In Praise of Messy Lives (21 page)

There is also the matter of Hillary’s forced relation to femininity. Her transformation from a woman who cut her own hair and wore work shirts and jeans and no makeup to a coiffed blonde in pink cashmere and pearls has been much noted and commented on. Hillary writes in
Living History
about the arrival of stylists in her life during Clinton’s first campaign: “I was like a kid in a candy store, trying out every style I could. Long hair, short hair, bangs, flips, braids and buns. This was a new universe and it turned out to be fun.” But of course, one doesn’t get a sense of fun from that particular passage. Here again is the phoniness. Her pleasure and mastery of traditional femininity is not effortless; rather, one feels the labor, the artifice. At one point,
Time
magazine accused her of “allowing handlers to substitute the heart of Martha Stewart for her own.” And it seemed that way because her relation to all things female felt unnatural, contrived. What is interesting is that this groping for a kind of workable femininity, a palatable, mainstream feminine image, necessary as it so obviously was, bothered us. Hillary was unable to project the effortless image of a strong, yet feminine woman that the next generation, at least, has come to expect. It is meant to be easy, to be seamless, the transition from tough, serious workaholic to lady in kitten heels. It is meant to look natural, and the sheer awkwardness, the effort that Clinton projected, the contradictions that she so conspicuously, so crudely, embodied were perhaps a little close to home. She is trying too hard, and the spectacle of all this trying is uncomfortable, embarrassing. One could feel in a palpable way the smart woman’s impersonation of the pretty
woman, the career woman’s impersonation of the stay-at-home mom; one could feel a lack of grace. This is perhaps the quandary of our particular iteration of feminism, how hard even a younger generation is trying, how often it feels faked. Hillary’s “phoniness” may be so irritating, so unforgivable, to so many smart, driven, women in part because it is our own.

The other afternoon, as people were gossiping about the breakup of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s marriage, I found myself thinking about the origins of the ubiquitous but complicated term “love child.” If the phrase was once slangy or tabloidish, news organizations ranging from
CBS News
to
The Washington Post
now seem to consider it a straightforward descriptive phrase, as if it were the Standard English term for a child born outside of marriage, which makes it seem like as fruitful a time as any to untangle its vexed etymology.

The word itself dates back to at least 1805. In
The Nuns of the Desert
, Eugenia de Acton writes of a “Miss Blenheim” being “what in that country is denominated a love-child,” and the term appears again a little later in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s
Posthumous Poems
. Another important addendum in the word’s history is, of course, the 1968 Diana Ross and the Supremes’ song “Love Child,” with the truly transcendent rhyme “Love child never meant to be / Love child scorned by society.”

Of course, we will never know exactly what went on between Schwarzenegger and his housekeeper, but I am quite sure that
most of the pundits and commentators and gossips who are using the phrase “love child” do not think that it was “love.” The ironies or elaborate commentaries within the phrase are fraught; the word “love” in this instance is in fact communicating the idea of sex, of unmade beds, of hotel rooms in the afternoon. Most people are not actually thinking, when they utter the phrase, “Oh, how nice. A love child!”

When people say that they feel sorry for Schwarzenegger’s “children,” or when he himself asks the media to “respect my wife and children through this extremely difficult time,” I am fairly sure that they mean his legitimate children, and that no one is being asked to respect his love child, who is with that pretty little prefix “love” somehow airlifted out of both his father’s familial obligations and the general moral concern.

Perhaps the
Washington Post
editor who chose to use the word “love child” as a purely descriptive phrase may have thought there was no better term, and he may be right. This may be one of those shadowy instances in which language fails us. Is there another word that does not carry with it some smirking holier-than-thou-ness, some puritanical judgment, some gleeful shades of schadenfreude? “A child born out of wedlock” is clunky, and the word “wedlock” is not exactly au courant.

The cool and technical “illegitimate” is not very nice; although at first glance it appears to be a neutral term, a
Merriam-Webster
detour around the whole messy hullabaloo, it too is freighted with an elaborate moral critique. What, one wonders, is more legitimate in the twenty-first century about the children of married people than those of people too busy, distracted, or original to be married?

Since our bigotries are less openly and exuberantly expressed
than they were in past decades, they take refuge in subtle, shifting word choices. “Love child” is definitely more friendly or tactful than the more Shakespearean “bastard” or Hawthorne’s “sin-born infant,” but it nonetheless conveys a certain discomfort with the facts. “Love child” is both tolerant (that is, more tolerant than other terms) and mocking; it contains within it our contradictions; it passes judgment in an ironic way—indirectly, playfully, but also plainly.

Note the pictures posted in various venues of the boy in question: standing next to his mother, who is smiling in a white parka, is the boy, his head pixilated so that we can’t see his face. Like all efforts to protect the privacy of those considered victims, this has the dubious effect of reinforcing the sense of shame: it puts forward the message that there is something to be ashamed of. We have to pixilate his face because we don’t want people on the street to recognize him. (Here one thinks of the dictionary definition of “bastard”: “Something that is of irregular, inferior or dubious origin.”)

There is in all this a sense that this love child should be protected because he is, as Diana Ross says, “scorned by society.”

As you read about the scandal on the Internet, it is not long before you come upon headlines like “Arnold’s Secret Lovechild to Blame in Split with Maria,” as if the kid himself is responsible for the collapse of the large Brentwood household. And you can’t help but notice that the faces of Schwarzenegger’s other four children are not blurred—because, the subliminal message goes, they would have nothing to be ashamed of if they were spotted on the street, or on an airplane, or in a Starbucks. They are simply children, not love children.

I happen to have a child outside of marriage, whom I sometimes
refer to, in a half-serious, half-jesting way, as a love child, especially around other people who have children outside of marriage. Is this because this is the best term we have? Or is there a sense that we are not apologizing for our children by resorting to the silliest, most tabloidy phrase in circulation? I have a feeling that it’s a little bit of both.

Stepping back, though, what is a tiny bit subversive and possibly appealing about the term is the faint suggestion that the love child has something more to do with love than the baby born in wedlock, who is in a certain sense just doing his job, fulfilling the natural and upstanding function of holy matrimony. On some level, the existence of the love child is testimony to some special energy on the planet, to someone doing something not necessarily sanctioned by the Bible, on his or her own time, out of some extra industry or aspiration.

Some might argue I am being a little overly scrupulous here. Does it matter what words we use for the child of an afternoon fling? As George Orwell wrote, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Which is to say, the words we use actually shape the way we think, and not just the other way around. In these casual phrases and headlines we are spreading our attitudes, as ambivalent, confused, and inconsistent as they are; we are propagating our mixed messages, our prurient judgments, our puritan fantasies. We are, in our inimitable, ironic register, proving to the love child just how unloved he actually is.

Considering the growing number of children born outside the institution of holy matrimony in this country, we may have to await a better way to describe them. And in the meantime, we could embark on the interesting thought experiment of calling Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pixilated fourteen-year-old his child.

Last year, a friend of mine sent a shipment of green rubber flooring, at great impractical expense, to a villa in the south of France because she was worried that over the summer holiday her toddler would fall on the stone floor. Generations of French children may have made their way safely to adulthood, walking and falling and playing and dreaming on these very same stone floors, but that in no way deterred her in her determination to be safe. This was, I think, an extreme articulation of this generation’s common fantasy: that we can control and perfect our children’s environment. And lurking somewhere behind this strange and hopeless desire to create a perfect environment lies the even stranger and more hopeless idea of creating the perfect child.

Of course, for most of us, this perfect, safe, perpetually educational environment is unobtainable; a casual fantasy we can browse through in
Dwell
, or some other beautiful magazine, with the starkly perfect Oeuf toddler bed, the spotless nursery. Most of us do not raise our children amidst a sea of lovely and instructive wooden toys and soft cushiony rubber floors and healthy organic snacks, but the ideal exists and exerts its dubious influence.

This fantasy of control begins long before the child is born, though every now and then a sane bulletin lands amidst our fashionable perfectionism, a real-world corrective to our overarching anxieties. I remember reading with some astonishment, while I was pregnant, a quiet, unsensational news story about how one study showed that crack babies turned out to be doing as well as non–crack babies. Here we are feeling guilty about goat cheese on a salad, or three sips of wine, and all the while these ladies lighting crack pipes are producing intelligent and healthy offspring. While it’s true that no one seemed to be wholeheartedly recommending that pregnant women everywhere take up crack for relaxation, the fundamental irony does appear to illustrate a basic point: that children, even in utero, are infinitely more adaptable and hardy and mysterious than we imagine.

And yet the current imagination continues to run to control, toward new frontiers and horizons of it. A recent book generating interest in the United States is called
Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives
. It takes up questions such as whether eating more fish will raise the intelligence of your child, or what exact level of stress is beneficial to the unborn child. (Too much stress is bad, but too little stress, it turns out, is not good either. One doctor reports that she has pregnant women with blissfully tranquil lives asking her what they can do to add a little healthy stress to the placid uterine environment.)

Then, just last month came a well-publicized British study that suggested that a little drinking during pregnancy is healthy, and that children whose parents drank a little bit were, if anything, slightly more intelligent than children whose mothers refrained from drinking entirely. One might think this new evidence would challenge the absolutism of our attitudes about drinking
and pregnancy, the quasi-religious zeal with which we approach the subject, but it’s equally possible that it won’t have much effect. Our righteousness and morally charged suspicion that drinking even the tiniest bit will harm an unborn child runs deeper than rational discussion or science; we are primed for guilt and sacrifice, for the obsessive monitoring of the environment, for rampant moralism and reproach, even before the baby is born.

One of my friends asked me, very sensibly, “Is it worth even the smallest risk?” about a glass of wine late in my pregnancy, and of course the answer has to be no. What kind of Lady Macbeth would place her own fleeting if urgent desire for a glass of wine above her child’s health, or ability to get into an excellent college? However, the question itself betrays its own assumptions: our exaggerated vision of risk and sensitivity to the impossible idea of control may also be damaging to a child.

If you drink a little, the popular logic goes, your child might be a little dumber. He won’t be damaged per se, but he’ll be a little dumber. Behind this calculation is the mystical idea of engineering the perfect child. But perhaps the question we should be asking ourselves is, Even if we can engineer him, will he grow up to be unbearable?

You know the child I am talking about: precious, wide-eyed, over-cared-for, fussy, in a beautiful sweater, or a carefully hipsterish T-shirt. Have we done him a favor by protecting him from everything, from dirt and dust and violence and sugar and boredom and egg whites and mean children who steal his plastic dinosaurs, from, in short, the everyday banging-up of the universe? The wooden toys that tastefully surround him, the all-sacrificing,
well-meaning parents, with a library of books on how to make him turn out correctly—is all of it actually harming or denaturing him?

Someone I know tells me that in the mornings, while making breakfast, packing lunches, and laying out clothes, she organizes an art project for her children. An art project! This sounds impossibly idyllic—imaginative, engaged, laudable. And yet, is it just the slightest bit mad as well? Will the world, with its long lines in the passport office and traffic jams, be able to live up to quite this standard of exquisite stimulation? And can you force or program your child to be creative?