“Hummingbird at a flower”. That is…one metaphor. I typed it weeks ago at the top of this very document, hoping to come back to it. The metaphor that comes to mind this morning instead is “lamprey suck-flaying a fish”.
H is still nursing at 22 months; I didn’t think this would happen, but then again I didn’t think it wouldn’t. My approach to breastfeeding has been inertial. He found his latch within the first few days of his life, I happened to have an adequate supply, I didn’t leave home for work so I didn’t have to pump, and so here we are, H nursing on and off all day, and nursing to sleep every day during our epic co-sleeping naptimes.
These naptimes another example of my “take the path of least resistance” mothering style. This is how we ended up co-napping and not even close to weaning during the pandemic. It was just easier.
But it doesn’t feel easy when he uses me as a drinking fountain at play, or a pacifier in sleep, or when he takes hours to wind down enough to nap while I’m trapped in a dark bedroom fending off minor disasters of toppling lamps and spilled water. Not after weeks and weeks of it with no more than his night’s sleep off.
Sometimes not even that. We had a power outage last night, and the cessation of his noise machine woke him. Who knew how long it would be, so in he came. Clambering and sliding under the blankets, pulling and contorting new stretch marks into my breasts (which I thank for their flexibility). Pushing up my shirt and instructing me to hold it up, no on both sides please, so he could find the other breast and investigate it as he drank. Scratching me as he went, so I took his little thumb and bit off the too-long nail, missed last time I clipped.
I dozed. Woke in the dark to H still busily nursing and his fingernail, little scrap of him, still in my mouth. So tired that ugliness coated the world around me, anything my mind touched ugly, broken. I wondered what the laws were for unemployed mothers giving up custody. They couldn’t force me to take care of him, could they?
But then again, there we were eating each other. There we were literally ingesting parts of each other. My leaving. What a joke. What a fiasco. I keep trying to write about the fact that mothers become literal chimeras after birth. Scraps of fetal DNA floating around in us for years. Lodging in our brains. Some researchers think it causes cancer. Some think it saves us from Alzheimer’s. Regardless, I contain him.
He contains me too. I’m reading about generational trauma, cycles of abuse, all the ways in which we ruin each other. One psychologist says “good” parenting works as the placenta worked, to take in and filter toxins from the womb.
If good parents—mothers, inescapably—are a life-giving, filtering organ of support, “bad” mothers make their children their “poison containers”, discarding their negativity into them instead. Such an incisive image. Such a searing one. If it weren’t for the undercurrent of misogyny I’d be seduced. If it weren’t for the fact that being a good mother in this case means being a self-negating mother.
But the metaphor sticks with me anyway, beyond the mother-child dyad. Because I believe it. That in my worst imaginings a family is just a group of scapegoated poison containers. That we inject our self-loathing into each other, that sometimes all we can see in another’s face is our own void staring back.
This feels especially true right now, when our worlds have shrunk. How easy it’s been, lately, to revert. The now-closed home become the reflection of my own dirty, dingy, exhausted mind. How easy to inject poison into those who are now always there, instead of defusing or diffusing the emotion. I’m being purposefully vague here. Because this isn’t about my particular wounds. It’s about the pain of carrying them around, and the pain of re-inflicting them.
“Man hands on misery to man”. The only poem I can recall in its entirety anymore. Partly because I used to teach it for meter and prosody, but mostly because I adore an incredibly dark poem.
I envy joyous poems & their poets—you know the ones, because they’re rightly popular, all these geniuses able to find the uplift, to sing it strong. But I’m at home in the dark stuff. Which is how I prefer to read Larkin, even with the sing-song insouciance and humor of it, I zero in on the trauma, of course. For the uninitiated, here:
This Be The Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Larkin was likely thinking of nurture, not nature, when he said “they fill you with the faults they had.” But even when we don’t directly re-enact our own wounds onto our children, the traces are still there, trauma inherited; he may as well have been talking about the reverberations of trauma in our epigenetics. The vision of our unhappy lineages “deepen[ing] like a coastal shelf” comes to me in the still-dark. Murky water sparking with corrosive little add-ons to our slowly spinning helixes.
And of course, then, the nature becomes the nurture, and on and on. How far back must I peer to find the root of my unhappiness, my addictions, the root of my short temper and rage, the root of my quick-to-overwhelm personality.
Or, more fearfully, how far will these press forward from me. Especially if I take the path of least resistance. How easy it’s been, lately, to growl, exhausted animal, and shamble down the well-trod paths. Paths trod by repetition, by chemical markers, by memory.
H is this open faucet streaming life, and I’m terrified that we will wrench him closed. I’m even more terrified that what’s streaming out will start carrying heavier and heavier toxins. That it’s all already lurking in the depths.
And so. What a horror. To pre-ruin your child not only with your bad genes, not only your bad actions, but the bad actions done to you even before their birth. My favorite novel, The Shining (yes, for all its overwritten faults) finds its worst terror in that dark reverberation. Those dark birthrights. Jack shuffling down the halls, turned into his father, turned into the hotel, turned into his addictions.
I am thinking of you, reader, in hoping to think my way towards something beautiful to end with. But no image of H smiling in the sun today, no snow shining like fire in the votive of a lilac bud, no light-hungry tulip unfurling air towards me on the deck can wipe that away, not truthfully. Not without it staining through, ugly palimpsest. Like how, at night, I imagine H’s cry and it joins with the rush of blood in my ears, is as constant, embedded.
At best it’s a can’t//must scenario. We can’t go on we must go on. He’s my last hope and he’s the container I pour my (our, our, our) toxicity into. Bad mother, source of sustenance. Little lamprey, erstwhile hummingbird. Scrap of me, best of me.
