Maggie Nelson - The Argonauts

For all the years I didn’t want to be pregnant — the years I spent harshly deriding “the breeders”—I secretly felt pregnant women were smug in their complaints. Here they were, sitting on top of the cake of the culture, getting all the kudos for doing exactly what women are supposed to do, yet still they felt unsupported and discriminated against. Give me a break! Then, when I wanted to be pregnant but wasn’t, I felt that pregnant women had the cake I wanted, and were busy bitching about the flavor of the icing.

I was wrong on all counts — imprisoned, as I was and still am, by my own hopes and fears. I’m not trying to fix that wrong-ness here. I’m just trying to let it hang out .

Place me now, like a pregnant cutout doll, at a “prestigious New York university,” giving a talk on my book on cruelty. During the Q&A, a well-known playwright raises his hand and says: I can’t help but notice that you’re with child, which leads me to the question — how did you handle working on all this dark material [sadism, masochism, cruelty, violence, and so on] in your condition?

Ah yes, I think, digging a knee into the podium. Leave it to the old patrician white guy to call the lady speaker back to her body, so that no one misses the spectacle of that wild oxymoron, the pregnant woman who thinks . Which is really just a pumped-up version of that more general oxymoron, a woman who thinks .

As if anyone was missing the spectacle anyway. As if a similar scene didn’t recur at nearly every location of my so-called book tour. As if when I myself see pregnant women in the public sphere, there isn’t a kind of drumming in my mind that threatens to drown out all else: pregnant, pregnant, pregnant , perhaps because the soul (or souls) in utero is pumping out static, static that disrupts our usual perception of an other as a single other. The static of facing not one, but also not two.

During irritating Q&As, bumpy takeoffs and landings, and frightful faculty meetings, I placed my hands on my risen belly and attempted silent communion with the being spinning in the murk. Wherever I went, there the baby went, too. Hello New York! Hello bathtub! And yet babies have a will of their own, which becomes visible the first time mine sticks out a limb and makes a tent of my belly. During the night he gets into weird positions, forcing me to plead, Move along, little baby! Get your foot off my lungs! And if you are tracking a problem, as I was, you may have to watch the baby’s body develop in ways that might harm him, with nothing you can do about it. Powerlessness, finitude, endurance. You are making the baby but not directly . You are responsible for his welfare, but unable to control the core elements. You must allow him to unfurl, you must feed his unfurling, you must hold him. But he will unfurl as his cells are programmed to unfurl. You can’t reverse an unfolding structural or chromosomal disturbance by ingesting the right organic tea.

Why do we have to measure his kidneys and freak out about their size every week if we’ve already decided we are not going to take him out early or do anything to treat him until after he’s born? I asked the doctor rolling the sticky ultrasound shaft over my belly for seemingly the thousandth time. Well, most mothers want to know as much as possible about the condition of their babies , she said, avoiding my eyes.

Truth be told, when we first started trying to conceive, I had hoped to be done with my cruelty project and onto something “cheerier,” so that the baby might have more upbeat accompaniment in utero. But I needn’t have worried — not only did getting pregnant take much longer than I’d wanted it to, but pregnancy itself taught me how irrelevant such a hope was. Babies grow in a helix of hope and fear; gestating draws one but deeper into the spiral. It isn’t cruel in there, but it’s dark. I would have explained this to the playwright, but he had already left the room.

After the Q&A at this event, a woman came up to me and told me that she just got out of a relationship with a woman who had wanted her to hit her during sex. She was so fucked up , she said. Came from a background of abuse. I had to tell her I couldn’t do that to her, I could never be that person . She seemed to be asking me for a species of advice, so I told her the only thing that occurred to me: I didn’t know this other woman, so all that seemed clear to me was that their perversities were not compatible.

Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people . This is a crucial point to remember, and also a difficult one. It reminds us that there is difference right where we may be looking for, and expecting, communion.

At twenty-eight weeks, I was hospitalized for some bleeding. While discussing a possible placental issue, one doctor quipped, “We don’t want that, because while that would likely be OK for the baby, it might not be OK for you.” By pressing a bit, I figured out that she meant, in that particular scenario, the baby would likely live, but I might not.

Now, I loved my hard-won baby-to-be fiercely, but I was in no way ready to bow out of this vale of tears for his survival. Nor do I think those who love me would have looked too kindly on such a decision — a decision that doctors elsewhere on the globe are mandated to make, and that the die-hard antiabortionists are going for here.

Once I was riding in a cab to JFK, passing by that amazingly overpacked cemetery along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (Calvary?). My cabdriver gazed out wistfully at the headstones packed onto the hill and said, Many of those graves are the graves of children. Likely so , I returned with a measure of fatigued trepidation, the result of years of fielding unwanted monologues from cabdrivers about how women should live or behave. It is a good thing when children die , he said. They go straight to Paradise, because they are the innocents .

During my sleepless night under placental observation, this monologue came back to me. And I wondered if, instead of working to fulfill the dream of worldwide enforced childbearing, abortion foes could instead get excited about all the innocent, unborn souls going straight from the abortion table to Paradise, no detour necessary into this den of iniquity, which eventually makes whores of us all (not to mention Social Security recipients). Could that get them off our backs once and for all?

Never in my life have I felt more prochoice than when I was pregnant. And never in my life have I understood more thoroughly, and been more excited about, a life that began at conception. Feminists may never make a bumper sticker that says IT’S A CHOICE AND A CHILD, but of course that’s what it is, and we know it. We don’t need to wait for George Carlin to spill the beans. We’re not idiots; we understand the stakes. Sometimes we choose death. Harry and I sometimes joke that women should get way beyond twenty weeks — maybe even up to two days after birth — to decide if they want to keep the baby. (Joke, OK?)

I have saved many mementos for Iggy, but I admit to tossing away an envelope with about twenty-five ultrasound photos of his in-utero penis and testicles, which a chirpy, blond pony-tailed technician printed out for me every time I had an ultrasound. Boy, he’s sure proud of his stuff , she would say, before jabbing Print. Or, He really likes to show it off!

Just let him wheel around in his sac for Christ’s sake, I thought, grimly folding the genital triptychs into my wallet, week after week. Let him stay oblivious — for the first and last time, perhaps — to the task of performing a self for others, to the fact that we develop, even in utero, in response to a flow of projections and reflections ricocheting off us. Eventually, we call that snowball a self ( Argo ).