Saturday's Child (44 page)

Nor was that the sole epiphany on the horizon. We decided to have a child.

We were now twenty-eight and thirty-eight, respectively, and we'd spoken about it for years. Kenneth had always wanted a child, children in fact. The younger of two, he'd really been raised more by his seven-years-older sister, Norma, than by his mother. I—an only child to my fingertips, a status left unaltered by those two ghostly half-brothers—couldn't imagine being or having multiples, although I'd always assumed that someday I'd have a child. I wanted to know what it was like to give birth and be a mother—but for selfish reasons, for
my
experience. I realized this, and it made me nervous. Certain as I was Ken would be a good father, I was petrified I'd fail utterly as a mother. What if I reenacted Faith's suffocatingly possessive love? Or overcompensated in the other direction and turned out to be as unfeeling as my father? Then, too, there was the real world where, as friends reminded us, we might be arrested, killed, or, as we not infrequently considered, forced to go into exile.

Counsel came from all directions. What a bourgeois step! What a dangerous course! What a ridiculous time and situation in which to plan having a child! This decision was life-affirmative but impractical, daring but illogical; it was also radical and romantic. A perfect fit for us.

As for our watchful friends in the government, they got it wrong again:

By means of a suitable pretext on August 25, 1969, by an SA (special agent) of the FBI, it was further ascertained that the subject is expecting a baby very shortly and as a result of her pregnancy is employed only [
sic
] as a housewife.

These guys just couldn't get with the program. Actually, I'd continued working as an editor at Grove Press until two weeks before I gave birth—on July 10, 1969—making it impossible for me to be expecting a baby very shortly one month later.

Of course I wrote about it.

Wrote about it beforehand and afterward, and if I could have, would have written my way
through
it—but that, as any woman who's been there can attest, is not an option. Writers are genuinely weird beings. In the early stage of labor, before we left for the hospital, I carried out a plan I'd contemplated for some months: I sat down at my typewriter and wrote two letters, one to Kenneth and one to the child I was carrying. Since my pregnancy and childbirth were “natural,” the actual writing was punctuated by breathing during a contraction every second paragraph or so, while Kenneth was timing the length of the contractions, Lamaze style, with a stopwatch. At my request, he didn't read either letter until he returned home alone from the hospital, after the birth, some twenty hours later.

Like any woman with her first childbirth, I was prey to almost archetypal feelings that I must be ready for the possibility of losing the child, or of dying myself, in some mishap. No matter how modern we become, it will take still more generations, consciousness, and changes in medical procedure before the imprint of a million ghosts dead in childbirth will be erased from the secret thoughts of a pregnant woman anywhere in the world; depending on her geography, class, age, and race, her death in childbirth may still be a commonplace occurrence. The letter to Kenneth
was written, as was the one to Blake, out of an acute awareness that these might be the last words I would ever write. Here is a fragment:

Wednesday, 9 July 1969

Dearest K.:

It's almost six o'clock in the afternoon now and we know we definitely are in labor because of the bloody mucous plug having loosened, and we've had our baths and are all ready, just playing hide-and-seek with the irregular contractions. And you're running about crazy loon with our color Polaroid camera taking pictures of me typing this very letter to you—images of images, visual of verbal—as we each try to reach and make permanent contact with and of and for each other.

And all I really wanted to say in this letter was and is and will be that I love you very much and am very happy at this second of our absurd existence. These last days have been so beautiful, as we finally seemed to find a way of growing closer out of all the difficulties we've been having these past months. …

[I]f anything should happen to the baby or me, I know that we still have—in truly remarkable ways—each other, and that the years I've lived with you have taken me in directions I've so wanted to go, since I can remember wanting anything. What I'm trying to say, rather badly, is that it's
already
been worth it, after all, you see, even if there isn't any more. … I'm less afraid now than I've ever been, although with more reasons to fear for us all …

We had chosen a “genderless” name for our child, whether it was to be a girl or a boy. I still have the final short list, and it's horrifyingly funny. Thank god we didn't take the militant path with Che, or the touchy-feely route with Leaf. We chose Blake, because the name means “bringer of light” or “illumined one,” and also for William Blake, the eighteenth-century poet and mystic. (There was a political slant to it, as well: Blake knew and had been influenced by the politics of Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as by those of Catherine Boucher, the painter he married.)

Rereading this second letter now, I'm struck by the false consciousness of it, the simpleminded views on oppression, revolution, sexuality, parenthood
. The language is striving
so
hard to be “hip” that it makes me groan. My predictive calendar of the future is staggeringly off-kilter. All my self-doubts are in play again, together with my confident auguries about Kenneth's parenting skills; after all, I thought,
he
at least knows how to
play
. Mostly, though, I'm touched at how deeply this letter still moves me, how much I recognize its urgency, and how intensely I still validate what was happening there—in that woman's body, and on that woman's page.

I actually got some things really right—about loving, about letting go. I had no idea that I was about to learn what love might really look like—a love beyond self-consciousness, beyond pretense, beyond fear.

But I got some things right, after all.

Wednesday, 9 July 1969 6:38 p.m.

Dear Blake:

I've written you no poems or letters while carrying you these past nine months, and somehow feel I can write you now only because we know, K. and I, that our labor with you has definitely begun, and so you seem finally very real, beginning your own struggle into the conscious universe.

First, I ask you to forgive us for having coalesced you via our genes from that whirling matter and energy that you were before. A planetary famine is likely within ten years; nuclear, biological, gas, and chemical warfare are all possibilities; our species is poisoning what little is left of the air, water, and soil that is our natural Edenic heritage, and it is moving out later this very month to land on (explore? contaminate?) our satellite, the moon. You are part of a population explosion which may well be alone responsible for the destruction of life on earth. Overbreed and overkill begin to be common everyday phrases.

Yet we have conceived you, from our sex and love, from the blending together of our brief tissues, K. and I. I could cite excuses, some of which I believe and some of which I don't: our own egos, our curiosity about what our genes would produce, our callousness, our desire to make an ongoing revolution in our own lives, on and on. Perhaps none is the truth, or all are. Perhaps none is really relevant.

The fact is that you are now being born, a woman or a man, but
mostly yourself, Blake for now (later you might want to change that name to one nobody has a right to give you but yourself), into a dimension we are all struggling to space out, to make freer, until we are ultimately free from it, into some new life or death—some meaningful way of living, or dying at least, in ecstasy.

Some people are arming themselves—for love.

Some people are refusing to bear arms—for love.

K. and I will be trying to find new ways to save ourselves and our sisters and brothers from suffering and extinction under the greedy powers of a few madmen, and you will be involved unavoidably in that struggle. But on your own terms, as soon as you know them and make them known.

We have no claims on you. We are your genetic mother and father, and beyond that, and more important, merely two people who will take the responsibility of you while you are still small and helpless, love you to the best of our ability, provide you with whatever tools of knowledge, skill, humor, and emotional freedom seem to interest you, respect your own individuality, hope you dig us as people but hardly dare insist on that (only try to earn it)—and let go.

Of course, I already envy you. Despite the horrors that oppress people around the world, those people are rising up to fight for their freedom. You are born into the age of worldwide revolution. You will be thirty-one years old in the year 2000. You may well travel to other planets. More prosaically, you have one hell of a groovy father, which I never had, and in some ways I trust him more with you than I do myself. I know you two will have crazy beautiful fun together. I have to get my ass in gear so I can join in.

If you are a woman, you will grow up in an atmosphere—indeed, a whole Movement—for women's liberation, so that your life will be less reflective of sexual oppression than mine, more human.

If you are a man, you will also be freer; you will not need to live a form of stereotyped masculinity which is based on the oppression of the other sex.

If you are a woman, you will be free to think—unlike so many women today. If you are a man, you will be free to feel—unlike so many men today.

K. and I are trying to be humanly unisexual, or pansexual. Join us?

If any of us survive these next decades on this planet, you will live to make a society where people share and love and laugh and understand each other. If none of us survive, it won't matter, because then we'll be free. Meanwhile, we can play with each other, and create poems and colors and songs and orgasms together, and learn to fight not so much for what we believe in as for what we love.

Dear Blake, I love myself right now.

Dear Blake, I love K. so very much.

Dear Blake, I love you, even though we've not been introduced.

Dear Blake, leave my body behind you quickly. K. and I together, throughout labor and delivery, will work hard to aid you in your struggle toward light and air and independence.

Dear Blake, welcome to the universe.

Dear, dear Blake, goodbye.

R.

¹
Not exaggeration. Mark Rudd, who postured himself as leader of the Columbia University uprising, was the child of an army general, as was the autocratic sometime-feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson, and a disproportionate number of Weatherpeople came from elite corporate backgrounds. This might prompt us to wonder just whom they were really rebelling against, and when the crunch came they could and did rely on Daddy Warbucks. For example, some Weatherpeople (from poorer or more politically active backgrounds) are still underground or still serving out life sentences, but Bill Ayres, a Weather Underground leader, served no serious time and is a university professor in Illinois, where he lives comfortably with Bernardine Dohrn, another Weather leader. Ayres's father owned Commonwealth Edison of Chicago.

²
Bran forms a central figure in my long poem “The Fall of a Sparrow,” originally published in
Depth Perception: New Poems and a Masque
(Doubleday, 1982), and reprinted in
Upstairs in the Garden: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1988
(W. W. Norton, 1990).

³
“Loyalty Oath,” another poem from the same period, begins, “Ungrateful Daughter, Intolerant Friend, / Officious Associate, Malcontent Wife: / these signs, hand-lettered in uneven print. / The oppressed carry them around inside my skull / in shifts. They want to organize, despite my efforts to negotiate / an individual settlement with each.” See
Lady of the Beasts: Poems
(Random House, 1976).

⁴
See
Lady of the Beasts
and
Upstairs in the Garden: Poems Selected and New
.

⁵
Many of the U.S.-based human-rights groups have carried this attitude into the global context. For years, arguing “cultural relativism,” they derided women campaigning to end the practice of female genital mutilation (
in their own cultures
); only when the UN was forced to acknowledge this issue did the human-rights groups opportunistically jump on board. At this writing, these groups are ranged in opposition to international feminist organizing against the sexual traffick in women and children. Still trying to convince themselves and others that women really
want
to be impoverished, prostituted, and exploited, they cynically revive old anti-union “right to work” arguments and misappropriate “pro-choice” phrases for the ostensible “right” of a human being to be trafficked into sexual slavery by pimps they've conveniently renamed “migration facilitators.” But they're savvy enough now to preach (abstractly) that “women's rights are human rights.”

⁶
Firestone would eventually write
The Dialectic of Sex
(William Morrow, 1970), an astute work of feminist theory unfortunately flawed by its naive assumption that technology would be an unmixed blessing that would automatically free women. Firestone would suffer a breakdown and drop out of political activism.

⁷
It originally stood for Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. But as it caught press attention and people's imagination with its humor, activist style, and guerrilla-theater tactics, women around the country picked up on the image and adopted the name. Variously, the anagram came to stand for Women Incensed at Telephone Company Harassment (operators on a wildcat strike), Women Indentured to Travelers' Corporate Hell (a group trying to organize a union at the insurance company), Women Intent on Toppling Consumer Holidays, Women Inspired to Commit Herstory, etc. For more information about WITCH, see
Sisterhood. Is Powerful
(Random House and Vintage Books, 1970) and
Going Too Far: the Personal Chronicle of a Feminist
(Random House and Vintage Books, 1977).