Kids & Parenting
Katie Roiphe: My Newborn Is Like a Narcotic
Why won't feminists admit the pleasure of infants?
In the six weeks since my baby was born, I seem to have lost all worldly ambition. I can think about September, when I am supposed to go back to work, only with dread. I have a class to teach. I have to start writing again. But the idea of talking about ideas in front of students or typing a coherent sentence (i.e., my normal life) seems totally implausible. Even now, the prospect of writing a few paragraphs about this problem seems almost out of reach. Taking care of the baby—physical, draining, exhilarating—is more like farming: following the rhythms of the earth, getting up at dawn, watching the corn flush in the sunrise. It is not at all like writing.
Some of my fear of returning to work may just be an accurate assessment of my capabilities. The other day it emerged that I lack the intellectual wherewithal to set a table: It was just a little too challenging to hold the number of people at dinner in my head on the walk from the kitchen to the deck. Some of this may be hormones; some is certainly sleep deprivation. I know from my days suffering from insomnia that sleep deprivation is tricky; it makes you sloppy, nervy, and fogged. But you also start to take a kind of perverse satisfaction in the jangly feeling of total exhaustion; you begin to thrive on the physical crisis, the special adrenaline of it.
When the baby was four weeks old, I had to do a reading at Barnes and Noble. I had written the introduction to Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife, and I was scheduled to do a reading with Talese. On the night of the reading, I left the baby with someone I trust completely and absolutely. I managed to put on a dress and look something like the person who gave readings who I used to be. But when I walked out onto the street, I felt like I was missing a limb. Even though Talese was riveting by any objective standard, my concentration faltered. During the reading I thought about the baby. As people asked questions, I calculated how long the taxi ride home would take. Afterward, there were people who wanted to buy one of my books. The manager of the bookstore held out a pen, and I apologized and told him that I couldn’t sign books, that I had to run home. The manager looked a little bewildered. This was, after all, a book signing at which the authors traditionally sign books.
On the escalator I panicked slightly because the person in front of me wasn’t moving, and I couldn’t pass her to get out of the store quickly enough. During the taxi ride down the FDR highway, I looked out at the water and cried. It was insane, sentimental, out of proportion, and I was aware that it was insane, sentimental, and out of proportion. But only when the baby was back in my arms did I feel OK again.
I remember visiting one of my closest friends on her maternity leave last summer. We sat on a wooden bench in her garden and drank iced coffees, and gazed at her second baby. She is a writer, and we talked about how the women writers we most admired had no children, or have had one child, at the absolute most, but never two. (Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen had no children; Mary McCarthy, Rebecca West, Joan Didion, and Janet Malcolm all had one.) My friend looked down at her newborn and her tiny eyelashes. She could entertain this conversation in an academic way, but as she adjusted the baby’s hat I could see how far removed it was from anything that mattered to her. Here, sitting in the garden, looking at the eyelashes, would you trade the baby for the possibility of writing The House of Mirth? You would not.
People often compare having a new baby to the early days of a love affair, which is true as far as it goes, but one’s physical fixation on, and craving for, a newborn is much stronger and more intense that that. How often in a love affair can you literally find yourself in tears because you were away from a man for three hours?
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Comments
newborn like a narcotic?
By: beachgirl61 | Mon, 11/30/2009 - 09:09
I just read the Kate Roiphe article...and am not all that impressed. She's not unlike every other new mother who thinks she's the FIRST to ever experience the miracle of new motherhood. I did the same thing 26 years ago...and got to experience it again secondhand when my grandson was born in 2006. Roiphe's feelings are of course valid, but I guess i wonder why she feels the need to ask the reading public to "validate me" like that? Being a mother doesn't make her any less of a feminist or an intellectual. Opening your womb doesn't necessarily mean closing off your intellect. Ok, so she's happy with full time mothering right now? Good. Why should she have to explain herself to someone else? We who are mothers/grandmothers just need to go with it and the heck with the opinions of others who allegedly "read and write and think" because if they are thinking less of you for being a mom or a grandmama, that's THEIR problem, not yours.
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beautiful article, unfortunate title
By: AliceM | Thu, 09/10/2009 - 07:28
What a beautifully written article. I loved everything about it, although perhaps the title choice was an unfortunate one. It seems to have put many women on the defensive before they even got started with the essay. (Although I have to admit, it was the title that prompted me to read it in the first place!) I am a feminist, a mother, and a writer, and I am sad to see so many women responding to Roiphe's words with anger and ill will. Thank you for sharing your experience with us, Katie Roiphe. It was a window into an intensely beautiful time.
a baby high, a baby low
By: RachelLee1979 | Sun, 09/06/2009 - 20:24
I'm not comfortable with this metaphor. And not for the idea of drugs and babies being paralleled... I think of addiction and I think of people who are are so consumed with their own vices that they no longer have the capacity, or care, to serve any other purpose and are so self-involved and focused on that one and only care that they will allow all else to fail. Similar to Roiphe's description but I can't quite connect the two. The main contradiction is that motherhood is commonly considered a selflessness (all that self they gave up for the little one!) but addiction is the truest form of selfishness. Well, that WAS my response until I remembered each of the new moms I have been exposed to over the years, all friends, in detail. Once they became mothers I might say I would feel more comfortable having tea with a meth addict in a basement locked from the outside. There will always be a wall between women who have had babies and women who haven't, but there is a mountain between the women who felt like Roiphe about their babies and the women who did'nt.
Why feminists don't "admit" the pleasure of infants...
By: marta_janison | Fri, 09/04/2009 - 15:29
Because life in an opium den is not work. Because thrilling to heights of ecstasy over an offspring's eyelashes is not work. To the degree that motherhood consists of these things, it is not work in any sense that is recognizable by the market, and without recognition by the market, individuals and their activities are devalued in our society. Feminists have correctly focused on the aspect of motherhood that stands a chance of improving the status of women by giving them market value (you know, the actual work involved). These feminists haven't been dishonest. They simply realize that while her new-found love may feel enormous, empowering and completely satisfying, it is not sufficient to support her value on the market, to argue for non-discrimination in hiring, equal pay or decent maternity leave.
Roiphe's essay is annoying because I don't for a minute believe she does not know this. Read with this mindset, it's just 2 more pages of navel-gazing, of which this feminist has had quite enough.
I'm a feminist and a mother...
By: Anglophile | Fri, 09/04/2009 - 14:06
...and I think this article is self-righteous, judgmental, offensive and self-serving.
To assert, as Roiphe arrogantly does, that feminists are "denying" the pleasures of infants is to perpetuate exactly the kind of obnoxious stereotyping against feminists that we've been fighting since feminism came into existence.
Not all of us feminist moms find babies to be Teh Awesome. Some of us are only too happy to have left behind the days of no sleep, nursing every two hours (or coping with the guilt, our own and guilt thrown at us, for not nursing), cleaning up poop explosives, doing piles of shit-stained laundry, not getting to shower on a regular basis, and coping with the roller coaster ride of postpartum hormones. Some of us take a hell of a lot more delight in our toddlers, or our primary-school aged kids, or our teenagers, than we ever did in our babies, and so what? We are all of us different and that's the point. Stereotyping sucks, but it sucks worst of all when a feminist does it.
We as humans- not women- have
By: buggie | Thu, 09/03/2009 - 19:31
We as humans- not women- have a duty to contribute to society beyond our own flesh and blood.
Yes, it is a passionate time
By: Diana Landen | Thu, 09/03/2009 - 16:34
What a beautiful description of the early days of motherhood. Tender, real, funny, and able to recognize that there is another world out there, she just doesn't want to be in it right now.
And yes, Roiphe is right, one of the mistakes of feminism has been denying the passion of this time. The hostile reaction to this piece proves that.
this is ridiculous
By: alyssology | Thu, 09/03/2009 - 12:47
The ethos of this article reminds me of the archaic notion that women are creatures who are slaves to their passions and emotions...you can't possibly get anything intellectually productive done when you're doomed to be obsessed with your baby...so why even bother trying?
As for me, I have a son who I love more than anything, and when I had him, I couldn't wait to get back to work. I found my six weeks at home with him too isolating and to intense, and that, in fact, prevented me from bonding with him. I found my return to adult company and conversation and intellectual stimulation to be thrilling and energizing. Articles like this imply that my style of parental attachment is deficient. I wonder if I ought to have felt the way that Roiphe and other respondents describe. This attitude that being love-drunk with your baby is a universal maternal experience, or should be, leaves little room for a diversity of experience, a diversity that we, as feminists, ought to celebrate.