* * *
It is often suggested, in the modern Western world, that the new, improved relationship between mothers and their teenage and/or adult daughters is like that of two especially close girlfriends who share everything: secrets, gossip and clothes (the long-running Netflix series, Gilmore Girls, set in ‘storybook’ Connecticut, about the relationship of Lorelai Gilmore and Rory, her teenage daughter, would be a prime example).12 As if all secrets were above board, or commodities to be passed round like a shared gourmet dish. When I started down the path of adopting my daughter, the first question on the form I was asked to fill in was: ‘What are your family secrets?’ I refused to answer it (just one of several moments that nearly brought the whole process to an abrupt halt). Surely, I suggested, a family secret should be respected as such? You would be amazed, the social worker insisted with barely concealed glee, how much invaluable information we get in response to that question. It had not occurred to her that a potential mother who betrays her family secrets as the price to pay for a child cannot be trusted with anything. The assumption was – and this endured throughout the whole process – that minds and hearts are fully open for inspection, that there are no boundaries between what can and cannot be said. This vision of a borderless world was completely contradicted by the obstacles placed in the path of any woman wanting to adopt from overseas, which social services grudgingly accepted while doing everything they could to block and discourage, since it was basically seen as a form of immigration, bringing unwanted future citizens, orphans as they were, to the UK.
Within months of bringing my daughter back from China – to say I was ecstatic would be an understatement – I headed off to Paris to introduce her proudly to some of my oldest, dearest friends, only to be turned back at the airport. I had the adoption papers with me and my baby was now entered in my passport, although she did not yet have a British passport of her own. It had taken more than two years, and an obduracy I had no idea I was capable of, to be accepted as an adopting mother. But this did not stop the border officials announcing they would not let me through as they could not be sure that I was not planning to leave her in France – to abandon an already abandoned baby – as an illegal migrant who might in time start claiming housing and work benefits (she was not yet one year old).
A few days later I waited in a queue at the Home Office to secure permission to travel, surrounded by Africans and Asians, would-be fellow travellers all falling outside the Schengen Agreement that allows free movement between the designated countries of Europe. That agreement has been threatened by the present migration crisis, as if even then, and despite the manifestly racist discrimination of Schengen that I had seen with my own eyes, Europe had failed to police its borders fiercely enough (the borders whose policing will come to be at the heart of the 2016 Brexit vote to leave the EU). When my name was finally called, I was ushered to the front of the queue, only to find, sickeningly, that it was because they had got wind of me as a white, British, professional, tax-paying citizen, unlike the Africans and Asians who, as some of them told me, had been hovering for days on end in the hall.
At the airport, I had wanted to scream at the officials: ‘You do not know this baby’s history.’ But then, I realised, neither – fully – did I. Nor would I, ever. It was and still is a crime to abandon a baby in China, even if the practice was precipitated by the government’s own one-child policy that, in the absence of proper pension provision, made parents desperate for a boy whose future wife would tend to them in their later years (whereas a married daughter would leave the home). Which means that, with very few exceptions, none of us who adopted from China in the early 1990s would ever be able to uncover the history of our children, other than being able to tell our daughters over time that their biological parents, far from casually abandoning their infant, had taken the utmost care, and indeed placed themselves at risk of arrest, by leaving her in a public place where she would immediately be found. But, for the most part, my daughter does not know – she has accepted that she cannot know – the story of her own past, although somewhere she must surely be carrying it within her.
Our two founding stories could not be more different, even if a tale of migration shadows both. Yet what each of us is faced with – what any mother, any child, is faced with – is a past that will not yield its secrets willingly or without a struggle, if at all. Mothers and daughters cannot tell each other everything, because they do not know – nobody knows – everything about themselves: not about their own lives, or the secrets of their families, or that part of history weighing on their shoulders that is too hard to communicate. All of which is simply another way of saying that one of the most unrealistic demands made of mothers is that they should be so inhumanly confident and sure of themselves.
Conversations between a mother and child can be as rich as they are unforetold. But the image of a mother and daughter of a certain class giggling over their latest purchases, even, apparently, over the details of their sex lives, is for me a self-deception, complicit with the false cheer, the exhortation to be happy, through which a difficult world buries its true nature. As if mother and daughter alike were meant to behave as a compliant child, the child who, in Winnicott’s account, is too scared to be properly ruthless and dare not make proper use of her own mother. Or to put it another way, confidence is a gift, but the version of confidence a mother is mostly asked to instil in her children in the consumer-driven societies of the Western world is based on a pack of lies.
* * *
Among its other problems, the exhortation to be happy is, literally, a killjoy. Joy is not always possible. Like all forms of intimacy, it relies on at least a modicum of freedom. In relation to mothers, joy – as in ‘the joys of motherhood’ – can be a corrupt term. Buchi Emecheta’s ironically named novel The Joys of Motherhood (1979) opens with a mother whose tribulations in a polygamous Nigerian tribal community have driven her to attempt suicide.13 But if joy is a privilege, it is also something for which you cannot prepare yourself, as though it were a garment that you first try on for size; unlike happiness, which tends to present itself as a habit of mind, devoutly to be wished, a prize possession to be sought and gained, an achievement or resting place.14
None of this comes near the radical disorientation of joy, certainly nowhere near the experience I have had as a mother. Resting in the afternoon while my baby was asleep, in the days after bringing her home, I would suddenly jolt awake at the sensation that she was lying on top of me, only to realise that she was in fact inside me – a close-on crazy thought of overwhelming delight – whereupon I would drift back into sleep. I was going through an inverse pregnancy, moving backwards in time, letting her in, or rather, it felt, her claiming her place as she crawled inside my body and into my blood-stream. Had anyone told me in advance that this was an experience common to adopting mothers – not that I had heard of it before or indeed have I since – I have no doubt I would have lain awake waiting, fruitlessly, for it to happen.
I was being turned inside out. This, I suggest, is the chief property of joy, certainly of maternal joy, which shatters the carapace of selfhood. Nor is it restricted to mothering alone. I have a friend who, with great reluctance, sent packing her passionate married lover of several years because, in the end, she could not bear him heading off after lovemaking of such intensity that she felt her body was opening to the winds, each and every nerve raw to the elements, something she had not known since giving birth to her two children more than ten years ago. And before being shocked at this analogy, we might remember the erotic charge of breastfeeding as one of the best-kept secrets of mothering (and Freud’s suggestion that the prototype for all later sexual pleasure was the sated baby at the mother’s breast).
‘The child brings joy,’ writes Simone de Beauvoir, ‘only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without reversion to herself, seeks to go beyond her own experience.’15 Joy is not, as we have seen, a word
most readily associated with the writing of de Beauvoir, certainly not in relation to motherhood. But here, in one of its rare appearances, it is clearly describing a form of dispossession. Whether in sexual passion, giving birth or being a mother, joy is fleeting, as they say, not so much because it doesn’t last, as because you can only experience it by letting go of something else. This is not, however, some idea of maternal sacrifice – the last thing de Beauvoir would ever promote or advocate. Remember that, in her eyes, it was a fatal mistake for a mother to believe she must do, and be, ‘all’ for her child (the flip side of this delusion is thinking you own your child, which turns a mother into a man asserting his property rights). It was, after all, the judgement of Solomon that the true mother was the one who would release her baby to a false claimant rather than tear the baby in two – an act that, one might argue, only a bereaved mother who had already lost her child would, in a fit of jealous rage, insanely contemplate.
In the hands of de Beauvoir, I suggested, motherhood became the place where a philosophy in thrall to self-mastery reached its limits and started to disintegrate. In this de Beauvoir is not far from Elena Ferrante, whose vision of motherhood, out of which for her all writing is born, dissolves the world’s borders. As a child, Ferrante had watched her mother fall to pieces physically and mentally under the pressures of being a wife and mother. Seizing on such moments, Ferrante transmutes them into an erotic, cosmic dreamscape: ‘a swarm of bees approaching above the motionless treetops; the sudden eddy in a slow body of water … a bright-coloured explosion of sounds … of butterflies with sonorous wings.’16 But, we should recall, it was only by plunging into a world that has lost all contour and plays havoc with decency – a world to which Ferrante’s mothers have their own special access – that she was able to produce such moments of ecstasy in her writing.
To all of these questions of boundaries and possession adoption gives its own unique hue. An adopting mother knows somewhere deep down that she does not own her child, something I have always seen as a caution, a truth and a gift. Not everyone, of course, is of the same view. ‘How could you do it?’ one friend asked me as he clutched his newborn to his chest. ‘I wanted,’ he admitted with just a touch of embarrassment, ‘to see my DNA grow and spread, my biological heritage and all that.’ ‘But to nurture another’s baby is to be part of the DNA of the whole world,’ I retorted, with perhaps an unfortunate tinge of self-righteousness. ‘My daughter and I belong as much to the biology and growing of the earth as you.’ The question, as we have seen so many times, is who you feel linked to and where you draw the line. During the adoption process we had to engage in role play, at one point being asked to imagine ourselves as the biological mother of our future baby. One man – older, with a very young wife – refused. ‘What has she got to do with us?’ he asked. ‘After all, she left her baby. Why should I think or care about her?’ From where we were in the process, I knew that the baby who would come to be my daughter was most likely about to be born, to a mother who would leave her through no fault of her own. I also knew that, faced with the abandonment of a baby girl, as a feminist I should fume and fret and rage. ‘I think about her every day,’ I replied. Even though her act would allow me – joyously – to become the mother I had always wanted to be, as I spoke all I felt was sorrow.
* * *
To finish with two moments taken from opposite ends of the earth.
In the early 1990s, at the Kaiser Medical Center, Los Angeles, Susan Stryker, trans activist and writer, held her pregnant lover between her spread legs as she gave birth, gripping Stryker so hard she left bruises on her thigh. As she felt a child move out of another woman’s body, ‘a jumble of dark unsolicited feelings’ emerged ‘wordlessly from some back corner’ of her mind.17 The medical staff were clueless as to how the various members of this ‘little tribe’ all related to each other: mother, biological father, their personal midwife, the mother’s sister, Stryker and her son from an earlier heterosexual – sort of – marriage. ‘Step by increasingly intimate step,’ Stryker found herself participating in the ritual of transforming consciousness that heralded this new birth, ‘a profound opening, as psychic as it is corporeal’.18 When she later returned to her home, she burst open – opening is key – ‘like a wet paper bag’, spilling the ‘emotional contents of my life through the hands I cupped like a sieve over my face’.19 It is agony, not least because of the mourning it provokes for the earlier marriage that had produced her son. But it is also ‘simple joy bubbling out, wave after wave’, as well as a moment of total dispossession, not unlike others we have seen, as she prepares ‘to let go of whatever was deepest within’.20
It is an extraordinary piece of writing, a tribute to the moment of giving birth as an experience into which anyone can enter, can lose and find themselves. Perhaps – although Stryker herself does not quite say this – it is only the radical disorientation of transgender that makes such an exuberant and painful crossing possible. Far from the air-brushed, sanitised image of mothering we have so often seen, and miles from the world of entrenched borders, which is where this book started, Stryker suggests that, in relation to this founding act of motherhood, what matters is how close you can get. Another way of putting this is that in an ideal world, everyone, whatever the impulses driving them hard and fast in the opposite direction, would be capable of thinking of themselves as mothers.
Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother (1998) offers a no less unprecedented crossing of paths in the name of mothers, though it belongs to a different world. We last encountered Magona through her story of the mother who, driven from her home in search of work under apartheid, had to abandon her babies. A few years later, in 1993, with the end of apartheid barely a year away, the young white American campaigner and human rights activist Amy Biehl was killed in the township of Gugulethu, to the cry of ‘One settler, one bullet!’ Her death sent shock waves through the community, indeed throughout the country as a whole, although it was impossible not to register that it was her whiteness that made her killing – unlike the untold deaths of blacks across the nation – such an outrage. Gugulethu was Magona’s township. Mother to Mother, her acclaimed first novel, is imagined from the point of view of the mother of the boy who was indicted for the killing, and addresses itself to the mother of Amy Biehl. Far from the domestic cosiness ironically coded in the title (From Mother to Mother: Recipes from a Family Kitchen is the title of a cookbook published in the US in 2017), Magona is asking a question as if the future of her nation, and not just her nation, depended on it: how could two such different mothers possibly listen, or have anything to say, to each other?
I end with this book because it condenses so many of the themes that have been my focus here. It places motherhood firmly in the context of a material life, scarred with a history of racial inequality and injustice (the forced removal of the Cape blacks to Gugulethu in 1958 forms the historical background to the novel). It gives a mother the right to her own memories and the complexity of her inner mind, even when that includes the unbearable thought that, as well as loving, she has always hated her son. First, because of the agonies of his birth – ‘pain with the savageness of the jaws of a shark’ – which then, only a few moments later, transmutes into the most intense love and joy: ‘all infusing light-headedness … Joy, pure and simple.’21 And then in response to the loss of her own educational ambitions, ambitions that she had passionately nurtured until she became a wife and mother, when – abandoned by the father of her child – they turned to dust. From the moment of his conception, her son, Mxolisi, is sheer upheaval: ‘his implanting himself inside me; unreasonably and totally destroying the me I was’.22 (At moments like these, the novel reads like an updated, politically and racially inflected version of Winnicott’s eighteen reasons a mother has to hate her baby.)
Tracing the inhumanity of the apartheid regime, she gives her son’s violent act – which she abhors – the dignity of a history. But she also tracks his troubled soul, thereby ho
lding both history and his own uniquely personal trajectory to account in one and the same breath (as if to say: it is the responsibility of an unjust world, it is also mine). Her son was the ‘sharpened arrow of the wrath of his race’, but he was also a boy who as a child had once betrayed his dearest friends during a police raid on their homes, and who then went mute for more than two years after he stood there watching as the two boys were dragged out and shot.23
This mother is also a dissenter, deeply attuned to the political dilemmas of her life. You could say that, even if it is the last thing she would have wished for, the public nature of her life as a mother is what the killing brings home to her. She is fierce in her critique of the township necklacing of those believed to be collaborators with the apartheid regime; she rejects the cry that all whites are dogs. And her body, the maternal body we have so often seen either degraded or refined out of existence in the popular imagination, is made palpable on the page, when she is giving birth, and then again – no less powerfully – when, walking into her shack, it dawns on her that her son is the killer: ‘Slowly, carefully, my body gone all liquid, I watched myself pour it onto the chair.’24 Remember Sethe, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, running round the side of the house to empty her bladder when she first recognises the ghost of the baby daughter she had murdered, rather than allow her to be enslaved. Remember, again, the mother from Magona’s earlier story, expressing her breast milk onto the track. And Stryker, worlds apart, cupping her hands like a sieve over her face.
Throughout all this, the narrator maintains the conversation between herself and the mother of Amy Biehl. The novel is that conversation:
Your daughter. The imperfect atonement of her race.
My son. The perfect host of the demons of his.25
Her task as a mother is to call up the legacy of her child, and – across barriers human and inhuman – the legacy of the dead child whose mother is facing her. Near the end of the novel, she addresses her interlocutor even more directly: ‘But now, my Sister-Mother, do I help him hide? Deliver him to the police? Get him a lawyer? Will that mean I do not feel your sorrow for your slain daughter? Am I your enemy? Are you mine? What wrong have I done you … or you me?’26
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