Homing Instincts Page 7
I first recognize this in a concrete way when I spot a Facebook post from a Oaxacan midwifery group declaring that vaccination is poisoning an entire generation. I am appalled. I plan on vaccinating my daughter, and the critical importance of vaccination has been highlighted for me via multiple posted warnings in U.S. airports about measles outbreaks. The baby could suffer grave and irreparable damage, or die, if I contract measles while pregnant, but the people responsible for the disease’s resurgence in the United States don’t seem to care about that. I am befuddled by a movement that seems so hostile to the well-being of communities in addition to individuals, and that so consistently refutes and distorts scientific fact.
The fact that Oaxaca’s predominant organization of midwives, the face of natural birth in the city and one of the only alternatives to ob-gyns, is spreading antivaccination propaganda is both depressing and infuriating. I am disturbed that an organization I’d admired and promoted to pregnant friends, an organization in charge of the health of many women and children, not only could be fearmongering with propagandistic generalizations but could actually endanger public health, especially in a place like Oaxaca with its high incidence of unvaccinated street children and poor mothers at risk for disease. I start to leave a comment on the group’s Facebook page saying how disappointed I am, pointing out that this kind of inflammatory rhetoric from blogs that distort scientific fact—or flat-out invent conclusions—is dangerous, and that it is particularly disconcerting to see it on the page of a group dedicated to public health.
The old me would’ve done it without questioning, and simmered the whole night with anger. Of course that part of me thought, this is wrong. It is just flat-out wrong, and besides being wrong it is dangerous. I could write an entire outraged essay about this.
Yet the old anger is dampened by sadness, or compassion, or uncertainty, or all swirled together. I think about all the women I know in Oaxaca who’ve been forced into C-sections that, in the United States, would’ve been entirely unnecessary; the C-section rate in Oaxaca is 80 percent, while in most U.S. hospitals it hovers around 30 percent. Some women in Oaxaca have been told they’d need C-sections because their babies weighed seven pounds. There is a billboard above an ob-gyn’s office near Parque El Llano, depicting the OB in scrubs, with a full medical team, standing over the body of a woman lying prone under white sheets; the OB is holding a screaming newborn upside down by his feet. In many ways hospital birth in Oaxaca resembles hospital birth in the 1950s United States: men aren’t allowed in the delivery room, and women are told that if they move during labor their babies will die—my sister-in-law was told that if she stood up her baby would fall out and could be killed. On top of this, breastfeeding education is spotty at best; one nutritionist told an acquaintance to stop breastfeeding her premature baby at six months because the milk no longer contained any nutrients.
This organization, meanwhile, runs multiple support groups for pregnant women where all of these problems are discussed: unnecessary interventions, the medicalization of birth, the insulting way women are treated, obstetric violence, the myths and dehumanizing practices that make labor so much more difficult for women. The midwives focus on natural home birth and use many of the techniques that I want to use during my labor: movement, the presence of a strong support system including the husband, breathing, trusting the mother’s instinct, not performing any interventions unless medically necessary. They also run a vibrant, thriving breastfeeding group that debunks so much of the widely perpetuated misinformation spread by doctors and pediatricians and challenges stigmas about breastfeeding in public.
And. But. Where do I stand, then? What does it mean to have a stance? What use, necessarily, does it have in this situation? Where does righteousness take me? To reject the group outright and despise them, and also to reject and despise the patriarchal OBs scaring women out of natural birth? All that I am left with is my own arrogance.
I begin to see that each of us carries a passel of fears like the heavy wicker baskets borne by Oaxacan señoras, woven handles slung taut around their foreheads. Some swear by the demonic powers of food additives; others would never let their children loose in a taxi; some loathe soap; others dirt; some heights; others meat.
My old anger is a solipsistic cycle of constant judgment, winnowing the world into a narrower and narrower sliver of acceptability until eventually all that is left is my own lonely, lofty rightness. To let go of it is not necessarily to dissolve in syrupy loving-kindness for, say, the grumpy old man who asks to switch tables when I begin breastfeeding, but to try to extend the gift of complexity to him and everyone whom in the past I might have treated as a pinned, motionless specimen, including myself.
Complexity is the hidden door in the wall, the blurted confession, the patchwork of irony furring our lives. It is the canned tuna I see piled up in a friend’s kitchen. This particular friend is from a tiny village in the Sierra Norte, and he is a major critic of the United States and an advocate of natural, non-GMO, unprocessed fresh food. He loathes supermarkets and their packaging and advertising. He once held a birthday party in which the central dish was the spiny chayote squash that grows on his mom’s property. He and his wife have a newborn baby, and we are at his house to celebrate. There, in the kitchen, stacked high with boxed milk straight from the supermarket, is the canned tuna, on which they have come to rely in the fervor of new parenthood. It is so incongruous I laugh. It echoes the image of another friend of ours, a cynical, sarcastic hipster from Mexico City who works as a curator, decked out in a feathered headdress, being bathed in ceremonial smoke during a Mexica wedding ceremony. Or my husband, the gentlest soul a tiny Mexican pueblo did birth, armed with a rifle in full camo in the rain on an Ohio winter morning. Instead of seeing these as anomalies, I begin to see them as entry points: the places where people become accessible, human, where we find empathy.
Of course, I still judge. Of course I think my decisions are the right ones, of course I take offense every day to injustices small and large. The difference is not the instinct but the aftermath: now, I reconsider. I step back; I make everything a little hazier, a little less certain. I turn the situation around and around like a Rubik’s Cube, look at my own moments of weakness and strength. I bring in the ands and the buts. I hope that other mothers will do the same with me, although the impulse here is not so much altruistic as selfish; I want to save my own soul. I want to rescue myself from the isolation, the perpetual insecurity, of anger. I don’t have to live in the deafening tunnel of my own assertions all the time. It is nicer out in the open, though quieter, more vulnerable.
This new sensitivity to complexity is tested by our trips to Guelatao to visit Jorge’s parents. Rosa and Manuel are in their seventies, bent by age and slowness. A hardscrabble life of many children and never enough money has lumbered them with aches and pains, yet they persevere, tough as gnarled wood. They spend much of the day in their open-walled living room, taking in the near view of passersby and the far view of mountains grading into blue. Their relationship has not been without contention. Jorge’s father had dozens of children with women in other villages. He was an alcoholic who frequently drank away his earnings and left the family broke. His mother worked making tortillas at the elementary school, and also did the laundry, the cleaning, the cooking, the waiting in line at the mill at 3:00 a.m. to grind corn. Their experience was not atypical in Oaxaca’s Sierra Norte. In pictures from Jorge’s childhood, his mother looks the same in many ways: already aged, already toughened by mountain sun and hardship, but radiating an innate kindness. Those pictures come from a reality of which I can barely conceive: young brown Jesuses in mock crucifixions on dry mountains, women in handwoven aprons carrying buckets, families walking through the woods in a wash of blinding yellow light.
Yet before pregnancy, this reality seemed more and more familiar. I assimilated it. It was normal to go to Guelatao on weekends for memelas and listen to la señora Rosa’s stories of tiny elves making misc
hief in the early mornings, bread delivered by burro, the time Jorge got kicked out of church for singing “Saca ese buey de la barranca!” I went running on the dusty road between Guelatao and a neighboring village and collected pinecones with Jorge’s aunts and uncles for the Christmas nativity scene. I knew this world in the way I knew Mexico, as a set of foreign experiences turned familiar, a thrilling reflection of my own worldliness.
But once the baby begins growing and the gap between me and what I thought I knew starts to open, the world where Jorge grew up and the world his parents still live in and represent becomes foreign in a new way. I listen to his mother relate her insatiable cravings to suck on rocks during pregnancy, a condition I now recognize as pica, indicative of malnutrition. I listen to her talk in the pragmatic way of many rural Mexican women of losing two children, and beneath her words for the first time I feel that deep black well of sadness that was as ever present and inevitable as the laundry heaped for her every day. I hear her describe giving birth to a little boy who had water coming out of his eyes and ears and died two days later. She had no time or space to grieve. Instead she had buckets of masa, her icons gathered in a dusky corner, little boys who wanted to paint Bart Simpson on her walls. One child after another, nine in total, two dead and seven living. The last came when she was forty-eight years old and had hardly any money or time. Jorge was raised largely by an aunt while his parents worked.
For a while I struggle with thoughts I previously would have dismissed immediately as taboo, unsophisticated, and imperialistic. Although I know there was certainly no contraception available in pueblos twenty or thirty years ago (and in any case birth control would have been widely condemned by church and community), I still find myself thinking: If there are so many mouths to feed and not enough to feed them, why another pregnancy, and another, and another? I think now of my own child, vulnerable and utterly trusting, and feel a pang of sharp judgment, forgetting that childhood and the precious, protected innocence of children are relatively modern American inventions. I think of the moments I have glimpsed a raw pain and shame when Jorge talks about his childhood; I think of the stories he tells about saving up for months to buy basketball shoes or walking miles because he didn’t have the twelve pesos for a taxi, and I am suddenly indignant at his suffering. I am more surprised by this anger than I am by any of Rosa or Jorge’s stories, for I’ve heard similar ones many times. Now, though, they strike the nerve of a mother’s ferocious protective instinct.
And. But. Jorge’s mother grew up neglected by her own mother; an unwanted child, she was scolded and cast off for her dark skin, beaten for speaking Zapotec. She grew up in a society that brutalized the indigenous in much the same way the United States did Native Americans, segregating them, forbidding them the rights and resources of whites and mestizos both explicitly and implicitly. She grew up in a world where women had and still in many places have no power whatsoever, are impregnated from the moment they become fertile until they hit menopause, and can be thrown in jail for murder if suspected of an abortion. She grew up in a world in which men are largely unaccountable to their wives and families and are seen as whimsical as weather: alternately benevolent or dangerous, to be tolerated and appeased. How can I judge her?
Still, my anger resurges from a new maternal sensitivity. I remember the night not long after we moved in together when Jorge cried in front of me for the first time, recalling that as a child he was constantly afraid his roof would cave in. I feel misplaced anger at this woman, in many ways representative of women throughout millennia, who is at once a victim of violent patriarchy and a survivor, a loving and generous figure amid circumstances contrived to make her as small as possible. Jorge has tremendous respect for his mother. He remembers her pride and the sacrifices she made when he was growing up, as well as their suffering. Rosa tells me a story about how her own mother picked all the good plums from a plum tree and gifted them to Rosa’s brother’s children, whom she loved more than Rosa’s; she then passed on the rotting and damaged ones from the ground to Rosa’s babies. Rosa gave them back; “My children don’t eat leftovers,” she said. Each time we leave her house, she foists as much as she can upon us: eggs, chayotes, apples, beans, sweet thick corn tortillas from a kitchen where she cooks over an open fire. She gives the little she has, as does Jorge, for he was raised in a world where the gift is sacred.
I, meanwhile, horde; I save, I accumulate. I will have one child and I will provide her with hand-carved wooden blocks and beautifully illustrated books and high-tops. And yet she will not know the dignity of a hungry woman who turns down a rotten plum because she knows her children deserve better; she will not know the scrappiness of curing strep throat with toasted rice and herbs, or have at the core of her soul the fatalistic conviction that we can only do what we can and no more. She will not know to put gravel in the road to hear la carreta de la muerte, and her heart will not leap when “Dios Nunca Muere” crackles from the village loudspeaker. She will not know what it means to give and give when she herself has nothing, to laugh in the most desperate circumstances, to cut off the feet of a baby’s onesie so that he can keep using it even as he grows.
Each time we leave Guelatao, Rosa stands behind her sky-blue, waist-high iron fence and makes the sign of the cross. While I am pregnant, she makes it over my forehead and my belly, kissing the latter and resting her cheek against it, perhaps sensing that the baby inside will carry her name.
I know how to judge, and I know enough now to know that judging is never enough. I see the gaping void behind each judgment, all it betrays and denies. I judge and then I must move beyond the judgment to consider all the convoluted nooks and crannies, longings and regrets, all the hidden resolves of Rosa’s life, which intersects with mine in only the smallest slivers. On the other side of judgment is the world in its infinite complexity. The lemon trees that grow in a messy garden of broken pottery; Jorge’s entire family gathered around the table for homemade pozole, each sibling with only two children, their hair polished and their feet squeezed into shiny leather shoes; the way Rosa laughs when the babies tear and scatter the petals of her beloved fuchsia; the coffee and conversation and que díos le bendiga offered each of many casual visitors to the patio, their camaraderie amid the sierra’s caprices of heat and cold.
Late one night in Guelatao, crammed in the tiny smoky kitchen with Jorge’s parents, his sister and brother-in-law, and their two teenage kids, I confess a sugar craving. We’ve just stuffed ourselves with memelas, thick corn tortillas that Rosa has rolled by hand, toasted on the comal, and topped with homemade black beans, salsas, and queso fresco, and now I am lusting after dessert. At fourteen weeks I am a black hole that absorbs insane quantities of food and is never full.
Before pregnancy, I had no sweet tooth. I’ve always been a cheese and chip person, much more liable to make a late-night grocery run for Sour Cream & Onion Pringles than doughnuts. Cheez-Its fueled my last-minute lit papers in graduate school. But, newly pregnant, I beseech Jorge to hop in the Honda and drive ten minutes to Dandy Don’s for raspberry pie. Rural Ohio yields happily to my cravings, offering up five-pound pies in every shade from peanut butter to lemon cream, deep-fried long johns coated in maple icing, apple fritters, buckeyes, soft-serve dipped in toffee and drizzled with caramel. Mexico is trickier.
“Pastel, dónde podemos conseguir pastel?” Adi, Jorge’s sister, asks Rosa. I sense a mission forming and quickly back off, saying, “No, no, está bien, está bien,” not wanting to be high maintenance. But Adi is already calling their sister Bivi, not once but twice and then three times until she gets through. Bivi is en route to Oaxaca with her husband and two daughters, the lot of them stopped at an elote stand eating roasted corn drenched with mayonnaise, lime, and cheese, when they get the call. They turn around, and Bivi runs back upstairs for a piece of strawberry-peach cake stashed in a Tupperware in the fridge. This cake makes the winding night journey over the mountains and is handed triumphantly to me when the family arriv
es. The kitchen is filled to capacity with bodies bustling in the smoke and glow. We all kiss one another on the cheeks, Rosa starts a new round of memelas, and I devour the pastel.
Sugar, I think, sugar passed from woman to woman to woman to my baby, the sweetness of generosity that transcends all judgment, and which I have found in Mexico more than any other place in the world. I think of the blind singer on the bus with his deep, resonant voice, swaying down the aisle, and how as he sang people dropped two or five or ten pesos into the can he was clutching, then reached out without thought or hesitation to still him as the bus lurched. Joan Halifax writes, “This is where God appears; not within an individual, but between beings.”
On the twelfth of December, the day of the Virgen de Guadalupe, I feel my uterus for the first time. Jorge and I are lying in bed in late morning, and I am running my hand over my belly as I do now, trying to discern the mystery within. What is that lump just above my pelvis, just below my stomach? At the end of the path of soft hairs that descends from my belly button is a ledge. It extends a good length across my lower abdomen. I trace my hand across it, press it gently, and realize from all my avid BabyCenter reading that this is it, the uterus, in its gradual rise toward and over the belly button and nearly to my breasts, edging out all other organs in its supremacy. The knowledge that this is it and it is growing and it is big enough now at fourteen weeks to feel with my hands makes me absolutely giddy for the first time since I found out I was pregnant. “I can feel my uterus!” I announce to Jorge as though I’ve won a massive stuffed animal at the fair, and Jorge, steady as he is with these pregnancy ups and downs, gives it a quick rub and says, “Órale!” then jumps up to make coffee.
From outside comes the faint blurt of bands playing for the Virgen. In Parque El Llano, hundreds of people are pressed into small booths that replicate imagined landscapes of Bethlehem, with waterfalls of shiny blue foil and waxy palms and sand strewn on the old stone, and before these landscapes stand donkeys, horses, beasts of burden (some real and some fake) on which people poise their small children. The boys, even the tiniest babies, wear the traditional buff-colored linen garb of peasants, hats onto which the image of the Virgin has been sewn or pinned, and serapes that feature Guadalupe aglitter in red, white, and green. Girls wear embroidered dresses and bright twin braids woven with ribbons. Their parents will press into the Templo de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe in a slow-moving mass that inches toward the priest, who douses his hands in holy water and splashes the crowd in a broad arc. Some, lightly spritzed, will push back for a moment more to coat their faces. They emerge dripping into the blinding sun. Babies are stunned. Outside, women sit in a long line beneath the palms and nurse. Cripples beg at the church entrance, bananas fry in huge sizzling vats, young men hidden in hot, enormous priest costumes joke with passersby.