“Should I have a baby?”
Melissa Broder’s Death Valley is a brilliant piece of literature and does not require my exposition to elucidate said brilliance. Still, one of the most powerful themes that emerged as I read it this first time was that of the childless woman. In grieving her father the narrator wonders time and again whether she should have had a child of her own. The question seems to resurface during times she feels the most powerless; and though it may seem out of place for a different type of reader, it’s the juxtaposition of this intense mourning for the father she knew in her own childhood with her seemingly newfound desire to produce a new, external childhood that reveals something profound about grief. The reader wonders alongside the narrator whether the only reprieve from the woes of losing a parent comes by reproducing the very source of this grief, generation after generation. And that, my friends, is what it means to carry the burden of being a woman.
Earlier this year, I read I Who Have Never Known Men by Jaqueline Harpman. (The work changed my life irrevocably but I dare not address the fullness of that transformation now). What strikes me in comparing Harpman’s and Broder’s portrayals of being a human with a womb is the sense both narrators express that womanhood divorced from motherhood is presented to them as no true womanhood at all. And the perceived lack of some integral part of their identity, which would be fulfilled by a child supposedly, stems not from their own sensation of missing-ness, but from the order of the world explained to them in their own youth. Both narrators seem to maintain their identities as children of a sort– reinforced in some indirect way by their lack of “ascension” to motherhood or marriage or some other institution that allows for women to occupy a more adultlike position in society– while wrestling with the knowledge that they are fully grown adults in age and weariness. And so we wonder alongside them, experiencing their worlds through their eyes, whether a woman can ever escape infantilization without an infant from her own womb.
I am now 27 years old and it is almost June. In June of 1996, when my mother was 27 years old, she got married and was quickly pregnant with me. I am now 27 years old and I am unmarried. I have never borne a child. I am nowhere close to doing either of these things. In fact, I am about to begin a 6-year degree program while working full-time and teaching– leaving very little space in my life for anything remotely resembling a child. And yet, when I get together with a group of female friends (most of whom are childless, due to the Great Divide that isolates childless women of a certain age from mothers) it is nearly ubiquitous now that we’ll talk about freezing our eggs. Some are donating eggs for cash, some are having fertility tests a la y2k sitcom trope to find out whether they should be worried, and nearly all are experiencing some existential crisis around where they stand in relation to motherhood while seldom expressing desire to become mothers at all.
It’s been said that having a child is the most selfish thing a person can do. This sentiment, too, is the burden of a woman. Because despite the expectation (however hidden it may be) that we serve as chattel for the betterment of society through a new generation, there is nothing more shameful than reproducing what may well become a mirror image of ourselves. Thus, women are tasked with not only creating, not only building from scratch, but also with correcting what is hated about us through mothering. We must identify what is unpalatable to society (what makes us undesirable to men and threatening to women, dangerous to children and disrespectful to elders) and address it in the most volatile of ways. By constantly confronting our perceived flaws, we are called upon to either buried by the shame, triumph over it through therapy or anarchy (what’s the difference?), or eradicate it from the next generation by dispelling it from our children. But of course, no one likes a woman with too much self-assurance and too little deference, unless she is a mother.
Thus, the childless woman by choice or condition is relegated to roles like “breaking the glass ceiling” or “paying her dues,” all in order to achieve the power of motherhood by alternate, comparably gruesome means. God forbid she is a woman of color, in which case she carries the compounded burden of producing some novel empowerment on behalf of an additional set of marginalized peoples while defending her entitlement to the entitlement won by the dominant group. Pay close attention to the women you see in media. The victim/survivor must choose what kind of respect she will demand by labeling herself with one of those two names. The burden is hers to report or prosecute or defend or dismiss. In order that she not seem childish/weak/submissive she must be large in strength or stature; and if her body is big without the influence of a womb she must defend her right to exist in such a way. The only way a woman is allowed to grow while maintaining her femininity is when she grows a child inside her. The only way she is allowed power is through her anatomical assets or blood and gritted teeth. We carry EVERYONE by nature of the potential to carry a child.
Should I have a baby?
The Nae Train 
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