Fear of Dying (19 page)

Glinda was in a labor room breathing with her husband, Sam, who looked pale and terrified. I thought of tribes who had the husbands wade out into the sea with the menfolk while their wives were in labor. It seemed like a better plan than our own isolated hospital waiting. What can a man do for his wife at a time like this? My then-husband, Glinda's father, Ralph, aka Rumi, shot videos when I was in labor that seemed more obscene at the time than pornography. For God's sake, do something useful—like not drowning. Husbands are not meant to be doulas. It gets them upset.

I liked being pregnant, but I would have happily skipped the whole birthing process. If I could have been knocked out cold like a 1930s mom, I wouldn't have minded. But in my day, there was endless propaganda about “natural childbirth.” There is, in my view, nothing natural about childbirth—but death. Before modern medicine, mothers and babies died like flies—as they still do in much of the world. The one thing childbirth taught me was not to romanticize nature. Red in tooth and claw, tending toward annihilation of the most vulnerable, nature is not all that great. I nearly died trying to deliver Glinda “naturally”—a delusory effort on my part. I labored for nine hours (it seemed like ninety) before giving up and having a C-section—possibly considered defeatism by my feminist cohort. But thank the Goddess for C-sections.

Sadly, Glinda was doomed to repeat this pattern—since we both have cervixes that don't dilate readily. But at least she had the C-section sooner. Not soon enough for her overidentified mother.

But when the baby appeared, wrapped in his pink-and-blue striped cap, swaddled in receiving blankets, shut-eyed, red-faced, and wrinkly, we found him the most gorgeous creature we'd ever beheld. He weighed nearly nine pounds, aced all his neonatal tests, and clearly was a genius. Glinda and Sam called him Leonardo after da Vinci. And we called him Leo.

He reduced us to simpering idiots, finding family resemblances in this new creature who looked like every other baby. We saw in him the future—a thing we'd not believed in for a long time. We marveled over his perfect hands and feet, his lusty cry, his endearing little kicks. This was a perfect creature that we all had made.

A baby! Then the human race will continue despite all our moronic mistakes—not to mention those of our political leaders. What is it about babies? We are hardwired to adore their little feet and hands, their oceanic eyes, their coos, their gurgles, their vomit, their pee, their sweet-smelling baby poop. At least I was. Leo reduced me to my primal maternal essence. I was the ur-matriarch, ready to give my all to this incredible nine pounds of hope.

As for Glinda, she delighted in telling and retelling the story of her giving birth—embellishing with each retelling. Her labor got longer and longer, her bleeding more and more excessive, her heroism greater.

I am not knocking this. The heroism of mothers makes the world go round. We cannot give it enough credit. And we don't.

A friend once told me that before you visit your grandchildren, you get more excited than when you are going to meet a lover. Mostly it's true. Your focus shifts in a crucial way. All your lovers pale before this little squirming lump of hope. The future! And you are already a part of it—through no fault of your own!

Also the dead children on TV become real to you in an excruciating way—children killed by drones, land mines, earthquakes, kidnappers become your own children. You used to be a smokin' broad but now you are a smokin' grandma and all the world's children are your own children. If only we could organize all the grandmas of the world—that might really work. Grandmas may be the only women in the world to understand the proper place of men. We ought to unite to change the world! Grandmotherhood had brought back hope.

Holding Leo, inhaling his aphrodisiacal newborn scent, I was transported to Babyland—a land of harmony where sleep comes easily, milk flows like tears, and all is well. “How many miles to Babyland?” went an old song playing in my memory. Where did it come from? It was lost in the amnesia of early childhood. If only I could retrace these snatches of memory.

What came back to me was Glinda's infancy—how I stared and stared at her, finding perfection in every finger, every toe, how I loved nursing her, listening to the gurgling of her stomach, her pooping as I switched her from one breast to the other; my complete delight in what a friend of mine called “the tube stage of life.” In one hole and out the other—how simple and elemental! It was so much more satisfying than an audition or waiting for reviews. You got your review then and there—and it was good.

*   *   *

But Glinda hated breast-feeding—perhaps because there was so much propaganda for it.

My sister Antonia made it all worse by coming in and declaring, “Just pretend you're a monkey.”

“But I'm not a monkey,” Glinda said. “Do people really
like
this?”

I knew that if I said I liked it, she'd be even more determined
not
to breast-feed. So I said nothing. Saying nothing is the deep wisdom of grandmothering. Shut up, Grandma, your kids cannot possibly accept that you know
anything
!

I had adored breast-feeding for six months or so—that elemental stage of existence, the feeding and excretion that consumes the lives of most living creatures. And I had wept when the baby began to wean herself because she was a big baby and started getting more substantial food. Besides, after six months or so, you start feeling trapped by the baby's schedule, and milk pumping had to be done by hand with little plastic trumpets in my day. Still, I would not have missed breast-feeding for the world. It was such a simple way of being needed and fulfilling a loved one's need. It was sensual to me, exciting and fulfilling both.

*   *   *

New ecological mothering was all the rage with Glinda's generation. You were supposed to sleep with your baby, transport your baby in a sling, use cloth diapers, and food-process your own baby food. Motherhood had been turned into a time-and-a-half job in rebellion against my feminist generation. Young women felt madly superior to their mothers because of all that slinging, food-processing, co-sleeping, and rigid observance of Dr. and Nurse Sears's method of baby farming. Parenting—already a twenty-four-hour-a-day job—now became a thirty-six-hour-a-day job, and mothers were fiercely proud of it.

I had always believed in baby nurses despite the fact that they were mostly difficult control freaks, so I paid for a baby nurse. She was called Drusilla. She was a bossy Belizean who knew everything and wouldn't let you forget it.

Baby nurses hate mothers who nurse. That took care of Glinda's reluctance to do it. Gone was the breast pump, and for Glinda it was good riddance.

I was not about to go on about how I'd enjoyed it. I believe that each mother should find her own way of mothering, that all the advice we give on mothering is useless. It's hard enough to be a mother without having some book or blog to obey. But the blogging that went on about breast-feeding and new mothering! Women are so competitive about their tits! You'd think we'd just invented them.

I know how illuminating it is to suddenly discover the wisdom of the body when you've spent much of your life denying the body and its vast intelligence.

But the breast-feeding part was easy compared to what came eight days later—the bris. The bris, the Brit Milah, the covenant of circumcision. Or as I like to think of it: Next time, boychick, we take the whole thing! Who would have believed I'd be wandering around my apartment looking for anesthetizing cream to put on his cute little dick while my daughter forbade me to get near her son!

As you've already gathered, the bris was at my house. Asher was thrilled to host it. All our friends and Glinda's and Sam's, waiting to behold the ancient sacrificial rite. My darling shrink tells me I'm wrong about all this—but what the hell. She believes in circumcision—so do many wise people.

The mohel was from Jewish Central Casting. He had a sonorous rabbi voice, masses of curly dark hair, and sad eyes that told the story of the wandering Jew, and he told jokes endlessly. He reminded me of an old joke about mohels.

What did the mohel put in his window?

A bonsai tree.

Why a bonsai tree?

What else should a mohel put in his window?

The circumcision of my first grandson was a revelation to me.

Ever wonder why Jewish boys are so fucked up about sex? Ever wonder why they fall for mile-high models from Slovenia who wear those big gold crosses? Ever wonder why Jewish boys fall in love with Chinese girls or blond shiksa cheerleaders from Kansas or those cool black models who dance like Beyoncé?

It's clearly because of the covenant with Jahwah or G-d.
I take this piece of your pecker, with your mother, father, grandfathers, and grandmothers looking on, exultant. And you think of nothing but your pecker for the rest of your life!

Of course most men think of nothing but their pricks for most of their lives. But Jewish men do it better—or worse, depending on your point of view.

You think female circumcision is bad? (It's hideous, health-destroying and horrible—and inflicted on women by other women.) But at least women have other things to think about than their pussies—like children, like politics, like acting. At least women don't focus nonstop on their vaginas (or as Oprah says, their vajayjays). Men think about their pricks for the rest of their lives. Don't get me wrong, they think about them whether or not they're circumcised. But circumcision bumps it up to a whole other level.

Health reasons, my ass. It's the health of the old impotent grandpas they're thinking of, not you, little boy. You could learn to push the skin back and wash. We're not in the desert anymore. We have Jacuzzis and steam showers and redwood hot tubs from California—or Californicate, as I always called it, even before the TV show.

No, folks, it's the
grandpas
who love this ritual. The mothers usually run in the other room crying. But they get blamed for it anyway. And Jewish women bear the brunt ever after. Either the nice Jewish boys marry you and run around with Diana Ross or Beyoncé or Naomi Campbell—or they marry Sandra Oh or Lisa Ling or Yoko Ono and the converts.

In the old days, your mother used to threaten suicide. Now we're more liberal, so your mother embraces Ms. Hung, Ms. Jong, Ms. Ono, Ms. Liu, Ms. Hoe, Ms. Loe, Ms. Cho, Ms. Choi, Ms. Loi. And guess what, the next little boy goes through it anyway!

In my parents' youth, there was a show that ran forever in which a Jewish boy fell head over heels in love with an Irish lass. It was called
Abie's Irish Rose
. That was the forbidden fruit in 1920s, 1930s New York. If you updated it, you'd have to call it
Abie's Chinese Lotus
or
Tantric Tootsie
. The idea would be the same: brilliant Jewish boy flees his mother and hightails it for India or China or Japan. (And you can find India, Africa, and China right here in New York City. You don't even have to take a plane.) Now everyone intermarries routinely. Great for the gene pool if not for Jewish mothers.

Okay. Call me an anti-Semite. (I'm secretly a pro-Semite.) But I do have misgivings about circumcision. And I have met (and married) a lot of Jewish men. The
alter kockers
(delicately translated as “old farts”) have every explanation under the sun. Explanations, after all, are all
alter kockers
can do. Circumcision is healthy, they claim. It prevents the clap. You won't get those nasty new viruses that are around today, G-d forbid. (A secret warning about gayness, I think.) But how can you ever forget the pain, the fear, the confusion of being eight days old and having your pecker snipped?

“They don't remember,” say the
alter kockers
—who also don't remember that
alter kocker
really means “old shitter.”

“They don't feel it,” say the
bubbes
.

“We did it in the hospital,” say the parents.

“He didn't feel a thing,” says the mother (who was in the other room crying her eyes out).

And here comes the mohel, with his beard, his tallis, his yarmulke, with his red wine and his gauze pads, his shiny snipper and his old jokes. Some of them actually suck off the snipped foreskin of the infant child and call it orthodoxy. (But every organized religion does absurd stuff—give me disorganized spirituality any day. At least then you can
choose
your own silly rituals.)

If this is the covenant with G-d, then G-d is a sadist. But we knew that already. He descends from Baal and all those other mean old gods. Not that the goddesses are any better. Think of Kali, after all, with her necklace of skulls. Life and death are always close as twins.

Even Jesus was circumcised, and many claim that Jesus was chaste—having demoted Mary Magdalene from disciple to whore, from wife to mistress, from wise woman to bimbo. But I never believed that version of the story. Now we have written proof that Jesus was possibly married—and probably to the woman most like his mother, that other Mary.

In the older Christianity—the one Jesus the Jew actually practiced—women were revered for their wisdom and spirituality. But that didn't suit Saint Paul, nor the apocalyptic Saint John the Evangelist (who was doubtless doing LSD on Patmos, where I visited his cave). When he wrote about the four horsemen and the blazing fires in the sky, he might well have been. Those horsemen might have been the Patmos sunset seen by a stoner emerging from a cave—or the Patmos sunrise—equally bewitching.

But whatever the old guys say, circumcision must hurt—even to a baby eight days old who then gets his first taste of wine—pain and alcoholism going hand in rubber glove.

It killed me to see my grandson marked like this so future Nazis could identify him. What is
wrong
with my chosen people? Are we chosen for
pain
? All the psychological troubles of Jewish men—from Sigmund Freud to Lenny Bernstein to Philip Roth—must stem from this dubious ritual. I want to tell my adorable grandson,
Just make sure you never make pee-pee in front of a skinhead
. But at eight days old, he doesn't know what a skinhead is!