regressive yearnings
This Week in Reading
The Carrying by Ada Limón
I first came upon Ada Limón via “Fifteen Balls of Feathers”, a poem that knocked me backwards. This poetry collection, The Carrying, also left me gutted. Many of the poems are about her failed attempts to get pregnant, about an insatiable yearning for a child, her acceptance that she may never get to be a mother. The poems are beautiful and devastating, full of hope and heartbreak and grief and love and wonder.
One of my favorite poems in the collection, titled Trying:
I’d forgotten how much
I like to grow things, I shout
to him as he passes me to paint
the basement. I’m trellising
the tomatoes in what’s called
a Florida weave. Later, we try
to knock me up again. We do it
in the guest room because that’s
the extent of our adventurism
in a week of violence in Florida
and France. Afterward,
the sun still strong though lowering
inevitably to the horizon, I check
on the plants in the back, my
fingers smelling of sex and tomato
vines. Even now, I don’t know much
about happiness. I still worry
and want an endless stream of more,
but some days I can see the point
in growing something, even if
it’s just to say I cared enough.
At 25, I seem to have fallen prey to baby hormones before most of my friends. Maybe after I turn 30, seems to be the common consensus. Not now, for sure, they all agree. They want to travel, and move up in the workplace and figure out who they are. I, on the other hand, want a baby. For the past three years, every time I see a pregnant woman I hear a tiny whisper deep within my own belly. I can imagine: the weight of a toddler on my hip, pudgy hands grasping and prodding, tiny breaths growing deeper and sleepier as I flip the pages of a picture book by lamplight. I went to Mt. Rainier and saw dozens of varieties of wildflowers, but what I remember most is a two year old stuffed in a baby backpack, chubby legs bouncing as her father hiked across an alpine meadow.
Yes, yes, I know that a being pregnant is basically like having your body snatched by an alien guzzling all your resources. I know that new parents don’t sleep for the first year and a half. Yes, I have heard about the placenta and I do agree that it is gross. But something jammy and sticky inside me wants a baby.
It seems to have become unfashionable to be a woman yearning for a child. Though feminism, at its core, aims to empower women to make whatever life choices they want, including having a baby, it seems slightly regressive to crave motherhood. Activists fought for decades so that women could hang up their aprons, leave the kitchen, become breadwinners. To be Career Woman instead of mere wives and mothers. But why is empowerment equated with success within the workforce? Instead of being defined by our relationships to the patriarchy, we are defining ourselves by the role we perform within capitalism. Is that really a better measure of personal worth than family? At least family is theoretically rooted in love, whereas career success is simply a thinly veiled proxy for money.
My mother quit her job when I turned 6. She never describes it as a choice to devote herself to her home and family, though she undoubtedly spent thousands of hours on unpaid domestic labor. She waited until I was comfortably settled in the public education system to leave the workforce. The way she tells it, she didn’t like working, and my dad didn’t mind working, and they could afford for her to stay home, so she did. As a tiny baby misguided feminist, I judged her for this. This judgment came from the same place as my 7 year old rejection of the color pink— the twisted belief that being a strong girl was dependent on shunning girlishness. Why was she home, cooking and cleaning, when she could be one of those career women in suits that everyone was always telling me I was smart enough to one day become? Now that I am in the workforce myself, I’m rethinking my mother’s decision. My job feels like a colossal waste of time, albeit one that affords me to pay for groceries and sweaters and my third of the electric bill. The fact that I have a “job” that I have to “go to” for “eight hours” seems like some kind of joke. Quitting her job at 38 was an absolute privilege, but now, to me, it also seems like a radical act. My mother essentially opted out of the labor economy, simply because she wanted to, because she wasn’t afraid that her identity was inextricable from her job, because she knew that one does not have to don a power suit to be powerful.
I am still years out from motherhood; unlike Ada Limón, I have never tried to get pregnant. I do not know what it is like— to try and try and try and fail and fail and fail. But reading her words, her longing found a home in the squishiest corner of my heart. She wants to see something grow, so she plants flowers, plants tomatoes, fills her garden with green things growing upwards. I have twenty houseplants and no baby. These things are not not-related.
There are a million other fascinating things you can do in your life besides becoming a mother, but I want that one. Sue me, I’m a deeply traditional person. People are both surprised and unsurprised when I tell them about my baby hormones. I was never really a kid-person, but I’ve been reading parenting blogs and magazines for years; the lessons we teach a child to grow up good and kind and strong in this world seem like lessons we could all use as we try to become better people. For some reason, people seem to have come to the incorrect conclusion that I’m primed for adventure, that I am the sort of person chasing a wild crazy life. In reality, I just want a wife to kiss goodbye every morning and a baby to bounce and a kitchen table to eat dinner around, and if I’m feeling particularly greedy— a really good story to tell about all of it.
But of course, that is the point of all of it. All of those women marching in the streets, burning their bras, they were not fighting for the extraordinary, not really. They were fighting so I could have this most ordinary life, that I could choose it freely. So I could see all the kinds of lives I could possibly live, and then, in the end, decide I wanted this one.
Studio-ing
Reminder that I have a piece in this art show next month! I would love if you came to the opening. There’s an after party later, text me for details.
Further Reading:
I also read Self-Help by Lorrie Moore this week, and loved it. It’s not getting its own newsletter but I still wanted to give it a plug.
Another poem from this book, to give you a taste.