Newsletter #80: The Maternal Instinct Will Not Be Suppressed

Expressing and sublimating the maternal impulse in the absence of one's own children

I noted back in newsletter #74 that great literature is right wing, because it helps us see Truth. But literature or journalism doesn’t have to be at the highest rank to do that. Quite often, these works overflow the intentions of their creators.

Mexican novelist Guadalupe Nettel’s latest Still Born has just been released in English in the United States. This book was written in 2020 and so is already dated in some of its themes around deconstructing family and caregiving. But it is both a decent read and provides some interesting female perspectives on our world. My focus is men’s issues as you know, but just because men have their struggles doesn’t mean everything is great for women. They have their own challenges and it is good to hear how they talk about them.

Laura, the book’s somewhat cold and detached narrator, starts off like many young women today, swearing off children.

Unlike my mother’s generation, for whom it was abnormal not to have children, many women in my own age group chose to abstain. My friends, for instance, could be divided into two groups of equal size: those who considered relinquishing their freedom and sacrificing themselves for the sake of the species, and those who were prepared to accept the disgrace heaped on them by society and family as long as they could preserve their autonomy. Each one justified their position with arguments of substance. Naturally, I got along better with the second group, which included Alina.

But as with many such youthful proclamations, this one didn’t survive contact with aging.

It is easy, when we are young, to have ideals and to live according to them. What is more complicated is acting consistently over time, and in spite of the challenges life puts in our way. Shortly after I turned thirty-three, I began to notice the presence – the appeal, even – of children.

Laura decides to take decisive action to deal with these unwanted desires; she has her tubes tied. Meanwhile, her friend Alina had chosen the opposite path, not only deciding to try to have kids, but turning to IVF when this was not happening naturally. Laura realizes that this has introduced a division between them, one that would likely mark a permanent divergence.

But even if the treatment proved fruitless, there was no going back. From now on there would be an invisible rift between us: she approved of maternity as a desirable fate for women, whereas I had undergone surgery to avoid it.

Alina finally does become pregnant. But late in her pregnancy, doctors discover that their baby, a girl, is not developing normally. She has an extraordinarily rare condition called microlissencephaly, in which the brain and head are too small, and there’s an absence of folds on the brain. Alina and her live in boyfriend Aurelio are told the baby cannot survive outside the womb and will die at birth. Abortion is illegal in Mexico at this stage of the pregnancy, but they could have easily arranged for one. They decided instead to allow the girl to be born, then cremate and bury the body.

But when the girl is born, she doesn’t die. She is, in the English title of the book, still born. Alina and Aurelio have to adjust to his new reality and learn to care for their severely disabled daughter Inés. This involves hiring a nanny named Marlene, whom Laura perceives both as a sexual threat to her relationship, and also as a rival mother to Inés.

Meanwhile, Laura befriends a deeply troubled young boy named Nico who lives next to her, and whose violent and profane outbursts she hears regularly through the walls. She ends up becoming something of a surrogate mother to Nico as his own suffers a mental collapse.

Books like this are interesting. They are obviously aimed at a mainstream audience, so the author is likely writing something that she hopes will resonate with a younger female readership here. (Nettel herself was born in 1973 and is Generation X in American terms). What are some of those themes?

Clearly one major theme is a sort of feminist deconstruction and reframing of family and caregiving. In this telling, to be a mother is not necessarily to be married and have a biological child of one’s own. Rather, a great variety of expressions of motherhood and family are possible, including ones based on chosen relationships, though there is ambivalence towards all of these.

Behind this, however, is a recognition that the maternal instinct cannot be suppressed. Laura attempts to amputate her budding longing for children by getting her tubes tied. But her maternal impulse reemerges in the way she latches on to Nico. Likewise, the nanny Marlene was unable to have children of her own, so devotes herself to caring for other people’s babies.

My takeaway from this is that Nettel anticipates that these circumstances are common among her likely female readership base in today’s world. Many women today chose not to have kids, either for ideological reasons or out of the naive impulses of youth. Others wanted them but didn’t have them, either because they couldn’t or haven’t yet found the relationship they’ve been looking for. They are growing older, are childless, and yet have a maternal impulse that can’t be denied. This book gives voice to that maternal desire that, for the feminist reasons Laura outlines in the novel, many women today might not be willing to speak openly about. Then Nettel provides reassurance to them that this impulse can find satisfaction in non-traditional ways.

These non-traditional family and caregiving arrangements are sure to be a growing feature of our world, in which more people are single and childless, and have broken or complex relationships. Many children lack one or both parents in their life. David Brooks got pummeled for his Atlantic piece calling the nuclear family a mistake and calling for singles to create “forged families.” But in newsletter #39 I argued that some solution like forged families was inevitable in a world such as ours.

I don’t think very many people really believe forged families are a substitute for the natural family. But guess what? With so many broken homes, out of wedlock births, and long term singles out there – millions “set adrift” as Brooks put it – forged families are going to have to be part of the solution for a significant number of people.  This state of affairs is presently bringing pressure to bear on the church, which finds itself with an increasing number of long-term singles. Embracing post-familialism or trying to act as if the church can be a genuine substitute for the natural family are mistakes. Nevertheless, the circumstances that push churches in that direction are real, and represent a significant pastoral challenge.

Newsletter #39: We Can Only Go Forward Because There Is No Way Back

I think it’s important to note that as in the novel, these arrangements probably won’t be chosen family in the sense of intentionally curated relationships. Rather, they will form from organic connections in the real world. The Good Samaritan wasn’t looking to find someone to help. He came across a particular man, at a particular time, in a particular condition, on a particular road and entered into a relationship with him. Similarly, Nico irrupts into Laura’s life, and she choses to respond.

Nettel also shows the risks of the traditional familial-maternal route in the form of a severely disabled child. This is, I think, true to life in ways conservative Christians don’t always want to admit. In my view, marriage and kids is the normative path for humanity and best path to human flourishing for most people. Yet let’s not pretend this is risk free. The pictures of seemingly perfect homeschooling families omits all the ways things can go tragically wrong.

At the same time, Nettel shows that even in this extreme case, the parents love the child and choose life. Alina could have aborted Inés. After the girl was born, a doctor also gives her an untraceable, undetectable poison which she could use to end Inés’ life at any time. She does neither (although she never gets rid of the poison). Nor does Aurelio abandon his family. My impression is that the vast majority of American parents who find out their baby has a significant genetic or developmental defect abort it. Maybe things are different in Mexico, but with Still Born showing parents who make a different choice, perhaps Nettel believes this will also resonate with the modern woman whose views of abortion may be more ambivalent than they would publicly admit.

I also found a subplot around a feminist collective called the Beehive interesting. They hand out flyers to Laura when she is out and about with Nico. She decides to check them out, and to her surprise finds her own mother volunteering there. This explains why her mom had been recently relationally withdrawn. She had stopped being a mother to her own child in order to become politically active in feminism. Later, a Beehive protest blocks the street and prevents Laura and Nico’s mother Doris from being able to get a taxi. Thus feminist politics becomes a symbolic roadblock to the kind of healthy feminist relational restructuring represented by Laura and Doris. While I’d have to go back and re-read these passages in detail to confirm, Nettel does not seem to provide a positive portrayal of organized political feminism, which in her telling sublimates genuine maternal affection into angry politics. It’s the one thing that seems to be able to defeat the maternal instinct. (Possibly she is alluding to organizations and events in Mexico City of which I’m unaware that would add context to this).

Still Born is not a masterpiece, but is an interesting book that has the additional virtue of being short. It hits on a number of themes that are active in our world, and probably being wrestled with by post-Boomer women.

On a related note, you may also be interested in my review of Amy Key’s book on her experience of singleness, Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone.

Amy Key's Single Life

The Evil Father

Another book I recently read was Will and Testament by the Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth. Like Karl Over Knausgaard’s My Struggle, this was a succès de scandale in Norway, selling 150,000 copies in a country with a total population of only 5.4 million people.

Norway has become known for autobiographic fiction, and this book is in that vein. While Hjorth insists it is a novel, many details align perfectly with her own family. As you can imagine, this caused controversy when one of the central elements of the novel is the main character’s accusation that her father had sexually abused her. Her sister actually wrote a novel in response to this one to rebut that accusation.

Hjorth is generationally a late Boomer, being born in 1959. I believe there’s a major generation gap between the experiences the Boomers had with their parents, and those of subsequent generations. You hear a lot today about fathers who behave horribly toward their children. But very commonly if not most commonly this involves a divorced or absent father. For example, Knausgaard is my age, a decade younger than Hjorth and in the prime years of Generation X. In My Struggle, his parents are divorced.

As an example of a real life situation involving divorced fathers, sometimes a divorced dad who remarries and has children by his second wife will focus all of his attention on his new family and ignore or slight his children from the first marriage. Sometimes this is even done maliciously as a way of getting back at his ex-wife. This seems to be common enough to have also made its way into culture, such as being a plot element in the great 2021 Norwegian film “The Worst Person in the World,” which I wrote about last year.

Live Through This

But there’s a limit to how much damage an absent father can do. His harms are often as much a matter of omission as commission, though there is still plenty of the latter of course.

By contrast, the Boomers’ parents largely stayed married. While there’s much to be celebrated there, it also meant that children and wives could sometimes be trapped in extremely abusive homes at a time when there was less focus or societal taboos against various forms of abuse (or when they were simply not discussed). Even where there wasn’t abuse, men of that era - many of whom had endured extremely hard times in the Depression - could often be cold and harsh, and treat their kids very poorly. This had to have resulted in nightmarish childhoods for some.

It makes me wonder if much of the roots of evangelical teaching on gender and fatherhood - teaching that is very much a product of the Boomers - is a result of these extremely bad experiences some Boomers had with their own fathers, or the experiences their friends had. The Boomers probably did experience more than their fair share of severe abusive households growing up, and are far more attuned to the harms fathers inflict while in the homes than they are to, say, the harms mothers inflict when they divorce the father of their children without due cause.

Coda

We sat in silence for a while. Then he said that his father had also been quite distant. That many fathers of that generation were and that back then wasn’t like today where fathers often turn up for hockey and handball games. Had my father merely been a little distant? No, I said. Because even distant fathers were proud of their sons when they won sailing competitions and ski races and would boast about their successful sons to other fathers, but Dad was incapable of giving Bard a single word of praise, of uttering one positive adjective about Bard. Dad was scared. If you’re scared, you never let them see you tremble, and Dad didn’t dare tremble or show any signs of weakness, which is what he believed a compliment to Bard would represent. Dad’s regime was sustained by fear.

- Vigdis Hjorth, Will and Testament