27. Elysian
A new baby, minutes old, pushes herself up on tiny arms, moving her head from side to side, seeking, seeking. It is an animal movement, something we didn’t know we had inside us, something there from the beginning. And on cue my body’s animal response comes forth, spoken in the language of prolactin and oxytocin, in the language of skin, of scent, of sweet milk, of love.
Something long submerged is arising, coming into the light.
A sweetness is rising in my bones, wafting out into the air, pulling me on.
And now a silent dialectic begins, a conversation between my conscious mind and this new language my body is speaking.
Eva’s heartbeat merging with mine had changed the equation; and now the old arithmetic is failing to add up, the numbers are spilling out everywhere, everywhere, landing in splatters and puddles on the floor. The syllogisms that undergird my life begin to come apart. The axioms that had seemed so simple, so self-evident, so mathematical, begin to move and swim before my eyes.
My body begins to dissassemble the world I thought I knew.
Something new is assembling itself.
When too many things intrude, too many phone calls, too many conflicting demands, it all scatters like a school of fish when you throw rocks in the water. Then Janie cries, and I find myself, like many parents, in a state of agitation. So like other parents I bounce her, I joggle her, I try the football hold, the upright over-the-shoulder hold, I frantically pat her back. I try one technique after another, the tension in my body rising and passing into her body, winding her tighter, making her cry harder. I don’t even notice as my seven souls flee my body, my calm center vanishing with them, leaving behind only my restlessness, my emptiness, my fear. But Janie notices. She tries to tell me, in a language I don’t yet understand.
Modern Science and Western Civilization teach us to try one technique after another, without ever mentioning that no technique will work if there is no soul in your body. They teach us that babies are little egoists, evolved to manipulate their parents, and that to be a good parent is to resist this manipulation, to ignore the agitation, to grit your teeth and grimly do to the baby what Modern Science (and Western Civilization) instruct you to do. They teach us to train our babies like dogs, to ignore them when they cry, to “reward” them with love when they stop seeking love, when they despair and grow silent.
My animal body tells me this is fucking bullshit. It tells me to go to my baby, to hold her, to comfort her, to feed her when she’s hungry. It tells me that the agitation I feel is a voice I should listen to, the voice I heard when Eva was in her isolette, silent, still, unweeping, her vital functions disintegrating before my eyes on the monitor.
While my animal body and my civilized brain are engaged in this dispute, my trauma-bent body steps in with suggestions of her own. My trauma body, hollowed out in infancy by an empty room, by silent hours alone in a crib like a cage, tells me to shut down, fold up, space out. It tells my seven souls to get the hell out of there, to leave the body behind and wander off to the safer realms of intellect and daydream.
The parts of me branded by my father’s rage have a darker message. They tell me to control, to subjugate, to subdue.
Trust your instincts, people say. But which instincts? Which overpowering urge? Which fear, which desire?
But then I felt it. The light of the sun began to flow through my body to my child. My mind turned to blue sky filled with light. And as the sky filled with light, I felt my baby’s body soften, grow heavier, felt it melting into sleep. And then slowly, one by one, my seven souls began returning, circling, like errant birds, alighting, and then slowly, slowly, nestling in to stay.
Janie, I’m so sorry for the struggles I put you through.
There was so much I didn’t know. And so much I did know that was absurdly, outrageously wrong, all the gaslight bullshit bred into me for a thousand generations. You and I had to try to disassemble it together, piece by piece by piece, this massive neverending mountain of bullshit. Of course it wasn’t really fair to ask a newborn baby to dismantle Western Civilization, but there it was. There was nothing to do but begin.
Slowly, too slowly, I began to understand that when I obeyed Modern Science the agitation was unbearable. When I listened to my body, to Janie’s body (for the two were always in agreement) things became simple. I slept better than I had ever slept before. We nestled together at night, until Janie made the smallest sound, the smallest movement, and with another small movement I was nursing her and within seconds we were both back asleep.
Later I read a study that showed that mothers’ and babies’ sleep cycles synchronize when they sleep close together at night. Like swimmers they rise together through light sleep into consciousness, then dive together into deep sleep and dreams. It was a nice study, the best kind of small-s science, attentive and illuminating, with lots of interesting data points, but the truth is my body already knew everything it said. Women all over the world already knew everything it said, they had already written that article, a thousand years ago, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, in a language Modern Science doesn’t understand.
Only here in the disconnected nations have we forgotton.
Women in the disconnected nations suffer from this forgetting, intensely. Sometimes I listened to them talking about their babies, complaining bitterly about the night waking, the diapers, the exhaustion. I listened to them go on and on about the hours spent trying to calm the anguished crying, pacing the floor, rocking in a chair, trying and failing and trying again to train the baby to comply with their regimes. And of course part of me just thought fuck your regimes. Fuck them to fucking hell.
And another part of me thought:
Do you know what an unimaginable stroke of luck it is, to have a baby who wakes up? Who opens her eyes? Who cries out for you in the night?
But of course another part of me understood those women, understood their agitation, their confusion, their seven souls scattered like frightened birds. Like my poor mother, like poor Mei Zhiang, like poor me pacing between the isolettes, our powers lost, exhausted, fled.
And so the dialectic spread outward through our days. Everything I thought I knew was suddenly unknown. The practicalities of life unraveled at the most basic level. How did any of this fit with the life I had planned?
I began to realize that all my carefully laid plans for motherhood — the crib, the daycare, the baby monitor, the babysitters, the breast pump — were a human version of fenceline weaning, a series of economic decisions that meant that mother and child would be fenced apart, and that yes, there would be anguished bellowing, and yes, there would be a breach, a wrench, a sundering.
And how was this decided? And who was the decider? For dairy cattle, they say, there is a 20% loss of saleable product if mother and calf stay happily together. What would be my reduction in saleable product if I didn’t leave Janie in the care of strangers, if I didn’t leave her to “cry it out?” Was it impossible to teach poetry with a child in your arms, with children playing happily nearby? It didn’t feel impossible. It felt like a choice.
It didn’t feel like my choice.
Small-s scientists say that the mother-child bond is the evolutionary root of all human compassion; it lies at the heart of all things. Small-s science confirms that we are not actually separate, individual organisms: like unlicked rats, we need each other to co-regulate our breathing, our blood pressure, our immune systems, our hormones, our hearts. Connection to this love is the source of all calm, all contentment, all peace. You see it in the faces of babies from Guatemala to Ladakh, riding on their mothers’ backs as they go about their business unhindered. You hear it from mothers from Guatemala to Ladakh, who learn about babies left alone in cribs like cages and say it sounds like child abuse.
To a political economy based on exploitation, the mother-child bond is a nuisance, an obstacle; it must be pushed to the margins. To a culture rooted in life, it is the center of all things. A baby would never be placed in a box in a room by herself, and a mother would never be placed in a box, an apartment or house, alone with her weeping children. Both baby and mother are embedded at the center of life, surrounded by other hands, other arms, other hearts always there to help and support them.
Because motherlove has escaped its evolutionary bounds, like a mother cat who nurses a litter of orphaned puppies or skunks, it has gone beyond kin, beyond species; it fills the sky. For our species, other parents are as necessary as the biological parents. Every woman is mother or auntie; every man is father or uncle; every child is sibling or cousin. A baby is not a tiny jailer of a trapped woman as I was for my mother, but a little companion, a fellow traveller who barely slows you down.
She barely slows you down, but in a culture rooted in life, slowness is not such a problem. Slowness does not waste your powers, as it did for my mother, but gathers them in, roots them in the life of all things, things that grow slowly, that unfold in their time, that blossom and fruit in their season. Matters of grave importance, of life and death, war and peace, are deliberated in slowness, by a woman with a child in her arms, by mothers and grandmothers and aunties, always considering what is good for the children and the grandchildren of all living beings for generations to come.
Once you slow down, once you grow rooted in the body, once your feel your heart synchronize with other hearts, once your mind turns to blue sky filled with light, suddenly you find yourself living in another nation.
There are many points of entry. Our bodies signal their objection to Western Civilization, to its large and small injustices, imbalances, abandonments and violations, in a thousand large and small ways, from a slight elevation in heart rate to the so-called “silent killers” of the dispossessed: diabetes, hypertension, maternal-infant mortality, despair. The sense of agitation, of wrongness, comes up in institutions, in schools, in hospitals, in job interviews and insurance forms, in traffic jams and dirty rivers, in the wail of sirens and the roar of military helicopters flying in formation from the nearest base. But it may also crop up in unexpected places. A tree crew pruning a massive sycamore chainsaws through a 6-inch branch and leaves an amputated stub. The fractal form of the tree, branching and spreading in a web of undulating lines like a river delta, like a mountain range, like the web of arteries in a placenta, like the web of neurons in a brain, is suddenly severed, blocked, cut off. You may feel this in your body, feel the sundering, the breach.
This can create awkward situations as you try to navigate your days. This world is built of layer upon layer upon layer of wrongness. It permeates everything, everything.
My people are out of their minds.
The earth is overthrown.
At work I tried a series of improvisations, reducing my classload and picking up more hours in the tutoring center. Without asking permission, I began to bring Janie into the tutoring center. She was calm and content in her baby sling or playing on a blanket on the floor, and most of the students didn’t mind; it seemed to lighten the mood, to put things in perspective. A sweet young freshman, a first generation college student who had helped raise her four little brothers and sisters, shyly asked if she could hold Janie, who took to her immediately. We started to talk about how babies were cared for in her family, her culture, and she grew so engaged she decided to research and write her essay on child-rearing methods in different cultures, then pursued the topic further in psychology and early childhood development classes. After two years she transferred to UCLA, then Berkeley, and now has a PhD in the sociology of child development and two children of her own.
But while some of these improvisations worked out well, others led to dead end or disaster. As Janie grew, we talked about trying to make a little play area for her on our steep lot. If we flattened out this one spot a bit, we could just fit a swingset and a small garden. It seemed like a good idea. We wanted a little yard for her to play in, we didn’t want to move down off the mountain. But a wave of foreboding washed over me.
A sinking feeling, an uncentering.
I brushed the feeling aside. We hired a contractor to grade a space for the swingset. They came with chainsaws and bulldozer, graded a small shelf in the side of the mountain. The bulldozer cut into the earth, cut with its metal teeth, ripped out the roots of ceanothus, ripped the roots of deerweed and sage, crushed the nests of rabbits, of birds, cut the face of the mountain. Like idiots, we planted grass, we planted lavender and roses. The rabbits ate the lavender. The deer ate the roses. Owls shat on the swingset, coughed up pellets of fur and bones on the grass. Coyotes posted their scat, reddish with seeds and berries, crumbling with fur and bones.
Ours, they said.
Not yours, they said.
Ours, they said.
You’re the kind of person who will always get caught.