When I turned to your author photo at the tail end of my time reading your book THE ARGONAUTS, you didn’t look anything like I expected. I was shocked at that reaction, and I realized I hadn’t actually pictured you in any way. My feeling of surprise, I think, was centered around the fact that seeing your picture and not recognizing you meant I didn’t, in fact, already know you.
Reading your book I felt like we connected deeply.
If I wrote a book like yours maybe you’d feel like you knew me too. I’d write how everyone asked how the cats were handling it in the weeks after my son’s birth. I’d write how I still can’t believe he’s a son after all the time I spent with him in my belly not knowing he’d be a boy. I’d write how I shook violently in the minutes after he finally slipped (slipped, after so much work pushing, he had the gall to slip) from me, saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” I'd write that putting a little bit of Earth Mama Angel Baby Natural Nipple Butter on the inside of the flange made pumping a thousand times better. I’d write about how much I’m looking forward to playing soccer with my son, how scared I am that he’ll like some other sport, like baseball, instead. How I assume he’ll like sports since I did, how foreign the idea of an unathletic child of mine is to me.
Those are things that I want to share with the world for some reason. They seem trivial. There are some things I particularly would want to share with you. You wrote your book while pumping milk for your son. I'm writing this letter to you pumping milk for my son. It is hard to find community for me, as a mother, but you’ve written in a way that makes me feel a part of a certain tribe of motherhood. You taught me not to be afraid of sharing my experience of motherhood, that even though birth and having children and family and pregnancy are universal things, they are special and individual too. I’m not scared of either of those aspects of starting a family anymore. The tribe I want to be a part of exists to me now. We all had something scary happen to our bodies, and we all had to face it. We all have to keep on facing it as the extension of our bodies, our babies, are put at risk every day they wake up again. It’s easier to face now after I read your book.
Maybe I’ll give my copy of your book to my next friend who gets pregnant and hope that she gives it to her next friend that gets pregnant. I wish I could have read THE ARGONAUTS while I was pregnant. It’s reassuring in its wildness. It’s educational in its careful philosophical curation. THE ARGONAUTS is a lot of books at once, so much so that I hesitate to make the slim tome too heavy in my mind. My husband read it before me, so we talked about certain passages twice- the ones we both liked enough to pause reading to point out to each other. A lot of them overlapped.
In the end, you wrote about so much more than babies and motherhood. It’s easy to feel like no one cares about this totally visceral (and to be honest disgusting) experience, that you shouldn’t talk about it openly. One book I read said not to mention certain words like “dilation,” “cervix,” or “placenta,” when discussing your birth experience in public. I knew already that was bullshit. THE ARGONAUTS is living proof that women can say those words, can feel them, and remain themselves. We can keep our identities, us mothers.
I don’t know how to sign this, so I’ll just say:
