Against Biological Determinism, or, There’s Something Growing In There!

Warning, this is explicit, and about body parts. Don’t read if you prefer to not think about body parts or sex.

A skit of James Franco competing with a 4 year old from SNL-- and being 31 weeks pregnant-- inspired me to write about bodies and what they say about who we are.

The skit itself was silly, and made me laugh to myself as Franco (who is almost constantly channeling the dirty old man he will undoubtedly become) yells into the camera about seeing the scrotum of the father of a four year old years before the boy is born. “We play squash together. He took a hard dive and his balls came spilling out of his shorts. They were huge and red and Tommy [the four year old] was still inside them.”

What this reminded me of is the myth of the homunculus. I am not sure where I ran across this thinking, but I’ve always associated it with the deprivation of non-masturbation and genital identification with sexuality. The homunculus idea is that inside each individual sperm there is a miniature person, waiting to be implanted and grown to baby form. If, as Franco jests and 16th century philosophers posited, each sperm is a potential person, than masturbation for people with penises is really murder.

When I was a child, there were whispers of this old viewpoint in the Catholic school I attended from seventh through ninth grade. I was at an all girls school, however, so it was mostly discussed at the lunch table. Lucky for me, I was not from a devout home, so my suspicion of this thinking was high. Not so for other girls. Wide eyed and unsure of what their bodies were for, these girls were the most scared of what was going on down there. I remember listening to girls talking about sins of the flesh, and the risk of boys committing murder if they made sperm come out of them.

In 8^th grade, we got to health class, and all these conjectures fell away, except for the specter of the homunculus, and its attendant question-- What are our bodies for? The sisters couldn’t help us, at least not with ease or self-awareness, as they had rejected the urges of the flesh, or sublimated them in good works and self-deprivation. But for we who knew we weren’t heading that way-- once we could believe we were desirable at all-- these questions loomed large. What happens down there?  What are our bodies for?

When I started having sex, it was with people with penises, and then people with vaginas. I found pleasure down there, and I sidestepped any concern about use and function by departing from heterosexual assumption at 15. Without the phantom mythic homunculus, I was free to see my body as my own, and the bodies of my lovers as something other than strictly speaking useful, as I had been taught in middle school. I also started being able to see erotic pleasure in more things than the body, or particular body parts.

In seminary, this experience I named in a feminist sense as body-god(ess)-talk, where the information and the vicissitudes of the body become a site for naming the divine, as a site for worship, as a place that moves between peoples, that creates something new. It wasn’t about reproduction, at least not in the normative sense. It was generative, and it was both about the body and not determined by it.

And then I started wanting to have a kid. I was 32 when I really started having that feeling, and I see this as part of healing for me. Part of rejecting that determinism of the body meant that I felt I also had to reject the possibility of family and parenting. So the desire to have children, from wherever it sprung, was something I repressed, much like those sisters in middle school (I knew I had more in common with them than I thought!). At 32 I stopped repressing, and started healing work to get ready to have a kid. And at 37, #1 came through my body into the world.

And now, #2. As the last weeks of pregnancy loom large, and my belly looms larger, I wonder about the homunculus, and the fear from which he comes. Am I carrying a fully grown being? Am I merely a vessel for this creature? Some conservative thinking about pregnancy and women’s roles would say, yes. The homunculus still lives in the hearts and imaginations of those who do not see what is really happening with pregnancy.

The symbiosis of pregnancy, the incredible interconnection, and the development of a being from very little to a baby is pretty amazing. But it’s not anything to privilege over any other life changing event. Oftentimes I have heard mothers say-- you have no idea until you become a mother, until you are pregnant, until you are nursing, until you are until you are……. You know, this is true! But it’s no more true than someone having other body experiences that are singular, that are personal, that do not ultimately determine who that person is. We are bodies. We have experiences. They are powerful.

What is happening to me is a fundamental experience of the body, but so are most other things. The desire to compare or privilege this experience over other bodies and their experiences recreates the world where the homunculus can grow big in our psyches. And I am truly not saying that what is happening to me is small-- or unimportant. But it does not determine value, or create more meaning or value than other bodies and their experiences. If I did that, if I wanted to have the pregnancy pedestal made for me and other people with uteruses who choose to grow babies in them, then I would be risking the loss of my sense of self to this experience. And I would be ignoring the rich depth of body experience and sources of the divine in my life before having children, before I chose this path of engaging my biology. 

This is my body, in all its vicissitudes, holiness, and commonness. And I honor the body growing in me, as a part of me, and as not all of me.  And with each birth, with each experience of the body, I wave goodbye to the homunculus ghost in this misogyny machine, and know there is more than what we bring to the project of nurturing life, in ourselves and in each other, in this world soon changed by someone new. We'll see who they are. 

So Many Levels

I’m still pregnant, heading into week 26 this week, spending a lot of time feeling tired and hungry. This pregnancy, during which I am only part-time employed, living much more simply than when pregnant with my first child, makes for a real slowness and awareness of the minute movements of time and life. I started feeling this baby moving inside me at week 16, it’s true, and within the past 2 weeks, she’s been dancing up a storm on all parts of my insides. I am lucky because I can actually stop what I am doing and pay attention to these small movements, which feel so big inside of me, and notice my reactions to them.

Mostly I am happy to be feeling confirmation of life growing inside of me. Mostly I am grateful to be able to build more on this land than just farms, just community. Mostly I am aware that my world focus has gotten so much smaller these past months than ever I was allowed to be before. And mostly that is a good thing.

Except when it’s not. Yesterday I attended a really lovely, well-organized and spirited rally and sit-in as part of Rising Tide’s work to stop a fracking pipeline through Vermont. 60 people went into the governor’soffice to demand attention to this issue, and over 30 stayed in the buildinguntil getting arrested at around 8 pm last night.  I didn’t make it inside to the sit-in, but was able to enjoy music, speakers, chanting, and friendliness among the 200 odd folk who stood outside in solidarity.

The thing that struck me most about my experience of this was that I had an intense sense of dissonance throughout the rally. I felt disoriented. I felt tired. I kept on looking for other pregnant women, or women with small children. There were a few. I felt lonely and confused. I managed to say hello to one or two people I knew, but expressed the sentiment-- Today is a really pregnant day for me, but I had to make it out for the rally.  I had such a sense of the bigness of this rally, the level that was trying to be affected through political action and civil disobedience. And it felt just weird, somehow disconnected with what I am focusing on just now.

I am also reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. This text unpacks the systemic racism of mass incarceration, and the legal buttressing that allows for a reproduction of the injustices and oppression of Jim Crow in our current moment. Arrest, detainment, prosecution, incarceration, and life after release mirror the legal segregation and discrimination of Jim Crow. It’s painfully obvious. It’s sick and wrong.

As I read this book, in between moments of deep fatigue and midwife appointments, I find myself again aware of a dissonance in my body. How can I be so completely focused inward and still make any sense at all of this vast and brutal system? How does it sit with me, to be living so small, when there is so much bigness to work on?

It’s kind of too much. I want to watch television and eat chips. I want to dream of an ease of life that doesn’t exist for anyone. I want to think I am bringing up children in a world where we actually do make a difference to the bigness of injustice. I believe that, and it’s hard to hold it next to the smallness of my life right now. All I end up thinking about is the knitting of life in me, the uncertainty of what is to come in the next weeks and months.

I’m 41 and planning on a VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean). Because of my age, my weight, and the type of suturing I had done (with no knowledge or consent), I am told I have a 35% chance of success. I am working hard to say no to this quick decision, categorization, and looking to work with others who can act hopefully because there is so little certainty about any of this, and hope informs outcome. I work on this knowing that this is what is best for my child-to-be, and best for me. I also work on this because I know fundamentally that what is happening to me is not a medical experience, and no matter how much I am medicalized, my body, this life, the prospect of being a parent again is so much more than what I am being told.

I have some awareness, some sense memory of working with the multiple levels of self, group, system, of mind, spirit, body, in workshops, movement meetings, therapies and relationships-- but never have I felt this so acutely within myself. It’s like all the levels are jumbled up inside of me, and I feel carried along in a stream that I have no control over. And so I kick, I stroke, I wriggle and pull myself along. I take it in, I gulp life like breath, and seek faith to bring me on and further down the way.

I am just one body in the world, wanting to live well and with health. I feel the intensity of my desire to know myself as whole and well, just as I feel the intensity of the life in me growing and wanting to be in the world. I know there is a connection between this highly personal experience and the work of world changing. I feel it, and yet can’t know it, just now. I can only remember that there must be a connection between all of these levels, and hope I can see them more clearly, when I have come ashore.

Being Brave

I'm pregnant again, climbing up week 16 of my third pregnancy, and feeling confident that this one will make it. We've had ultrasounds, appointments, careful diagnosis of this healthy pregnancy, and that's a great relief, if not resolve for all the anxiety and uncertainty that is just the truth with being pregnant, and the added truth of pregnancy after miscarriage.

My son turned four about a month ago, and we told him about the pregnancy after the 13 week ultrasound that confirmed the health and well being of this baby. He was ecstatic and convinced that the baby growing inside of me is a girl. He alternately pretends he is inside of me or is the newborn baby, and talks frequently about wanting to hug and kiss the baby, and perhaps have the baby sleep in his room. He often hugs my belly. I know this will get more complex as the baby is more visible, and finally born in February.

This news has made it possible for Forrest to ask all kinds of questions. First he asks if daddies can have babies. Then, where is the baby inside of you? And what makes someone a mommy or a daddy?

As a bisexual queer cisgendered (mostly) woman who loves and cares about the liberation of my trans and queer friends and chosen family, I have started to imagine what it looks like to answer these questions in a way that includes all of us, that doesn't problematize the reality of biology that does not determine who we are. And I have begun to answer these questions in that direction.

Can daddies have babies?
Most daddies cannot have babies, but some daddies can. Most mommies can have babies, but some mommies cannot.

Where is the baby inside of you? Where does it come out?
The baby is in my uterus. I will give birth to the baby through my vagina. In order to give birth to a baby, you have to have a uterus and vagina. You and daddy don't have a uterus. Some daddies have uteruses. Some mommies do not have uteruses.

What makes a mommy or a daddy?
Being a mommy or a daddy is about loving a child, and choosing to be a parent. Anyone can be a mommy or a daddy, or a nana, or papi, or parent.

I have started to talk to Forrest about the difference between body parts and gender. I have started to be really explicit about the words for body parts and talk about how this is only one part of who we are.

I see Forrest take this in, and he doesn't look upset or confused. He changes the subject rapidly, as with all conversations we have, and circles around to it throughout our days together. Sometimes he declares-- Most men have penises, but not all men. Or he suddenly shares that he wants to wear a skirt like mommy. Or he gets confused about the gender of his classmate, and I suggest he ask his classmate what they identify as.

Am I making things too complex for Forrest? Will this damage him later? I imagine some folks might think so. But when I am with my son in nature, talking about the complexity of plant growth, or when I am trying to explain to him the complex and vast family we have chosen and been given through life and lineage, he doesn't blink. He just keeps on asking questions, and I keep on trying my best to answer. Mostly I just try to tell him that whoever we are is okay, and that we don't need to worry about other folks, or even ourselves, so much. That it's all good and all right. We get to be who we are.

Recently, I was walking in the woods with a family member. I was sharing my desire to make the categories of gender light for my son, and the process of possibility I want to hold for him. I told her that he says he wants to be a ballerina. I told her about his gentle nature, his heart filled desire for beauty and appreciation for it everywhere. I told her he asks to wear skirts sometimes, that I need to get on that and find him some skirts to wear.

She smiled and let me know that all of that would be gone once he started school and was exposed to other kids. Then he would get the message from his peers, and stop talking about those things. And I let her know that what she was describing made me want to homeschool my son.

I've heard a lot of talk about giving young people the education they need-- the resilience to handle harshness and criticism, the ability to function in highly competitive environments and difficult situations. If I hold this beside the desire to help my son explore who he is in a playful and possible way, I see a recapitulation of conformity and a continuation of the marginalization that I experience, that my loved ones experience. I refuse that in my life. I refuse to collude with my own erasure, and the erasure of those I love, in the name of resilience and mainstreaming.

And this includes my son, whoever he is, and whoever he will become. Maybe he will be a ballerina. Or maybe he will be a corporate lawyer (gasp). He did tell me yesterday he did not want to be an author, and he did want to be a big cat rescuer. I suggested he study zoology.