I hope my wife disagrees, but I'm not about to ask her, even though forty years have run by. The truth is that the moment that I felt myself among the Absolute Worst Husbands Ever was a moment I should have felt the greatest glory--at the birth of our children. Well, let me restate that: at the moment my wife gave birth to our children.
Some husbands record every savory moment with a camera. I've listened to countless tales of heartwarming spousal piety--how meaningful it was for Jake or Ed or Kyle to experience those precious birthing moments with their wives.
I wish it warn't so, but it warn't that way for me. The truth is, I probably never, ever felt so useless as when I stood there, holding my wife's hand through all that pain, her pain.
We'd lugged pillows to classes where real earth mother-types reviewed every last glorious anatomical detail of the birth process, details I tried to tell myself I really wanted to know. I know what I supposed to feel--true exaltation; but, truthfully, I didn't. While my wife was in the throes of pain I'll never feel, the doctor who sat at the receiving end at my son's birth talked about having read something I'd written in a church magaziine, even expressed some tepid disapproval. Seriously, that happened.
But the moment those pink bundles arrived and arrived in tact, both of us experienced miraculous recovery. A novelist friend of mine once said he thought the very best finish to a novel had to be birth because nothing else we'll ever experience under the sun is so affirming as birth, as new life. Pick up a copy of Touches the Sky, and you'll see that I once took that advice to heart.
Even though I felt as useless as I did, it's fair to say that watching my wife take those babies in her arms just a few moments after those births will forever rank among the most beautiful portraits I have in the album of greatest treasures in my memory. We have no video, but I do have unforgettable images.)
That joy was something I was surprised not to find on this young mother's face at a clinic in west Africa. She'd just borne her first child--we'd arrived at the clinic a short time after her delivery. The baby looked healthy and was, or so said the midwife, a tiny bundle of life wrapped up in a blanket, almost Christ-like. But, this young mother's face, her whole countenance (to use an old word), seemed joyless, almost abject.
Not sad really, and there was no real fear or anger. What was on her face seemed roughly akin to boredom, as if what she'd been through meant no more to her, perhaps, than spreading washed clothing out to dry on the roof of her hut.
Not that life itself was drudgery--that's not what I saw on her face and still do when I see her above. What I saw was a species of passive acceptance at a moment one might expect at least a sparkle of, well, ecstasy. She'd just had a baby, a son, and that sweetheart child was healthy and strong, her first.
But she looked as if what she'd just gone through--how can I say this best?--really didn't matter much at all.
Maybe by her estimation it didn't. Perhaps in her world, having children is less a joy than obligation. Perhaps she had no reason not to expect another dozen such moments in her life, some less successful. When she'd walk back to her village, there'd be no balloons, no streamers hanging from the ceiling of the hut, no cake, no cards, no hugs. The father hadn't even come with her to the clinic. Perhaps whatever gratification she could take from having just given birth was the simple fact that she'd done what she was supposed to. She could have been, after all, one of his several wives.
Some who know far more than I do claim that animism, the old religion of many in rural west Africa, creates passivity by teaching that one's life is blessed or cursed, willy-nilly, by strong spirits so vastly beyond our power that believing in human choice is nothing less than silly.
Maybe I'm overthinking all of this. Maybe this young, young mom is just plain worn out. She's just a kid, and she just had a baby.
My wife witnessed a birth at another rural clinic in another African country, and was greatly thankful for the experience. But she said she was surprised the new mom didn't seem more excited at what had just happened, more pleased, more thrilled.
Some things one witnesses in other worlds, in other cultures, are almost immediately translatable by judgement created by our mutual humanness: women laughing together around the village well some mornings. There is no village well in Alton, Iowa, but their laughing and spoofing?--that happens anywhere in countless coffee shops. A half-dozen guys sit around a tiny fire heating tea; I don't have to translate what they're saying when they're joshing around.
But other images hold mystery that's beguiling, and this is one I have in my camera--the taciturn face of a beautiful young mom holding her beautiful young baby; and the passivity, the strange joylessness that seemed so clearly written all over her. This grandpa simply couldn't read what it was and why it was there.
I don't know how to understand it, how to translate it. I wish I did. I'd like to know.
________________________
*Previously published in With the Luke Society in Africa.
No comments:
Post a Comment