Sixth, seventh month … the first strawberries, the first roses … Can I call pregnancy anything but a long holiday? One forgets the anguish of the term, one doesn’t forget a unique long holiday; I’ve forgotten none of it. I particularly recall that sleep used to overwhelm me at capricious hours, and that I would be seized, as in my childhood, by the desire to sleep on the ground, on the grass, on warm straw. Unique “craving,” healthy craving …
Towards the end I had the air of a rat that drags a stolen egg. Uncomfortable in myself, I would be too tired to go to bed … Even then, the weight and the tiredness did not interrupt my long holiday. I was borne on a shield of privilege and solicitude.
This happy pregnancy was called by one of Colette’s friends “a man’s pregnancy.” And she seemed to be the epitome of these women who valiantly support their state because they are not absorbed in it. She continued her work as a writer at the same time. “The child showed signs of coming first and I screwed on the top of my pen.”
Other women are more weighed down; they mull indefinitely over their new importance. With just a little encouragement they adopt masculine myths: they juxtapose the lucidity of the mind to the fertile night of Life, clear consciousness to the mysteries of interiority, sterile freedom to the weight of this womb there in its enormous facticity; the future mother smells of humus and earth, spring and root; when she dozes, her sleep is that of chaos where worlds ferment. There are those more forgetful of self who are especially enchanted with the treasure of life growing in them. This is the joy Cécile Sauvage expresses in her poems in L’âme en bourgeon (The Soul in Bud):
You belong to me as dawn to the plain
Around you my life is a warm fleece
Where your chilly limbs grow in secret.
And further on:
Oh you whom I fearfully cuddle in fleecy cotton
Little soul in bud attached to my flower
With a piece of my heart I fashion your heart
Oh my cottony fruit, little moist mouth.*
And in a letter to her husband:
It’s funny, it seems to me I am watching the formation of a tiny planet and that I am kneading its frail globe. I have never been so close to life. I have never so felt I am sister of the earth with all vegetation and sap. My feet walk on the earth as on a living beast. I dream of the day full of flutes, of awakened bees, of dew because here he is bucking and stirring in me. If you knew what springtime freshness and what youth this soul in bud puts in my heart. And to think this is Pierrot’s infant soul and that in the night of my being it is elaborating two big eyes of infinity like his.
In contrast are women who are very flirtatious, who grasp themselves essentially as erotic objects, who love themselves in the beauty of their bodies, and who suffer from seeing themselves deformed, ungainly, incapable of arousing desire. Pregnancy does not at all appear to them as a celebration or an enrichment, but as a diminishing of their self.
In My Life by Isadora Duncan one can read, among other observations:
The child asserted itself now, more and more. It was strange to see my beautiful marble body softened and broken and stretched and deformed … As I walked beside the sea, I sometimes felt an excess of strength and prowess, and I thought this creature would be mine, mine alone, but on other days … I felt myself some poor animal in a mighty trap … With alternate hope and despair, I often thought of the pilgrimage of my childhood, my youth, my wanderings … my discoveries in Art, and they were as a misty, far-away prologue, leading up to this—the before-birth of a child. What any peasant woman could have!… I began to be assailed with all sorts of fears. In vain I told myself that every woman had children … It was all in the course of life, etc. I was, nevertheless, conscious of fear. Of what? Certainly not of death, nor even of pain—some unknown fear, of what I did not know … More and more my lovely body bulged under my astonished gaze … Where was my lovely, youthful naiad form? Where my ambition? My fame? Often, in spite of myself, I felt very miserable and defeated. This game with the giant Life was too much. But then I thought of the child to come, and all such painful thoughts ceased … Helpless, cruel hours of waiting in the night … With what a price we pay for the glory of motherhood.
In the last stage of pregnancy begins the separation between mother and child. Women experience his first movement differently, his kick knocking at the doors of the world, knocking against the wall of the womb that encloses him away from the world. Some women welcome and marvel at this signal announcing the presence of an autonomous life; others think of themselves with repugnance as the receptacle of a foreign individual. Once again, the union of fetus and maternal body is disturbed: the uterus descends, the woman has a feeling of pressure, tension, respiratory trouble. She is possessed this time not by the indistinct species but by this child who is going to be born; until then, he was just an image, a hope; he becomes heavily present. His reality creates new problems. Every passage is anguishing: the birth appears particularly frightening. When the woman comes close to term, all the infantile terrors come back to life; if, from a feeling of guilt, she thinks she is cursed by her mother, she persuades herself she is going to die or that the child will die. In War and Peace, Tolstoy painted in the character of Lise one of these infantile women who see a death sentence in birth: and she does die.
Depending on the case, the birth takes many different forms: the mother wants both to keep in her womb the treasure of her flesh that is a precious piece of her self and to get rid of an intruder; she wants finally to hold her dream in her hands, but she is afraid of new responsibilities this materialization will create: either desire can win, but she is often divided. Often, also, she does not come to the anguishing ordeal with a determined heart: she intends to prove to herself and to her family—her mother, her husband—that she is capable of surmounting it without help; but at the same time she resents the world, life, and her family for the suffering inflicted on her, and in protest she adopts a passive attitude. Independent women—matrons or masculine women—attach great importance to playing an active role in the period preceding and even during the birth; very infantile women let themselves passively go to the midwife, to their mother; some take pride in not crying out; others refuse to follow any recommendations. On the whole, it can be said that in this crisis they express their deepest attitude to the world in general, and to their motherhood in particular: they are stoic, resigned, demanding, imperious, revolted, inert, tense … These psychological dispositions have an enormous influence on the length and difficulty of the birth (which also, of course, depends on purely organic factors). What is significant is that normally woman—like some domesticated female animals—needs help to accomplish the function to which nature destines her; there are peasants in rough conditions and shamed young unmarried mothers who give birth alone: but their solitude often brings about the death of the child or for the mother incurable illnesses. At the very moment woman completes the realization of her feminine destiny, she is still dependent: which also proves that in the human species nature can never be separated from artifice. With respect to nature, the conflict between the interest of the feminine person and that of the species is so acute it often brings about the death of either the mother or the child: human interventions by doctors and surgeons have considerably reduced—and even almost eliminated—the accidents that were previously so frequent. Anesthetic methods are in the process of giving the lie to the biblical affirmation “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children”; they are commonly used in America and are beginning to spread to France; in March 1949, a decree has just made them compulsory in England.13
It is difficult to know exactly what suffering these methods save women from. The fact that delivery sometimes lasts more than twenty-four hours and sometimes is completed in two or three hours prevents any generalization. For some women, childbirth is martyrdom. Such is the case of Isadora Duncan: she lived through her pregnancy in anxiety, and psychic resistance undoubtedly aggravated the pains o
f childbirth even more. She writes:
Talk about the Spanish Inquisition! No woman who has borne a child would have to fear it. It must have been a mild sport in comparison. Relentless, cruel, knowing no release, no pity, this terrible, unseen genie had me in his grip, and was, in continued spasms, tearing my bones and my sinews apart. They say such suffering is soon forgotten. All I have to reply is that I have only to shut my eyes and I hear again my shrieks and groans as they were then.
On the other hand, some women think it is a relatively easy ordeal to bear. A small number experience sensual pleasure in it. One woman writes:
I am so strongly sexed that even childbirth means to me a sexual act … I had a very pretty “madame” for a nurse. She bathed me and gave me my vaginal douches. This was enough for me—it kept me in such a high state of sexual agitation that I trembled.14
Some women say they felt creative power during childbirth; they truly accomplished a voluntary and productive piece of work; many others feel passive, a suffering and tortured instrument.
The mother’s first relations with the newborn vary as well. Some women suffer from this emptiness they now feel in their bodies: it seems to them that someone has stolen their treasure. Cécile Sauvage writes:
I am the hive without speech
Whose swarm has flown into the air
No longer do I bring back the beakful
Of my blood to your frail body
My being is a closed-up house
From which they have removed a body.
And more:
No longer are you mine alone. Your head
Already reflects other skies.
And also:
He is born, I have lost my young beloved
Now that he is born, I am alone, I feel
Terrifying within me the void of my blood.*
Yet, at the same time, there is a wondrous curiosity in every young mother. It is a strange miracle to see, to hold a living being formed in and coming out of one’s self. But what part has the mother really had in the extraordinary event that brings a new existence into the world? She does not know. The being would not exist without her, and yet he escapes her. There is a surprising sadness in seeing him outside, cut off from herself. And there is almost always a disappointment. The woman would like to feel him hers as surely as her own hand: but everything he feels is closed up inside him, he is opaque, impenetrable, apart; she does not even recognize him, since she does not know him; she lived her pregnancy without him: she has no common past with this little stranger; she expected to be familiar right away; but no, he is a newcomer, and she is stupefied by the indifference with which she receives him. In her pregnancy reveries he was an image, he was infinite, and the mother mentally played out her future motherhood; now he is a tiny, finite individual, he is really there, contingent, fragile, demanding. The joy that he is finally here, quite real, is mingled with the regret that this is all he is.
After the initial separation, many young mothers regain an intimate animal relationship with their children through nursing; this is a more stressful fatigue than that of pregnancy, but it allows the nursing mother to prolong the “vacation” state of peace and plenitude she relished in pregnancy. Colette Audry says of one of her heroines:
When the baby was suckling, there was really nothing else to do, and it could last for hours; she did not even think of what would come after. She could only wait for him to release her breast like a big bee.15
But there are women who cannot nurse, and in whom the surprising indifference of the first hours continues until they regain concrete bonds with the child. This was the case, among others, with Colette, who was not able to nurse her daughter and who describes her first maternal feelings with her customary sincerity:
The outcome is the contemplation of a new person who has entered the house without coming in from outside … Did I devote enough love to my contemplation? I should not like to say so. True, I had the capacity—I still have—for wonder. I exercised it on that assembly of marvels which is the newborn. Her nails, resembling in their transparency the convex scale of the pink shrimp—the soles of her feet, which have reached us without touching the ground … The light plumage of her lashes, lowered over her cheek, interposed between the scenes of earth and the bluish dream of her eye … The small sex, a barely incised almond, a bivalve precisely closed, lip to lip … But the meticulous admiration I devoted to my daughter—I did not call it, I did not feel it as love. I waited … I did not derive from these scenes, so long awaited in my life, the vigilance and emulation of besotted mothers. When, then, would be vouchsafed to me the sign that was to mark my second, more difficult, violation? I had to accept that an accumulation of warnings, of furtive, jealous outbursts, of false premonitions—and even of real ones—the pride in managing an existence of which I was the humble creditor, the somewhat perfidious awareness of giving the other love a lesson in modesty, would eventually change me into an ordinary mother. Yet I only regained my equanimity when intelligible speech blossomed on those ravishing lips, when recognition, malice, and even tenderness turned a run-of-the-mill baby into a little girl, and a little girl into my daughter!16
There are also many mothers who are terrified of their new responsibilities. During pregnancy, they had only to abandon themselves to their flesh; no initiative was demanded of them. Now in front of them is a person who has rights to them. Some women happily caress their babies while they are still in the hospital, still gay and carefree, but upon returning home, they start to regard them as burdens. Even nursing brings them no joy, and, on the contrary, they worry about ruining their breasts; they resent feeling their cracked breasts, their painful glands; the baby’s mouth hurts them: he seems to be sucking their strength, life, and happiness from them. He inflicts a harsh servitude on them, and he is no longer part of his mother: he is like a tyrant; she feels hostility for this little individual who threatens her flesh, her freedom, her whole self.
Many other factors are involved. The woman’s relations with her mother are still of great importance. Helene Deutsch cites the case of a young nursing mother whose milk dried up whenever her mother came to see her; she often solicits help, but is jealous of the care someone else gives to the baby and feels depressed about this. Her relations with the infant’s father and the feelings he himself fosters also have a strong influence. A whole set of economic and sentimental considerations define the infant as a burden, a shackle, or a liberation, a jewel, a form of security. There are cases where hostility becomes outright hatred resulting in extreme neglect or bad treatment. Most often the mother, conscious of her duties, combats this hostility; she feels remorse that gives rise to anxieties prolonging the apprehensions of pregnancy. All psychoanalysts agree that mothers who are obsessed about harming their children, or who imagine horrible accidents, feel an enmity toward them they force themselves to repress. What is nonetheless remarkable and distinguishes this relationship from all other human relationships is that in the beginning the child himself does not play a part: his smiles, his babbling, have no meaning other than the one his mother gives them; it depends on her, not him, whether he seems charming, unique, bothersome, ordinary, or obnoxious. This is why cold, unsatisfied, melancholic women who expect a child to be a companion, or to provide warmth and excitement that draw them out of themselves, are always deeply disappointed. Like the “passage” into puberty, sexual initiation, and marriage, motherhood generates morose disappointment for subjects who are waiting for an external event to renew and justify their lives. This is the sentiment found in Sophia Tolstoy. She writes:
“These past nine months have been practically the worst in my life,” to say nothing of the tenth.*
She tries in vain to express a conventional joy; we are struck by her sadness and fear of responsibilities:
It is all over, the baby has been born and my ordeal is at last at an end. I have risen from my bed and am gradually entering into life again, but with a constant feeling of fear and dread
about my baby and especially my husband. Something within me seems to have collapsed, and I sense that whatever it is it will always be there to torment me; it is probably the fear of not doing my duty towards my family … I have become insincere, for I am frightened by the womb’s vulgar love for its offspring, and frightened by my somewhat unnatural love for my husband … I sometimes comfort myself with the thought that most people see this love of one’s husband and children as a virtue … But how strong these maternal feelings are!… He is Lyovochka’s child, that’s why I love him.
But we know very well that she only exhibits so much love for her husband because she does not love him; this antipathy marks the child conceived in embraces that disgusted her.
Katherine Mansfield describes the hesitation of a young mother who loves her husband but is repulsed by his caresses. For her children she feels tenderness and at the same time has an impression of emptiness she sadly interprets as complete indifference. Linda, resting in the garden next to her newborn, thinks about her husband, Stanley:
Well, she was married to him. And what was more she loved him. Not the Stanley whom everyone saw, not the everyday one; but a timid, sensitive, innocent Stanley who knelt down every night to say his prayers … But the trouble was … she saw her Stanley so seldom. There were glimpses, moments, breathing spaces of calm, but all the rest of the time it was like living in a house that couldn’t be cured of the habit of catching on fire, on a ship that got wrecked every day. And it was always Stanley who was in the thick of the danger. Her whole time was spent in rescuing him, and restoring him, and calming him down, and listening to his story. And what was left of her time was spent in the dread of having children … It was all very well to say it was the common lot of women to bear children. It wasn’t true. She, for one, could prove that wrong. She was broken, made weak, her courage was gone, through childbearing. And what made it doubly hard to bear was, she did not love her children. It was useless pretending … No, it was as though a cold breath had chilled her through and through on each of those awful journeys; she had no warmth left to give them. As to the boy—well, thank Heaven, mother had taken him; he was mother’s, or Beryl’s, or anybody’s who wanted him. She had hardly held him in her arms. She was so indifferent about him that as he lay there … Linda glanced down … There was something so quaint, so unexpected about that smile that Linda smiled herself. But she checked herself and said to the boy coldly, “I don’t like babies.” “Don’t like babies?” The boy couldn’t believe her. “Don’t like me?” He waved his arms foolishly at his mother. Linda dropped off her chair on to the grass. “Why do you keep on smiling?” she said severely. “If you knew what I was thinking about, you wouldn’t” … Linda was so astonished at the confidence of this little creature … Ah no, be sincere. That was not what she felt; it was something far different, it was something so new, so … The tears danced in her eyes; she breathed in a small whisper to the boy, “Hallo, my funny!”17
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