If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. – Einstein

I just adore this quote.  Putting aside for a minute my essential belief that raw intelligence is innate, I agree with everything that Einstein means with this single beautiful sentence.  Why?  For lots of reasons.

Fairy tales are where the archetypes live.  They are where we learn about courage and love, about family, loyalty, and betrayal, about tests and triumph.  They are where we learn the most essential stories of humanity, the stories that go on repeating themselves over and over again in our lives and in our literature, as we grow into adulthood.

Fairy tales exist firmly in the realm of the imagination, and they allow children to dream of a world unrestricted by the boundaries of reality as they know it.  In fairy tales, magic can truly happen, and I think a commitment to the power of that which lies beyond reason and logic is fundamental to both intelligence and creativity.  How else can enormous leaps of the imagination come about, without this capacity?

More basically, stories are how you learn about the world.  I love that someone as aligned with the rigorous worlds of science and math as Einstein celebrates the power of the story.  I agree with him.  This reminds me of what I’ve written about my father: that he has a master’s degree in Physics, a PhD in Engineering, and an abiding trust in the ability of science, logic, and measurement to explain the world. At the same time, he has a deep fascination with European history and culture, often manifested in a love of the continent’s cathedrals, those embodiments of religious fervor, of all that is not scientific, logical, or measurable. His unshakeable faith in the life of the rational mind is matched by his profound wonder at the power of the ineffable, the territory of religious belief and cultural experience, that which is beyond the intellect.

I grew up in the space between those two worlds, believing that they are in fact as mutually enriching as they appear paradoxical.  I’d like to provide the same powerful learning for Grace and Whit.  As I help Grace learn the multiplication tables and how to touch type, may I remember to teach her also about dragons and princesses, about the hero’s journey, about spells which change the world, and about the fierce bonds of love.

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“I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.”
-Ernest Hemingway

I’ve loved this quote for a long time. And ever since Saturday night I’ve been thinking about it in light of Margaret Atwood’s provocative poem, Spelling. There are so many lines of that poem that echo in my head, but the one I’ve been mulling specifically is “I wonder how many women/denied themselves daughters…/so they could mainline words.” She beautifully refers to the age-old tension between creativity and procreativity that defined women artists for centuries. As recently as 1899, Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier walked into the sea as a way of avoiding the choice she could not make.

I feel so grateful to live in a time with more room for women to be both mothers and artists. Even more, for women to be both mothers and not-mothers, mothers and someone-other-than-a-mother at the same time. So glad because, ultimately, the subject that chose me clearly has a lot to do with my having had children. I don’t know that I would have come to the place that I am today, where my old way of being in the world simply does not suffice anymore, without them. It’s not precisely that my “subject” (if there is such a defining thing running through these diffuse musings) is my children, though clearly they are a big part of it. It’s more that the insistent awareness that I was missing something critical in this singular, short life of mine came only after I was a mother.

Of course it is not always simple, trying to mother and to write. Of course not. Adrienne Rich’s famous line that “Poetry was where I existed as no-one’s mother” speaks to the eternal trading-off of time, attention, and identity that we all engage in. But for me, one sphere enriches the other in ways I cannot yet fully articulate. They provide ample material, Grace and Whit do, but it’s actually more than that. It was they who woke me up to the sleepwalking way I was moving through my life, they who shook the foil in my eyes, they who said “Right here! Right now” loudly enough that I finally listened.

They, Grace and Whit, brought with them noise and sleeplessness and worry and chest-tightening love and most of all, a keen, bittersweet awareness of the fleetingness of it all. They brought stuffed animals and soccer balls and exercise pants and Harry Potter and sleepy whispers of love and a handful of dandelions offered with grubby hands and proud eyes. They brought my attention to my life, to a thousand million tiny moments, some of which glitter brilliantly, most of which blend into the slurry of memory. They brought me my subject. And how wildly, extravagantly fortunate I am that I don’t have to choose.

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My awkward, stumbling search for faith is no secret. I write often of the way I trudge through my days, alternating with lightning speed and cloudy confusion between certainty and doubt. There are times, though, when the idea floating up in my mind seems to be echoed by external messages in a way that can’t be an accident. I was thinking yesterday of the ways that my spirit manifests through my physical body, and then I read three things that convinced me this inquiry was something to dwell on. I started a book that I already know is going to change my life (and I don’t say that lightly): Devotion, Dani Shapiro’s new memoir. And I read posts by two of my beloved blogfriends, Ronna and Julie.

They all seemed to be speaking about what I’d been thinking about. There is something that is true deep down in your body: listen to it. Okay. Perhaps I should believe that my attention is being drawn, like my eyes to shook foil, to this theme for a reason.

Dani Shapiro describes how the word please “seemed to emerge from some deep and hollow cavern” inside of herself. Please, as in: please help me to understand. This is so familiar to me. Often the word that I hear over and over is just that: please. please, please, please. She then shares her view that the startling moments of clarity come at random times, and that “those insights are already fully formed – they are literally inside our bodies, if only we know where to look.”

Ronna writes about “this deep, before-time wisdom that I know-that-I-know-that-I-know that I have; that … all women have.” And Julie speaks of the energy of the Great Mother, and of how she “first became conscious of Her presence a number of years ago. It felt as if someone was pulling me down, way down into my body, into the depths of the darkness that the descent illuminates.” Julie mentions that she initially resisted this pull into her innermost physicality because it contradicted all the years of spiritual teachings about “transcendence” and “Light.”

There is something here. It’s not fully formed yet in my head, but there is something about the wisdom of the body, the story in the pulse, the truth in the marrow of our bones. It’s more than just the way we – certainly I – can sometimes know things in a visceral way. It is more than the cyclical nature of the female body, the ways that we spiral through circles and seasons, ebbing and flowing and waxing and waning in a way much less directly linear than either the world or, maybe, the male body. It’s more than the ways the state of my spirit manifests in my physical well-being, specifically how my lack of boundaries results (I believe) in my being sick far more often than I’d like. I am permeable, porous to the outside world, letting in both good and bad influences far too easily.

What is this something? What is this that I’m sensing, to which I’m being guided gently to by the words of the world? I don’t know. Something about the ways that our spirit communicates through our bodies. Something about a knowledge that is on the flip side of reason, beyond logic, to a place where all there is is belief. Something soaked in blood, in tears, in milk. Something that might – maybe? – be showing me the way towards faith, towards meaning, towards the things, both maddeningly abstract and all-important, that I ache for most powerfully.

I can think of so many examples of this thing – this energy? this truth? – animate in my life. The way my physical self slept ten hours a night through my senior year in high school, hibernating through a lonely and sad winter the way an animal might. The way some vibrating core of power I didn’t know I had, exhausted but ferocious, propelled me through Grace’s delivery. The way my body shrank into a husk of itself within weeks of that delivery as my depression drove me to try to hide, escape, vanish. The way my dear friend Taylor always used to talk about people being “in their bodies” as shorthand for being present, engaged, conscious.

I don’t have a clear conclusion yet, only a newfound conviction to listen to the messages that I know throb in my bloodstream. There is more there than the simple beat of my heart. It occurs to me (just now!) that this could be merely another expression of instinct and intuition, the same internal choir I’ve been struggling so mightily to tune into. So when this trio of women whose writing I respect all seemed to speak about the same thing, they are the universe speaking to me: yes, this is a worthy effort. The answers you seek are already there: you just need to know where to look and how to listen.

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Today: What advertisement made you think this year?

I know it’s not new this year, but I continue to be awed and moved by Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. The top video is the one I know best, and every time I see it I find myself almost breathless with a combination of anger and panic. I feel angry and also sad about all of the hours and energy that I and many wonderful women I know have wasted worrying about what we look like and whether we fit into the impossible mold that society presents us. I feel panicked about how to arm my seven year old daughter to go out into this world’s relentless onslaught, how best to shore up her own self-esteem so that she is rocked as little as possible by these influences.

I think it is tremendously brave of a big beauty company to advertise in this way. With the caveat that I don’t really know very much about Dove (though their parent, Unilever, was many years ago a client of mine) my impression is that this is precisely the combination of doing good and doing well that I more passionately wish more of the business world would aim for. This company seems to be using their brand and their clout to speak out against the norm, to stand in the torrent and face the other way. I admire this tremendously.

Dove makes a powerful statement by showing women, young and old – though I imagine it is with the young that this may have the most germane impact – images of beauty in which they can see themselves. They throw open the definition of beauty and challenge the viewer to think more expansively about what it means. They seek to illuminate the societal cues about attractiveness that many of us have internalized for what they are: merely a single, narrow view on what is really a much more polymorphous and complex issue. Bravo, Dove.

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This picture, of Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz, was the first page of my thesis. I love the way the image speaks of creativity and procreativity, of the tension and symbiosis between them.

The news of Kim Clijster’s US Open win – remarkable because she was the first unseeded winner but also, more notably, because she is the first mother to win in almost 30 years – reminded me of my thesis. Of all of the endless debate – perennial or boring? – about motherhood and creativity, motherhood and career, broadly defined. Take the leap with me, please, from tennis court to writer’s desk … it’s not really that far-fetched.

As I did in 1996, I reject utterly the notion that women must choose one or the other branch of the tree – I believe that while motherhood requires certain compromises on the part of the mother/artist, it also enriches the content of the art incalculably. That statement is hardly inflammatory now, but it’s important not to forget that until the mid 20th century it was quite unusual for a woman to be both a mother and an artist.

The history of female artists is filled with women who sacrificed their potential as mothers to succeed as writers: Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Stevie Smith, Marianne Moore are just a few examples. I am more familiar with writers, but this is also true of visual artists, Georgia O’Keeffe being a primary example.

It was my thesis poets (Rich, Kumin, and Sexton) who represented the first generation of women unwilling to accept this binary view of the world. In the poetry these women wrote, and in the art of other of their contemporaries, we see the ongoing negotiation of the border and relationship between creativity and procreativity. For every woman, every mother, every artist this negotiation is unique, of course, but out of its struggle true art is made.

I believe that parenthood, broadly defined, is a source of rich inspiration for artists of either gender. For women who give birth to their children, perhaps, this is even more visceral, given the raw exposure pregnancy and childbirth provides to physical regeneration and reproduction. The tensions between the two roles, while irrefutable, may also provide a vein of deep emotion, conflict, and thought for many artists to tap. The impact of Sexton, Kumin, and, especially, Rich was profound: these women removed the taboo on the territory of motherhood (and, in truth, daughterhood), exposing its complexities and darknesses as poetic material that is not only valid but deeply moving. These poets gave a generation of writers permission to explore the sources of emotional conflict and the complex forest of identity. I for one am grateful.

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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. – Adrienne Rich

Cherish your wilderness. – Maxine Kumin

It’s thesis day around here, clearly, with Anne Sexton this morning and Adrienne Rich and Maxine Kumin this evening. I know I have both monsters and wilderness in me, and I know I share Sexton’s view that there is nothing uncomplicated about love.

Have been sort of heavy-hearted today, feeling an inarticulate and undefined cloud of vague sadness hovering around my head. I find myself wondering if I am even capable of happiness untouched by this melancholy that is just part of who I am. Actually, I know I’m not. So what I wonder, I guess, is whether I care. Of course this thought exercise is not very practical since I can’t change it, even if I wanted to, but it is interesting.

I am incapable of experiencing joy unlimned with loss. I am always, achingly aware of the imminent farewell that hovers around any happy moment. I am simultaneously in the moment and already grieving its passage. I am a palimpsest whose first layer is one of deep sorrow, and no matter how much paint I apply on top, that orientation towards sadness always shows through. This is okay with me: some of my favorite expressions of beauty, like the deep blue of a hydrangea or the fire of a summer sunset, seem to share, somehow, this underlying sense of joy’s intractable connection with loss.

Despite my endless ruminations, I have actually accepted this part of who I am rather peacefully. I struggle to relate, in fact, to people whose outlook on life is more simply sunny. These people are often a breath of fresh air to me, and a positive influence, but I am fundamentally unable to understand the way they are wired. Surely my life would be simpler if I was able to live my life without preemptively mourning the fact that every day will pass, without dwelling on my inability to capture and hold the things I love most dearly. But it would not be my life. So instead of wishing I was someone else, I will try and try, as summer fades into fall and the world again reminds us so viscerally of loss and time’s passage, to embrace my own complicated, squirrel-like mind.

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I read about the case of New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services v. V.M. and B.G. with horror. The story of a laboring woman refusing a cesarean section and, as a direct result, having her newborn daughter (healthy after a vaginal delivery) removed from her custody shocks me. She was declared to have abused her unborn daughter and was described as having been uncooperative and belligerent in labor.

I am not a lawyer and am sure there are nuances to this case that I do not understand. But at the most basic level this case privileges the medical establishment and judgment of a doctor over the rights and instincts of a woman in a way that I find tremendously alarming. I utterly reject the logic that says that for challenging the medical establishment’s assumptions, V.M. is a mother so unfit as to deserve having her daughter permanently removed from her custody. How is this different from a parent deciding to spare a child with cancer a painful and low-odds chemotherapy treatment? In that case, the parent is deemed humane. Here, V.M. was deemed unfit and reckless.

My understanding is that informed consent is a part of all medical procedures, particularly those involving major surgery. Clearly there is a fine line here to be walked; in some small percentage of cases, cesarean sections unquestionably save lives. That said, the US averages about 33% of deliveries by c-section, whereas in western Europe it is about 5%. This discrepancy suggests, at least to me, that a great deal of US c-sections might be avoided. We know for a fact that there are many interventions in modern childbirth that are neither medically necessary nor, perhaps more alarmingly, completely understood by the laboring mother. I do not judge in the least how people choose to deliver their babies, but I think it is understandable that the laboring V.M. might have questioned the absolute need for a c-section in her case (and she was proven right).

By implying – in fact, asserting – that V.M. ought to have submitted without question to the medical authorities and procedures, the ruling sets a scary precedent that reminds me of the era of “twilight sleep” at the beginning of the 20th century, when women delivered their babies in a semi-conscious state and often had no memory of the experience. Do we really want to return to a world where a laboring mother is nothing other than a vessel, whose rights are forfeited in favor of the norms of the medical establishment?

This case seems to tread on both the tricky landscape of the abortion debate (where the rights of a woman intersect with those of her unborn child) and that of the neonatal ward (where questions of when and how much lifesaving effort should be applied to very very premature babies). I am no expert on either topic and I understand that there are deep moral complexities involved. I do believe, however, in the primacy of a woman’s right to her own body and, certainly in this case, where a healthy vaginal delivery ensued, find the removal of the baby from the mother’s care to be punitive in the extreme. It is one thing for a hospital staff to be disgruntled that a mother would not sign a blanket c-section waiver, but quite another to deem that mother as unfit after the child has been born and the c-section is proven to have been unnecessary.

Furthermore, to use V.M.’s “uncooperative” behavior during labor as evidence of her unfitness as a mother is ludicrous. I’ve delivered two babies and I was certainly neither placid nor quiet during either experience. There is no reason to extrapolate from a woman’s behavior in labor that she is not concerned above all with the health of her baby. While I absolutely acknowledge that there may be more to this case, both legally and medically, than I understand, the basic facts of it trouble me deeply. A woman who questions the assumptions of the modern hospital birth and chooses to follow her own intuition is not abusive, and she does not deserve to lose her maternal rights. In fact, I would go further and say that a woman who is educated, engaged, and aware enough to actively participate in her own labor and delivery deserves to be celebrated, not punished.

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I read Judith Warner’s column last week with a heavy heart. Of course I do not understand the nuances of the situation so I can’t comment on the specific instance she cites. But the trend, the overall observation she makes, had me nodding my head in sad recognition.

Then one of my favorite new blogs, Ivy League Insecurities, took up the topic with a thought-provoking response.

I found myself mulling this over all weekend as I hiked, and handed children hand-over-hand down a rock ravine, and lay in a camp bunk trying to sleep as 11 people stirred around me.

My initial reaction is that the growing resentment among the many for the “privileged few,” especially women, is just another form of judgment by superficial labels. How is extrapolating from people’s external situations to draw assumptions about their personalities, values, and problems any different whether the person being stereotyped and judged is privileged or not? Isn’t it the same kind of superficial judgment in either direction?

And then I thought more. I have certainly been made to feel, many times, that my own concerns and fears are somehow less legitimate, less raw and real, because most of my life appears pretty well under control. And, when I am truly honest, sometimes I believe that too. Sometimes – actually, often – I chastise myself, saying: Come on. Pull yourself together. What do you want for? What do you need? You have so much. Why are you sad? And part of me believes this message, but part of me adamantly does not.

On the one hand, of course concerns of feeding your children or pressing fatal illness are much more significant than the things that rattle around my head. In fact, when I push this further, the kinds of issues that occupy me could be thought of as the province of the privileged; is it not an indulgence, a gift, even, to be able to worry about such small things? But then I know how keenly I feel things. I know that these worries are very real, often all-consuming.

So I guess the conclusion I come to is that it is not for any of us to judge the lives of others. It is not for us to make assessments of how valid are other people’s points of view, intentions, or loves. It is impossible to know, from how someone looks on the surface, what is going on inside his or her heart. I have learned enough in my life to know that with absolute certainty.

Both posts are, in fact, about something beyond just this notion of outsides and insides. The claim that educated women are being told, implicitly and explicitly, to muzzle it troubles me. Troubles me a lot. On the most basic level this is because I know many of these women, and most of them have a lot of interest to say – lots that is provocative, insightful, reflective, and honest. But more generally because I fear a world in which any single group is being told, for no good reason, to shut up.

I don’t know that I have a good conclusion to this yet, but I know it’s on my mind. I also know that like other friends and bloggers I know, I am both unwilling and, more importantly, unable to stop talking. I will not be muzzled; I believe there is too much to be gained by telling our stories, whoever we are and whatever formal education we have.

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To the one who made me a daughter and who shows me every day, in ways big and small, how to be a mother: I love you.

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Many of you know that birth is an important topic to me personally. Let me say that again: to me personally. I do not consider myself an evangelist and hope to never come across as one. It has struck me more than once that it’s interesting that the universe made the process of becoming a mother (conception, pregnancy, birth) so easy for someone who struggles so mightily with being a mother.

Anyway, I read this passage today on babble.com and it captures a lot of what I feel about birth – an open mind rather than a closed one, in fact, and a powerful awareness of my own luck in having it go the way it did for me. It is an important passage, certainly, but in the grand scheme of identity and motherhood, a very small one. And, arguably, you make the passage one way or another. It is the arrival on the other side that is the key, no?

The lesson, ultimately, is that we are not in control; this is a conversation I’ve had many times over with friends waiting at 41 weeks for their first child to commence his or her arrival. We are simply not in charge of these little people: not then, and not ever. I may have handled relatively easily the intense hours of becoming a mother that the writer describes, but I grapple on a regular basis with the months, years, and decades of mothering. There is no ambiguity in my mind about which struggle is more important, more meaningful, and more difficult.

Was it the birth of my dreams? Hardly. Do I wish it could have been different? Sure. But compared with the result — my daughter, Liana, little sister to my sons Eitan and Daniel — I really don’t care. If I’ve learned anything in ten years of motherhood, it’s that the way our children are brought into the world means very little for how they live in the world. Nor do the intense hours in which we become mothers shape the months, years and decades of our actually being mothers. And if the experience of childbirth is in fact a crucial process, then let it be the process of teaching us that our children will emerge in ways varied and complicated, not necessarily in times or manners of our choosing, neither made in our image nor as proof of our prowess. Let birth remind us that, with children, so little goes according to even the most well-drawn plan.
- Tova Mirvis

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