Baby girls and men
On up until I was about thirty, I had a strong preference for men over women. I mean specifically as friends, as people to talk to. If a male and a female exactly alike were to enter a room, in my deformed perceptions the male was magnified into glory. It wasn’t until this primitive preference began to expire, for whatever reasons, that it began to bother me that it had previously existed. I didn’t blame my mother for this trait, but I did feel that I had inherited it from her. Despite my having a mother who is extremely intelligent and capable and giving, I still grew up with a sense that it was always nicest to be around men, and I decided that maybe this dated back to my mother’s father having died before she was born, and her mother then being alone, with two young girls, in the household of her in-laws, and there being no male taking his place, ever, and so this atmosphere of any room being short a male seemed to have been passed on to me, and then, when my father similarly was suddenly gone, this atmosphere thickened… until it lifted. Or at least lifted for me. Did it ever lift for my mother? When I saw how fully she fell in love with the puma, I felt that the both of us had fallen in love with a girl in some healthy, unprecedented way. My mother recently sent me a text that read: “I love the channels between 210–223. Amazing information/world views. They just said that Chelsea’s husband runs a hedge fund that lost 40 percent since he bet the wrong way on the Euro crisis, then they went on to bad-mouth him — you create a job for him and pour money into it since Chelsea was unable to get any better husband for herself.” Was this my old mother (and self)? Shortly thereafter my mother followed up this text with: “Doubt it is true about not getting a husband, she looks pretty good on TV. I think it was a malicious angry comment of the commentator.”
A friend who is not a close friend
A friend who is not a close friend was trying to get pregnant, via in vitro fertilization, on her own. She had health issues that led doctors to tell her that her chances were low. I didn’t know whether to ask or not ask how it was going. I didn’t ask. Then she informed me and others, via e-mail, that she was six weeks pregnant, happily. I’m not very good with time, with noting where I am in it, or how much of it has passed, but time proceeded and I began to accumulate anxiety about still not having heard of a birth. I woke from a dream one night, a straightforward dream, in which I learned that she had lost the baby. I felt sure I had had a vision. But in real life she hadn’t lost the baby. Three days later I received an e-mail announcing that the baby had been born. The announcement came on the same day as one of the more important rulings in favor of gay marriage.
This friend was not the only woman I knew who had decided to have a baby on her own. Within the span of a single year, five women I knew had deliberately had babies on their own, without a partner, or in one case, with a partner who was a friend who wanted to be involved, though there was no romantic connection. Prior to these five women I had known only one woman who had had a baby on her own, deliberately. This was an older cousin of mine, and for her it had been such a remarkable decision that no one had thought it appropriate to remark upon it, and one of the only reasons the awkwardness around her had gone away was because at nearly eight months the baby had died inside the womb, and then, though she was over forty, she became pregnant again, and the second time around, the baby was carried to term, and the then radicalness of her decision paled against joy and relief. Now it seems there are many more varieties of “normal” family.
I never
I never especially cared for babies. When I heard about babies dying there was a part of myself that thought, At least it’s not a child! A child is someone that people know and who knows other people; was the loss of a baby really so different from the loss of a potential baby that happened every month? Once, at an elementary-school-age summer camp, they took us young campers to do rubbings of gravestones. My friend took several rubbings of the gravestones of babies, with the birth and death dates sometimes in the same month. Then she had written sad, short Blakean poems about the babies. After that, I thought that she was an odd girl, and melodramatic. I don’t feel that way now.
A Doll’s House
I once saw a production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in which all the characters except for Nora were played by small people, by a midget, a dwarf, a person with Williams syndrome… This made stark the power that the childlike Nora, the wife and mother, really did have. I can still hear the enormous woman asking her very small and angry husband for some chocolates.
However I have only heard of and seen one performance of A Doll’s House in which, at a certain moment, the audience literally gasped — and it was not at this version but at a straightforward performance. The gasp came when, in the second act, a real live baby was brought onto the stage. I don’t think even a live bear would have elicited as much of a reaction; I once saw a magic show in a theater and at the end of the show a live elephant showed up on stage, and I can report that the reaction to the elephant was considerably less than the reaction to the baby. Why was the baby on stage such a force? Because it might cry? Maybe it was the simple thrill of cameo: a baby seems indisputably from everyday life, and everyday life, though depicted on stage, also feels conspicuously absent from it. The actors other than the baby, if the baby can be termed an actor simply by context, seemed suddenly neon in their falseness, which in turn made them seem real, as if visible backstage, brushing their teeth, watching Mad Men on a laptop. In the original Ibsen script, there is no baby, there are just young children.
People who get along well with babies
Four women are having dinner together. One begins to tell of how well her mother gets along with her baby, her grandson. The woman’s mother, the grandmother, prepares Hungarian food for the baby, she prepares him chicken with walnuts and pomegranate in rice which is then stuffed into a pepper — he loves it. The mother’s mother also has things to say to the baby all day long, she is in a constant conversation with him, she doesn’t run out of spirit to talk to him, and he loves it, and, because she talks to him so much, and cares for him so much, she is also the best at getting him to laugh; he loves her; she loves him. “I even believe,” the friend says, “that when me and my sister were babies, she was also this good.” Another mother at the table (who is, naturally, also a daughter) has her mother living with her right now, for a few months, as she helps take care of her granddaughter, now a young girl, no longer a baby. The grandmother is good with the young girl, very good, but maybe she was even better with her when she was a baby. When she was a baby, she was amazing with her, and she was a difficult baby, a colicky baby. This grandmother is wonderful with babies, and with the very elderly, she is wonderful with the extremely vulnerable, it is observed, she cheerfully anticipates their needs, even as, with the not very vulnerable, she can be, actually, quite difficult. I then shared a story, about my own grandmother, a woman who is not noted for her sunny disposition, not at all, but who also, like these other noted women, is really wonderful with babies; she raised her grandchildren, and even helped raise her great-grandchildren, when they were tiny. Even now, her great-grandson, a toddler — his favorite activity is to bring his great-grandmother her cane. My mother also takes babies very seriously, loves them, and when I return home after having left the baby with her, I never find them separated, either the baby is asleep on my mother’s chest, or she is sitting right next to her on the sofa, gesturing. And so on.