The Mother/Child Papers: With a new preface by the author

preface

‹ix› Some things change, some things do not change, some things appear to disappear, and then return. Women have been giving birth to babies for hundreds of thousands of years. It is likely that war has existed as long as people have existed. We human beings are a loving and violent species. The immediate trigger for The Mother/Child Papers was a cluster of events in 1970, when we were still in the quicksand of the Vietnam War: the invasion and bombing of Vietnam’s neighboring nation, Cambodia, announced by then-president Richard M. Nixon on April 30; the futile mass protests following this announcement; the killing of four students at Kent State University by National Guardsmen on May 4; the birth of my son Gabriel at Pasadena General Hospital on May 14, following an epidural anesthetic administered against my wishes, which numbed me from the waist down, preventing me from having the natural childbirth I had planned. The military invasion of a country parallels the medical invasion of a woman’s body. Technology provides the opportunity. Expert professionals give the orders. As for motivation: the need to control, to dominate, to conquer, while claiming that your invasion is for the benefit of the invaded , is as old as history. The personal is the political. That slogan wasn’t born yet, but the manifest parallel between military and medical invasions was impossible for me to ignore. I found also that I had to think, since I already had preface ‹x› two daughters but this was my first (and would be my last) son, about the meaning of having a boy child in wartime, and I had to realize that wartime is all of human history. Adrienne Rich in her book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, tells of a Frenchwoman remarking to her, when her son was born, “Madame, vous travaillez pour l’armée.” “Lady, you’re working for the army.” I feared, despairingly, that my newborn son was destined by history to be among the killed or the killers. What was I going to do about that, I who believed in love and tenderness? Experience and experiment share a Latin root: ex-periri, to find out. The Mother/Child Papers became an experimental work-in-progress, dealing with time. “Cambodia” as a prose poem links the global to the intimate at a specific moment. The second section of the book pursues psychic time as it unrolls, as the mind/body of a new mother and the mind/body of a newborn infant gradually pull apart from each other. How would one create a music, a form or set of forms, adequate to the miracle and the anguish of this unfolding of selves? The book’s third section evolved over a period of ten years, gathering scraps and fragments of a family’s existence in calendar time. It seemed, and continues to seem, important to deal with the huge mix of emotions a mother feels toward her children and herself as she and they emerge from the primordial soup. Instead of the sanitized stereotypes, there was all that ecstasy and agony, pride and shame, fear, guilt, joy, resentment, violence, exhaustion, awe, illumination, sweetness. Daily life, ephemeral as snow, permanent as rock. It seemed essential to find language for what Blake called “the minute particulars.” To acknowledge the eroticism of maternal love was important . Equally important was recognizing the anger and cruelty lurking within oneself, brushing up against the love. Was I opposed to war? Did I think only other people did harm in the world, never myself? As Marianne Moore says, “There never was a war that was not inward.” The final section of the book, “This Power,” presses through the pragmatic to another dimension, other modes of language, ultimately the timeless language of dream. When the book began, motherhood was not exactly a hot topic for ‹xi› poetry. One might say it was virtually taboo, with the understanding that taboos exist at an unconscious rather than a conscious level. Only when it is broken do we recognize that a taboo has existed. In 1970, people hardly mentioned pregnancy and childbirth in mixed company, let alone tried to make literature out of these embarrassingly gross female topics. I have been told I was “brave” to do this writing. It didn’t feel like bravery, it felt like necessity. If courage was involved in the creation...