Calling Eurydice

For my grandmothers, both of whom had children by the time they were my age. I don’t know how they did it.

Regarding
incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.”
– Louise Glück, “Persephone the Wanderer”

I have nightmares about getting pregnant.

The first one came when I was still too young to understand how one became pregnant, let alone that I was still too young to have a child. In that dream I simply had a suddenly swollen belly and no idea of what had happened to me to make me like this, just the clear certainty that I was going to have a child and I was going to have to care for it alone. I was seven or eight years old.

The phantom terror of a Virgin Mary-like pregnancy faded as I learned more about the birth of a child, but the nightmares still come from time to time, as they did throughout my adolescence. Each time I wake up in a panic. I am not very good with children; I have no maternal instincts that I have been able to discern. Having children has always been conditional for me—an if, not a when, that depends on a whole host of factors that I haven’t fully visualized yet. I can’t imagine carving space out in my current life for a child, nor can I imagine ever being able to do something like that alone.

Fortunately, I have never in my waking hours faced this situation, but the thing that has comforted me those mornings as I’m trying to calm myself down is that if something like that happened, I could have an abortion. Not once have I considered carrying a baby to term, either to give it up for adoption or to keep as my own, not if I got pregnant now, nor any time since I learned that abortion was an option. Most certainly, this is not the choice that everyone would make. But it’s the option of that choice that gets my heart rate back to normal.

I have been thinking a lot this week about the various phenomena like this that are so weaved into the fabric of my life that I barely consider them day-to-day, because there is already so much to be angry about in the world and I don’t have the energy or the time to let them in. The only problem with this approach is that sometimes, despite your best efforts, the anger bubbles over all the same.

Some other things I spend my time not thinking about:

Of the 181 books I have read since January 2017, only 70 have been by women—about 38.5%. Of those 70, approximately half were fantasy or science fiction/speculative fiction, and only six were nonfiction scholarly works (contrast with the 28 scholarly works I read during this period that were written by men). In 2018, it took me until April to read any books at all that were written by a woman. (This is despite the fact that I make a point of leaving the library with at least one book written by a woman every time I visit).
On a related note, generally most speculative fiction I read these days is written by women who have simply taken the trends of our current world to their logical conclusions and produced worlds that sicken me mostly because they seem so plausible.
And further, the silence of women in literature: Penelope and Lavinia’s voicelessness, Echo’s borrowed words, Sarah and Rebecca and Leah and Rachel’s one-dimensional narrative purposes, Morgana Le Fey’s cruelty, Ophelia’s madness, and the further silence that these stories bring by asserting themselves over non-Western and native stories. Much work has been done—most of it by women—to address some of these disparities (see: Ursula K. LeGuin’s Lavinia, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, Madeleine Miller’s Circe, and on, and on), but it is not yet anywhere near enough.
The excitement of my grandmother when, in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, we found a statue of an old woman, there among the gods and goddesses, the emperors and heroes. I had been overjoyed to find depictions of all the famous figures I had studied—but of course, almost without exception, they were all men, in this museum and in all the other museums I went through. To see a woman clothed and aged—and on display!—was astonishing. Through the whole museum, this was the only piece of art my grandmother requested a photo with.
The statues of women we find outside of museums, too—the monuments and the plaques I pass honoring figures of history in every city I visit overwhelmingly honor men, and when they do honor women, they honor faceless groups as opposed to individual people. When I encountered a statue of suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament in London, tears came to my eyes.
The fight women have waged for equality under a banner that in its very name does not include them—“all men are created equal,” we argue, should mean everyone. How can you make a successful argument when you have to assume the title of your oppressor before you can even get your foot in the door?
The overwhelmingly masculine tone of Jewish liturgy, where G-d uses male pronouns and we remember only our forefathers, and the ongoing struggle even today to get communities to not only remember the women who bore them but to remember them with honor, for it is very different to remember them only under duress.
The fact that even though I am an avid student of history, I was dumbfounded back in November to read of the evidence of female scribes in the Middle Ages, for though all the signs were there, my experience and my teachers alike had never suggested to me that such people could exist outside of fantasy novels. How many other women have been lost to history because we failed to imagine them?
The toxic preeminence of the feminism of white women, that fails to recognize that the needs of women can differ, that not all women have uteri and that some men can get pregnant, that refuses to acknowledge that it is just as important for black girls to be seen as soft and gentle as it is for white girls to be seen as tough, that does not yet understand that the liberation of women is bound up in all women—black and white, trans and cis, queer and straight.

The list goes on—the number of women I see at volunteer meetings and the absence of their husbands, the difference between who steps up to do the work and who gets the credit, the years I spent unlearning the hatred I had been taught to feel for other women, and the years I spent trying to find my own voice and learning—or relearning—how to use it. For every time I notice one of these things, there are another two times I push something down or refuse to see it, because if I saw it all the time I would drown. But this week, for me and I think for many others, refusing to see what was happening or pushing it down was not really an option.

On Friday, I watched a video of some of the dissenting State Senators in Alabama making their pleas for their colleagues to reconsider. Their words were moving, but I was most struck by the way most of their white, male colleagues visible within the frame were quietly talking to each other behind their hands instead of listening as a white woman, a black man, and a black woman spoke in turn. Decorum may insist on their hearing these remarks, but it cannot make them listen.

I thought of this again at services Friday night, as I watched an incredible rabbi soon to celebrate her 20^th anniversary on the pulpit attempt to offer her congregation some comfort after yet another week of difficult news, and I listened to several men next to me talking in loud whispers behind their hands instead of listening. Perhaps this is what we teach men in the age of liberation: that if a woman is talking, you cannot silence her, but if you speak behind your hand you will be absolved of any noise you might make. Fighting back a swell of fury, I left my seat to go listen somewhere where I could not hear their voices. Perhaps I should have said something to them, although I am not at all convinced that they would have listened. Perhaps I should have tried anyway—but I am tired, and sometimes I am afraid that my anger will eat me alive.

I spent a long afternoon in Central Park yesterday, trying to regain some of my equilibrium. I read a book written by a woman—and if, incidentally, anyone is looking for a good read that isn’t The Handmaid’s Tale about the danger banning abortion poses to women, I will make a plug for Louise Erdrich’s The Future Home of the Living God—and I watched the people of New York. I watched a group of young girls play at being sailors out to rescue ships over one of the park’s waterfalls. I watched two impeccably dressed families take photos by Bethany Fountain for the quinceañeras of two young women, literally lifting them over their heads to celebrate them. I watched brides, mothers, and grandmothers, and many other women like me, the people who are still somewhere in between—who, without any label that might attach us to men, must simply be women in our own right. And I thought of what I will say to a daughter I may never have, how I could possibly remind her that her choices are her own and her possibilities are limitless when we live in a world where neither of those things are necessarily true—where they have never been true.

It is okay to be angry, I will begin, perhaps. You have every right to be angry. But—but what? But, it will all turn out all right? I can make no such promise. But, you can’t be angry forever? How could I say that, when I am not sure my own anger will ever fade? But, but, but—why does there need to be a but at all? Why can’t we just be angry?

Child, I will try again. I will make no promises of a teleological future—after all, this comfort I had for so long, that I could avoid having a child if such a moment arose, may not be hers. I will not tell her that the world will allow her to become anything, for so far, that has not proven to be true. I will not lie to her. Child. You were born on land stolen from another people, a land built by those whose bodies were not their own, man and woman alike, a land shaped by those it silenced as much as by those to whom it gave voice. Child, listen for those voices as you walk in this world. Call for them. They were people, too—perhaps the most human of us all. Remember that hearing is different than listening. And yes, there will be times that you will be angry. Hold on to those moments, child. Your anger will remind you that no matter what anyone will tell you, you are a person too.

—

Title taken from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (yes, just because I think there are other wonderful abortion books out there doesn’t mean that this one is not also well worth your time):

We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer, and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.”