One of the lines I thought of often during my pregnancy this year was in the thirteenth chapter of Tao Te Ching, where Lao Tzu said “吾所以有大患者，為吾有身 (We only know calamity because we have these bodies/selves)”. As someone still in her thirties with the relative good fortune of not paying such close attention to the body before, the changes brought by the journey of motherhood and the regular monitoring of the body at home and in the doctor’s office have been unnerving. I started to think more seriously about something that I have always known like everyone else, but not felt deeply from within: a youthful contentment coming from an unawareness of the body’s fragility, or at least the willful denial of it with little immediate consequence. Our bodies have always been working for us, catering to most of our needs when we were younger, without us noticing their mere existence in the best scenarios. Even though some of us may still suffer the emotional woes from an appetite for life bigger than our gifts or power, at least for most happy-go-luckies, our bodies have not been a physical hindrance.
One can immerse in an intellectual life more easily when one does not have the constant reminder of the body. When I read Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections during my third trimester, I found the psychologist’s childhood experience relatable: the early memories, discontents, isolation and early meditations. For a moment, living in Jung’s world, I felt like my old self, not subject to the physical clumsiness typical during late pregnancy and motivated to work towards the perspicuity of the mind. In recent years, the need to understand my formative years’ experiences became more urgent once there was a question of becoming a parent (finishing my novel helped in that regard). Besides, I sought comfort in Jung’s recall of the “fallow period” during the First World War and having parted ways with Freud, when his loneliness bore the fruits of his later prolific career. “The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life – in them everything essential was decided. It all began then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications of the material that burst forth from the unconscious, and at first swamped me. It was the prima materia for a lifetime’s work,” he reflected. And I found, of course, that the intellectual echoing between a writer and a reader, even with decades apart and great difference in circumstances, has no gender.
Motherhood, on the other hand, has been such a gendered and primal experience. It is especially so in the early months, since women are, both self-driven and nowadays under social pressure to breastfeed. Even though Jung fathered five children and spoke fondly of the ground base of family life, I doubt that he could empathize with the feeling of milk leaking from the breasts when hearing the baby’s cries in the morning. Motherhood not only makes a woman less “uprooted and hovered above the earth” (as Jung describes Nietzsche), it can knock a woman to the ground all too quickly almost to the extent of doubting the thin line between our human existence and that of the animals. I find that the blow can be even harder for women who have a rich inner life.
Can it be a blessing in disguise, however, to be humbled in regards to our body prematurely before old age? I have found myself asking this lately, at the risk of sounding opposed to feminism since misogynists are known to “humble” women’s bodies while denying their own vulnerability. But does motherhood essentially contribute to women’s strength and resilience precisely because of our sharp awareness of the body and its connection to the mind? After all, the primal joy has also been intense – is it really so bad to be an animal and a human at the same time, and to love in multiple ways? We have often separated the two in our narratives, creating hierarchies and the Tower of Babel – we are all different humans but not the same animal. But is it one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves since the invention of words?
Perhaps our babies bring us back to our own beginnings, before we fooled ourselves with “history” (men’s words), the beginnings with memories mostly locked in our subconsciousness, and to the place where we joyously or bitterly crossed the threshold between animals and humans. As I hear my three-month old’s daily coos with “ow-wee” and “ah-woo” while I’m typing, I wonder whether the inevitable event of teaching her a language (any language) would only benefit adults by allowing us to communicate with her better, but essentially reduce her much more colorful experience to ready-made tools. At the moment, I feel reluctant to think about giving her simple words such as “happy” if “ah-woo” would express the emotions better. However, when the time comes, I know that I will give in, because as original as I would like to be, I don’t want to be that wildly odd parent. Being multi-lingual might help a little.
In Chinese mythology, when 倉頡 created the written words, it was said that “天雨粟鬼夜哭” (heaven to rain down grain and ghosts to wail at night) – I have always wondered whether the ghosts were crying not out of fear but sympathy for the living. How I often feel that I am a writer who in fact doesn’t like words that much (music and images are better in my opinion). And how I wish sometimes that we could learn more from our babies, these bright-eyed beings still untinted in their lenses and unlearned in their manners, and not the other way around.
Flora Qian is the author of South of the Yangtze. She lives in New York with her husband and daughter.