[âMy mother passed down to me a generalized disappointment with men. Very young, I saw resentment written on her body, which was, however confusingly, a map on which I located my own flesh and my own frustration. It seemed she was blackmailing and bitter toward me not only because being a single mother taxed her but also because she was still looking for love, finding only cruelty in its place. Any connectionâbetween the violence and violation she experienced in her sex life and the challenges of motherhoodâwas murky for us both. But I sensed in her, always, a repudiation of the roles of both mother and woman, even when, at times, the closeness the two of us shared felt stifling. When I was in the third grade, she had an abortion and told me about it on the night of the procedure as we bathed together. The water that night, like all her stories and like all her baths, was scorching yet therapeutic, and I must have begun to understand then the impossible task women face, which my mother taught me through her storytelling, but also night after night as we burned off the day together in the bath. To survive as a woman in this world, she seemed to say, we must regularly destroy the shit we have collected inside our bodies.
There was not, to my knowledge, any alternative. But I knew that some women in our family had resisted motherhood, for reasons I didnât quite understand. They did away with unwanted pregnancies in clinics, or in bedrooms, or tried. My great-grandmother, Jean, gave herself multiple abortions at home. My mother told me Jean used hangers repeatedly, disfiguring her reproductive system over time, but itâs possible Jean used other abortive methods, and that these were simply cultural images of abortion my mother patterned on to what she knew. Jean was white and came from money, and although her father forbade her from going to the womenâs college she wanted, she was educated at a finishing school meant to prepare her for marriage. Safe abortion may have been possible for Jean, living just outside of Chicago at the turn of the century, because of her race, class, and marital status. Itâs also possible that Jean was raped in her marriage and then suffered through abortions alone, though itâs hard to say how Jean herself would have categorized the way her body fit into her marriageâwhether she endorsed a kind of marital duty. But given how many times my great-grandmother had to do away with unwanted pregnancies, I have always assumed she simply couldnât say no to the man she lived with, who was known to be an angry alcoholic who drove a Duesenberg and threw big parties.
Jean died before menopause due to complications caused by a final at-home abortion, never getting the chance to know her body as something other than a maker of children. The details of those complications are lost to time and the haziness of generational memory. But I know Jeanâs life was altered by legal and medical institutions that endorsed a husbandâs ownership over his wife, and that didnât see women as capable of making choices about their bodies. Even so, whenever my mother spoke of Jean, she spoke only of my great-grandmotherâs sadness. My mother was ashamed of Jeanâs depressive tendencies, as though they issued from some flaw withinâsomething perhaps we carried in ourselves, too. Jeanâs feminine melancholy was, for my mother, just another thing Jean could not rid herself of, however she triedâand it was, perhaps, the thing my mother, too, was always trying to overcome. Ultimately, my mother came to see her own dark periods the ways she saw Jeanâs. My motherâs alcoholism, her trouble with men, her imperfect motherhoodâthese she would come to see as indications that there was something broken in her, rather than in the world.â]
amanda montei, from touched out: motherhood, misogyny, consent, and control, 2023
