Saturday, 30th October 2004
Cave bitches and beasties and soup
There are a lot of caves in this region of France. A lot of houses carved out of hills, utilising the natural caves within as the rooms. People still live in them and even lived in the “ordinary” caves up until fairly recently - a lot of them still have doors on! Ha. Anyway, when Butcher Boy and I were out sight seeing those couple of days, I remarked to him that I would like to live in a cave and maybe it’s because he is an American, or maybe it’s because I am really fucked up, but I suddenly said, “I really am a cave bitch after all.” Ice Cube was right…
In other news, nature is all messed up. It is far warmer here than it should be and so plants and insects are starting their life cycle all over again. The orchids are re-growing in the orchard and other plants that should be going to sleep now are still blossoming and blooming for us and the butterflies. I’m not sure what this means for next spring. If the seeds think that now is the time to grow, and then when this supposed hard winter hits and kills them, what will be left to grow come the real spring? I had also neglected my garden a little and have discovered that caterpillars have shredded some of the winter vegetable plants like purple sprouting and brussel sprouts. I am guessing it is the white cabbage moth’s doing as only the brassicas have been attacked but DAMN, I didn’t think I had to worry about things like that at this time of the year. Go global warming!
I can see the difference in me though. Prior to coming here I would have had to put on surgical gloves and deal with the caterpillars that way, screaming and squirming all the way. As this entry shows, I might want to save the butterfly babies, but I was never able to touch them before now. However, I just spent the morning picking off all the critters and throwing them onto the lawn as far as I could with my bare hands! I can’t deal with the guilt of killing them, (apart from the few I accidentally squished, mmm, green blood), and since there is no such thing as live and let live in nature, (i.e. if I leave them, they will kill my plants), I compromised by throwing them as far as I could. I’m hoping they won’t try and crawl their way back to my sprouting. Eat grass and rotting figs you bitches!
In the final news for the day that is today, last Friday I came home from the market to a gift on my stoop of a couple of bunches of grapes, a pumpkin and a recipe for Argentinean Pumpkin Soup - all of which being a gift from P&G. I love P&G, I’m gonna invite them to my graduation! I made the soup for lunch today and my was it good! If anyone wants the recipe, let me know.
Friday, 29th October 2004
I don’t ever want to be a mother.
So I finished reading that book, The Abortion Myth, a few days ago and one of the things it posits is that the central argument about abortion is not truly one of foetal rights vs. women’s rights, but one of enforced motherhood vs. chosen motherhood. That the “pro-lifers”, (or anti-choice people as she calls them which I far prefer), aren’t truly concerned with saving the life of a potential child but are alarmed / outraged / shocked that a woman would choose to NOT become a mother. That there is something inherently wrong with the woman and her choices when she rejects motherhood. She posits this as a result of interviews conducted with pro and anti-choice woman in which she asks pertinent and somewhat uncomfortable questions. At the end of the day, if the anti-choice women are as opposed to ectogenetic wombs as they are abortion, then her point is proven really.
All of this ties into something that has been sitting in the back of my mind for some years now - that I am viewed as having something wrong with me because I have not ever wanted children and still do not. I can still see the look in a male friends eyes when I reaffirmed, when I was 28, that I did not want to have children and he suddenly realised that my continuing statements to this effect could no longer be attributed to my youth. That this rejection of motherhood were the statements of a fully grown woman. Granted, the people that have looked at me as somehow less for rejecting motherhood have primarily been men, but my statement still remains true - somehow I am less.
There are a million and one reasons to not have children from my perspective; from the trite, but nevertheless true one, that this is a damn shitty world and why the hell would I bring another being into it? But my main reason is that, quite frankly, that much power terrifies me. The knowledge that one innocent, yet misplaced, sentence could potentially shape a persons life for the worse is not something I choose to risk. How many of us have hang-ups from things that our parents said or did? And whilst I know that is a negative point of view and one sentence could just as easily shape a persons life for the better, I’ll stick with the adults I interact with thank you very much. I’m not so important to them. And anyway, blah, blah, blah, I’m too selfish to have kids. I want to be able to switch up my life at a moments notice. I want to be the centre of my life and I am not willing to become second place to another person. All of those trite, tried and true arguments belong to me too.
And yes, I know I am giving up a very special bond. I do not, for one second, doubt that what a woman goes through as a mother is a very valuable, emotional and, probably spiritual experience. I may not choose to have a baby, but I am acutely aware of my womb and breasts are for and how amazing it would feel to carry a child around inside of me for 9 months. But it is precisely, (as all the pro-choice women in Cannold’s aforementioned book agree), because of my respect of motherhood that I reject it. I do not feel like I am worthy of the task for a million reasons some of which I have mentioned here. Mostly because I don’t want it.
But why or why not to have kids is not really what interests me, what I find interesting is the reactions to a woman’s rejection of motherhood. That still, in 2004, we are expected to biologically reproduce. That somehow we are less if we do not fulfil our biological capabilities. Like we are supposed to naturally want children and to not want them is in someway in discord with some ancient natural code. And I suppose in some ways it is, if we truly are here just to reproduce, but I wonder why it must be that we reproduce ourselves genetically? Why not, in this overpopulated world, can we not, as women, choose to reproduce ourselves in an intellectual or artistic fashion? Why is it not enough for me to want my genes to stop here, but my heart and mind to continue eternally? Why is it not enough for me to want to experience myself completely without the aid of another to articulate my values through? “I am this kind of woman because I raised my child in this way and with these beliefs and look how wonderfully they turned out”. Why can I not be this kind of woman because of the person that I am to my friends and family, because of the politics and values I expound, because of the way I have lived my life? Why is it not enough for me, or others, to look back at my life as I die and see what an amazing woman I was because of the way I conducted myself as a person, not because of how I conducted myself as a mother? Why does it feel like by rejecting motherhood is synonymous with rejecting womanhood in so many peoples eyes?
If I am honest, it feels, has felt, like I don’t have complete reproductive freedom in respects to the choices I make as a woman. In regards to my body sure - I can control my fertility, mostly, and with some risks to my health, but I can regulate if I have children. But it feels that societally I leave myself unfulfilled in regards to my affirmation to remain childless. As in, I can choose to not have children in exchange for handing in my woman card and perhaps receiving an androgyny card instead.