It Runs in the Family (6 page)

We packed up for the longest car ride of my entire life. The backseat of a Toyota Corolla never seemed as small as it did at 4 am with a baby trying to come out of me. It was forty minutes of trying to ignore contractions, ignore how slow my husband was driving, ignore how uncomfortable I was, ignore that I wanted to be wearing lots more clothes or no clothes at all. When we finally arrived at the hospital, an orderly named Ted was waiting with a wheelchair. “Frida, right? Let’s go.” I cried with relief. All of a sudden I was in a room with computers and lights and nurses and monitors. Things were being attached to my body and I was being asked if I was allergic to anything and if I wanted to be visited by the chaplain. I got an epidural. The doctor examined me and suggested a forceps assist to get the baby out.

“You are going to need to push,” she said. “I am just going to direct the head. We only have a few tries. Can you do that? If it doesn’t work, we will bring you to surgery and do a C-section. Is that okay?”

“Yes, yes,” I responded.

So I went from the quiet intensity of home labor, where it was dark, warm, and full of whispered suggestions, to the tightly controlled chaos of the hospital, where it was bright and cold and full of shouted commands to push, push, PUSH. And there he was. His head all misshapen, like an Incan pyramid: steeped and conical. He had worked so hard against my body. His eyes were so bright. He was so alive.

We nursed, we laughed, we cried, and we stayed in the hospital for two more days and nights. Everyone took such good care of us and taught us how to take care of our precious little one. His head magically got round and smooth. We named him Seamus Philip Berrigan Sheehan-Gaumer. Seamus (Irish for James) after Patrick’s cousin and grandfather, and Philip after my dad. We threw Berrigan in there just so he could have two lines on his Social Security card and driver’s license, and so there would never be enough boxes for all the letters in his name on any standardized forms. I felt lucky all the way through my labor. Lucky to have midwives, lucky to be able to go to the hospital when it was absolutely necessary, lucky to be able to deliver my baby the old-fashioned way, and especially lucky to have a healthy baby. I also felt lucky to be covered. We did not get a big scary bill from Middlesex Hospital. It was all covered.

This is what I wish for all people. This is what a civilized and just society provides for its people. This is a right.

WHO YOU CALLING MAMA?

W
hen Seamus was born, I took a leave of absence from writing my regular column for
Waging Nonviolence
. What was I doing? Getting to know my kid. I struggled with many questions during this time. Who am I when I am not an activist, an organizer, an energetic and creative homemaker, and all of the other roles I have carved out for myself? Who am I, when all it seems I am doing is taking care of this infant?

Eventually, I learned to approach this time with Seamus—and with my family—as a gift, a foundation upon which I could build and grow comfortable with a big new facet of my identity—being a mother.

When Seamus was a happily napping infant, I might get an hour and twenty minutes of grown-up time here and there. The challenge was to use it wisely. I watched a lot of TV on Netflix. While he nursed, I consumed all of
Better Off Ted
and most of
IT Crowd
and caught up with those zany kids on
That ’70s Show
. I figured out what all the fuss was about with
Mad Men
and watched all six seasons of
Lost
. Occasionally, it would occur to me that I should be watching
A Force More Powerful
or a Ken Burns documentary—something edifying—but I was equally happy queuing up another sitcom.

When I was not nursing (which, depending on the day, might be for hours-long stretches or mere twenty-minute snippets), I washed his poopy diapers, frantically ate everything in sight (mostly cold), and tried to stay on top of a few select responsibilities.

My “to do” list used to be a page and a half long: War Resisters League conference calls, Witness Against Torture meetings, my responsibilities at the local food co-op, tending my community garden plot, volunteering at church, writing assignments, speaking gigs, and family responsibilities. I am a list maker, a planner, a do-er. And for weeks, maybe months, I made no lists, I set no plans, and I did very little. Yet, I was active and so was Seamus. We came to know one another, to understand one another, to settle into a relationship as mother and son. I had to learn to be okay with measuring my accomplishments in ounces and pounds gained on a happy baby instead of measuring my accomplishments as items checked off on a to-do list.

It meant learning to fully embrace, enjoy, and celebrate my new role as mother, and to integrate the new responsibilities, graces, and challenges into the person I already am.

Many women have to go back to work after six weeks, and most daycare centers take kids that young. But my husband and I made a choice to live on one salary. This choice means that we don’t go out to eat or to the movies that much, we don’t buy new clothes or expensive computer devices. We don’t have a lot of extra money, but we do have more time for family, for each other, and for the world.

One Good Friday, I trudged down the side of the road carrying a small sign: “I am waiting for YOU to shut down Guantánamo.” We were marching towards the submarine base in Groton, CT. I was grateful for the orange jumpsuit that added a layer of warmth and the black hood that blurred my sight. It was nice to not be seen. Usually at demonstrations, I like to be out and about. In New York City, where I was an activist with the War Resisters League and Witness Against Torture for twelve years, I often opted to pass out leaflets or hold a lead sign in a demonstration. I even honed an outgoing, chatty, aw-shucks persona that helped me greet everyone with enthusiasm and openness.

But New York City is not Southeastern Connecticut. Even when the response was hostile and barbed in New York, it was brief. Even the biggest haters are in a big rush in the Big Apple. In a city of eight million people, the person who tells you to “Get a job!” or “Move to Russia!” or who wants to “Behead all the Muslims!” is probably not going to be pulling you over for speeding on Route 32 or taking your gas money at the local Pump ‘N Munch.

What I was really worried about was the people I already knew and liked who worked at the base or at General Electric—the big military contractor in the area. I was not quite ready to “come out” as a peace activist.

Until moving to New London in 2010, I had never been friends or even acquaintances with people in the military or people who worked as military contractors. For years I have casually and professionally referred to them as Merchants of Death. I am a second-generation activist whose last name is synonymous with prophetic witness, long prison sentences, and military-related property destruction. We weren’t hanging out with army brats outside the local VFW. My dad was a veteran of a foreign war, but a repentant one. I knew lots of those—men haunted by their time in war, who were strengthened and healed by their resistance. But I didn’t know people who saw the military as a smart career move or a chance for adventure or the only way out of poverty. I wasn’t likely to meet them as a pudgy eleven-year-old wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the message “Join the Army: travel to exotic, distant lands; meet exciting, unusual people—and kill them.”

Now I live in a town that sees its economic vitality as dependent on General Electric, the Coast Guard Academy, and the submarine base. My massage therapist is a subcontractor at Electric Boat, the company that makes submarines. My best friend’s new next-door neighbor makes great beer and also works for EB. Our old downstairs neighbors were in the Navy. When my car battery died, he helped me get my car started again despite my assertion that I knew what I was doing (which I did not). Half the moms in the local La Leche League and the play groups we love live on the sub base.

Joanne Sheehan, my mother-in-law, the nonviolence training guru and long-time War Resisters League staff person, often says that it is easier to “speak truth to power” than to “speak truth to family and community.” She has lived in this area for more than thirty years. I am starting to understand what she means.

It is a new thing for me to relate to people in the military across dinner tables, church pews, and street corners instead of across picket lines. It is harder, in some sense. It is easy to judge and condemn and decry. It is hard to relate and communicate and respectfully agree to disagree.

My husband grew up here. Many of his friends at school were dependent on the military industrial complex. They moved around a lot. They would be in his class for a year while their dad was deployed to the Navy base and then they would be gone. From an early age, Patrick developed the ability to relate to people from different backgrounds and different political perspectives, finding common ground.

He said: “Even though most of the other kids at school had some direct relationship with the military through their parents’ enlistment or employment, and I was the peace activists’ kid, I never had any conflict with those kids. I never hid who I was or what I thought and believed. I worked really hard to find ways of communicating respectfully and nonjudgmentally. I learned to focus on systems, not personalities. I would tell the other kids: ‘I am not against your dad the soldier; I am against the system that bombs cities and kills kids. I think your dad joined the military for the same reasons I am against war.’ I think that I helped kids think more about the world and their role in it.”

After twelve years of being “Peace Pat” in the Submarine Capital of the World, he anticipated going to Earlham—a Quaker college in Indiana where he would major in Peace and Global Studies—as a kind of long-awaited homecoming. “I thought I would find my people! But I found myself less comfortable than I was in high school. It was kind of like: Everyone is progressive, everyone agrees that war is bad, so what do we talk about now? What do we do? How do we use this critical mass of like-minded people to create change? It made me realize that being a peace minority made me sharp and deliberate about who I was and what I thought and how I communicated with other people. It motivated me. At a place like Earlham I could be sort of lazy about it, which made me glad that I had not always been able to do that.”

Patrick is a good sounding board and a great inspiration. How do I get the conversation started with my new peers?

“Hey, I notice you are a really great father. Why do you work on submarines that could annihilate fathers and daughters?”

“How do you sleep at night?”

“Don’t you see the contradictions between your life and your work?”

Or my favorite when I was a kid protesting at the Pentagon: “You can’t run from a nuclear war.”

Patrick and most other small-town activists would tell me that these conversation “starters” actually kill dialogue. They tell me that empathy, compassion, and mutual aid are more effective. So I am letting go of judgment and conversion and starting with real conversation.

Of course Patrick makes mistakes too. Like the time he left a dirty diaper sitting on the back of the sofa. It was neatly wrapped. I walked by it two or three times before it registered in my tired mind: “Patrick! Gross!” My husband had changed the baby’s diaper and then left it right there.

But then I started to piece together our night. The baby was up at midnight to nurse, then up again at 2, and again at 4, and then again at 5:30—at which point Patrick took the voracious little eater away and I got to sleep deeply until 7:30. Bliss.

Patrick, on the other hand, walked around with a gassy, restless, grumpy baby for the better part of two hours. When Seamus would drift off, nuzzled on his dad’s shoulder, Patrick would try to get comfy on the couch. But then Seamus would wake up again, and there would more walking as the cycle repeated three, four, five times. I picked up the diaper and brought it upstairs to the pail with all the rest of them. I did not give him a hard time about it. Dads get a bad rap these days. They are accused of not doing housework. When they take care of the kids, it’s called babysitting by the Census Bureau. And their earning potential is down. Also, they get Father’s Day, which is kind of a second-rate holiday promoted mostly by the Father’s Day Council, an association of menswear retailers who declared in the 1980s that Father’s Day “has become a ‘Second Christmas’ for all the men’s gift-oriented industries.” Of course, Mother’s Day is similarly commercial. But the holiday will always have that illustrious peace origin story, with Julia Ward Howe’s Peace Proclamation, where she calls for a “general congress of women” to peacefully settle international disputes.