My White Whale: On Moby-Dick and Motherhood
by Molly Sutton Kiefer, March 24, 2016
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whale, 1851
Editors’ Note: This essay is the first entry in an occasional series on books writers have stopped reading, either because the books were difficult, or too time-consuming, or because the writers just didn’t have it in them at the end of the day. At any rate, the series will be about that thing we good readers aren’t supposed to do (but which we do nonetheless): abandoning books.
My daughter can’t stop drawing sperm whales. She’s five years old and calls them this, uses those very words: sperm whales. Mostly, she draws them pregnant, as this is how she draws all her animals: little pigs within little pigs, fat mamas with wedge nipples. For a while, the stick-nipples were as long as the stick-legs, but eventually she abbreviated them, realizing her animals would stumble and fall at a trot.
We’re usually sitting at the kitchen table when she does this. She has a little tray full of quarter sheets of printer paper and a mug full of crayons and she’ll draw dens and oceans and nests. Her fascination with the animal world astounds me until I remember how I covered my double-fold closet doors with gummy double-sided tape and pages ripped from my old Ranger Rick magazines when I was a kid. We spent hours with a razor blade pulling that gunk off the pressed wood.
In many ways, my daughter is—was—my white whale. Just before I got married in the summer of 2007, I was diagnosed with a condition known as Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, or PCOS. It meant my ovaries were stubborn, refused to cooperate and ovulate. I was menstruating at the rate, well, I’d say of a whale, but whales re-absorb their uterine lining[1]—it’s primates that have the unique pleasure of bloodshed. Infrequently, to say the least, and no neat egg dropped from my little basket. I was a barren tree.
2007 was also the year I taught at the local high school. I was just a one-year substitute for the quirky teacher on sabbatical, which was ideal for me as I planned to go back to school and get my MFA before life swept me under with essay grading and parent-teacher conferences. The class he loved the most was simply called Humanities, and it all centered on a long explication of the novel Moby-Dick. I remember visiting his classroom after I got the job and finding all forty-two of his students’ desks swirled in concentric circles around his stool where I imagined him perched, the center of Charybdis.
I was first supposed to read Moby-Dick when I was an undergraduate—one of those American Literature surveys. Who read that gray brick of a book? My classmates were stunned silent. This was just as cell phones were becoming flat pucks, a rarity on college campuses. One girl read another book in the folds of her Moby-Dick. Another wrote long letters to friends, as if she were still in high school. We were all English majors at this point but couldn’t face This Book.
My father is an English professor and when I came home for a visit, he asked, “What are you reading in class these days?” I told him my supposed-to-be, and he asked if I’d gotten to the chapters on whaling yet. “Are they anything like the chapters on sewers in Les Miserables?”
When the elementary students at my daughter’s school got new fish, she wanted new fish. It didn’t matter that we had a pair of fatter fish at home, two goldfish with baleful eyes plus a lone plecostomus, its O-mouth plastered to the aquarium walls. I originally bought the fish to keep her company at night just after she was born; I was so bereft at the thought of her alone in that room, trying to fall asleep. I thought she’d love the gentle light.
Now she’s at that age where she wants more and more and more please, Mama. One little rabbit figure isn’t enough; she needs a whole warren to burrow into sleep.
I don’t remember a lot about that teaching year, except that it was the only time I maintained a routine that involved a daily poem (during my second hour prep period, right after I walked down to the teacher lounge for a Diet Coke) and I didn’t change the art on the walls. Moby-Dick was everywhere: in paintings, on driftwood, hanging from the ceiling. He was in pieces, affronted. I refused to teach him.
The summer of 2007 was the summer I got married. I was told I had this infertility condition and I didn’t know how to care. I had gone in because I was trying to time my cycle for my impending honeymoon. I wasn’t thinking about the future beyond that—just the ship we’d board in Alaska, the dark tunnel of our bedroom. The food and the nakedness and the endless reams of water.
When my daughter says it, says sperm whale, I try to be an adult. Try not to giggle. But there’s all of it: the dick, the sperm, the whiteness of it all, the coagulation of the ocean, the spunk, the froth, the things we end up doing to have the children we end up having. It’s like when my son shoves a carrot up his nose during dinner and I try not to laugh because it’s so cute but my husband is frustrated because he wants him to just eat your dinner please. So the snotty carrot shoots back into his lap and he has that proud-of-himself laugh, and I can’t help but think, “Well, yes, we’ve all arrived in farts and flumes. Welcome to the dinner table.”
A dear friend of mine is currently in her second trimester of pregnancy.
I want to leave that as a stanza in and of itself: a lone single-sentence paragraph. I want it to exist with so much white space around it, the world swallows it up and there is nothing left but a bright, hot light.
Pregnancy was my friend’s white whale too. She spent a year ramping up the fertility treatments, ending in the stirrups and with nightly injections, prodding her fine ovaries into over-stimulation. She never told him, but it wasn’t her ovaries that were the trouble, it was his lazy sperm. Those little wigglers would shuffle along for a few hours, but peter out halfway, languishing far from that glowing white egg. Essentially, the stimulation shots were meant to create a bigger target; their baby was made in a hospital room, a shot-put eliminating the too-long gangplank.
My Blogger profile declares many things I love: wool and bulbs and the colors of the ocean. It declares I love thick books to get lost in, and it’s true—there’s nothing compared to a fat book I cannot put down and want to live in for weeks. I was thinking of Anna Karenina when I wrote this. After reading AK, I decided to try a fat Russian novel every winter, went on to Doctor Zhivago, which I also loved, and then War and Peace. I’d read a few chapters every night, forgetting who was who, desperate to just be done, and left it, halfway, to collect dust. I gave up on Moby-Dick in much the same way. I don’t know where my mind wandered when it did, but I couldn’t rein it in. With no rope to tie it, my thoughts flutter kicked back onto land.
We went whale watching on our honeymoon. I remember hoping to see just one whale—it wasn’t guaranteed—and instead, we saw entire pods of them bubble feeding. They breached and everyone on the boat made happy shocked noises. The pod swam towards us, then under us, their great mottled bodies hilling in the water, and, eventually, swam away from us.
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Molly Sutton Kiefer is the author of the full-length lyric essay Nestuary. She has published three poetry chapbooks, and her work appears in journals such as The Rumpus, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Collagist, and Fiddlehead Review, among others. She is editor-in-chief of Tinderbox Poetry Journal and publisher of Tinderbox Editions. Molly Sutton Kiefer lives in Minnesota with her family.
Cover image via the Elusive Muse flickr photostream, March 22, 2015
Whaling image via Wikimedia Commons,” Whale-Fishing. Fac-simile of a Woodcut in the "Cosmographie Universelle" of Thevet, in folio: Paris, 1574. Project Gutenberg text 10940”
[1] http://www.whale-world.com/whale-reproduction/