tried repeating my argument, the less comfortable I felt. I bogged down altogether one dreadful afternoon, trying to summarize the poem to the switchboard operator at the University of Illinois School of Veterinary Medicine.
"Is there a veterinary medical library?" I asked. "Or a reference desk where collections include animal husbandry?" She connected me to a phone line into the sheep barns, where a gruff annoyed voice insisted that any fool knew that the flowers were poisonous. I asked for the title of a reference book to which I could refer—or the name of a library?—one cannot footnote to a voice on the phone, after all—and the man hung up on me.
All I had were crumbs. A headnote in a pharmacology book explained that lilies of the valley contain enough digitalis to rank among effective herbalist remedies for congestive heart failure, and to have been recognized as a potentially poisonous heart tonic since antiquity. A reference text in the history of gardening lamented that wild lilies of the valley have been eradicated from cultivated areas of Europe for centuries—but never said why. Various Blake scholars noted that Blake knew herbalist lore well, but without documenting their claim: how was I to find Blake's sources and check them for lilies of the valley? And even if he knew about lilies of the valley and digitalis, did he know about sheep? I could not find the gold-standard proof I wanted before facing the hostile scorn and ritual combat of seminar presentations—especially since I was taking on a well-established critical consensus, and from a feminist viewpoint no less. And I was running out of time. After the guy in the sheep barn hung up on me, I found myself unwilling to pursue the matter further. This whole business of poisonous self-sacrifice was too complicated.
Rousing myself from memories of Thel, I got through the checkout line without incident. I was only mildly embarrassed by the fact that I already had two illuminated versions of Blake's Songs of Innocence, and three more copies that were text-only. I didn't need this book. Maybe it could be a Christmas present for someone? I stashed the pregnancy books deep in my briefcase and treated myself to a ride home on the train—flipping idly through this new copy of Blake.
It was as if I had never read these poems before. His Songs of Experience played their extraordinary counterpoint in my head as the train swayed along. Never had I felt so keenly the truth of Blake's impassioned arguments about childhood, about psychological development, about denied passions, about a warped society transmitting the lethal disorders that arise from its own repressions. I wondered, with a heart-sickening thud, if now every literary work would be different, if now I would have to reread everything.
In comparison to Blake, the prosaic pregnancy books I had so furtively selected were unredeemable trash. I had learned as much biology and physiology in fifth-grade sex-ed. "The pregnant woman" was portrayed throughout as fat, whiny, self-indulgent, and irrationally, stupidly anxious. She was a needy, insecure "other" whose petty needs the authors condescended to meet only so that she would be better motivated to obey them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Motherhood in the Balance by CATHERINE M. WALLACE. Copyright © 1999 Catherine M. Wallace. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
Prologue: As Angels Dance
1 Fiat Lux: April, 1979
2 Is There Life after Birth?
3 Bonbons and Soap Operas
4 A Rainbow in the Sky
5 Across the Waters
6 A Big Blue Frog
Epilogue: Another Leap
Notes