Chalk it up to placenta brain if you will. Decide I have a touch of survivor’s guilt, which I suppose I do. But don’t think—as I myself thought a few short months ago about women who talked and talked through infertility and loss but then went suddenly quiet—that my silence here is because I’m off being busily pregnant, too full of baby and hormones and happiness and possibility to think, much less think about writing. Because here at 18 weeks along into this pregnancy, I’m thinking all the time, only not in a way that lends itself to something as presumably simple as words on the page.
It’s as if I’ve been dropped down in a foreign country, and though I have been here for a few weeks, I am still just learning the money and not to give ten or a hundred times the amount of bus fare, as I once did in Florence, before I could figure out the rate of lira to dollars. The streets are confusing and seem to lead only into each other, into a locked maze. I cannot get my body accustomed to the new clock that runs the time here, so far from where I’ve been. The language tumbles and rushes and clamors around me, outside of me. So many words come to my ears from the people on the streets; I try and try but can’t make sense of any of it, until, every so often, I recognize a single word here or there that I remember years ago from a rundown high school classroom. Back then, I could think in another language and thought it normal to put many words together into a sentence and make sense in that different tongue. But now I know that even if I were fluent, it would only get me part of the way in this new country, which borrows from that language but does not use it wholesale—making a creole; a pidgining; some forceful, rich dialect I can only begin to be let into. I recognize words as they come into my brain, and I recall the necessity of the future tense and its many complicated forms. I am struck dumb by this art that should come so easily—that of thinking ahead and speaking of what will come. My command of this tense is so shaky simply because it’s a way I haven’t allowed myself to talk in years.
The truth is, I can’t trust myself even trying to pronounce these words out loud. I just know they’ll come out silly, in some terrible accent—maternity clothes, nursery, crib, breastfeeding, colic. Even the word baby seems dangerous. And most unutterable of all: birth. Best not to trust any of this language to speech only to embarrass myself, be completely misunderstood. Best, then, to keep quiet.
Still, there is a word that begs to be spoken of right now, and it's the one I most cannot fathom because it keeps appearing in a different lingo, begging me to make sense of it and then to put it to use in my own mouth. Only I can’t. Not without all kinds of confusion. But this is how the word sounds: family.
A few weeks ago I came face to face with photographer Sally Mann’s children—ardent, serious, standing on their own two feet or lost in sleep no adult could ever get to—in an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. I’d seen those photographs in books and loved them there, and had seen later works and series of hers in person, but there was something about coming right up to the glass of the Immediate Family selections for the first time that startled me, shocked me in all the right, complicated ways art should. Those photographs show her children as fierce, but no fiercer than children just actually are, and her capturing of that astounds me. The reality of that intensity and inherent struggle of family, as I see especially in her picture of daughter Virginia, of thinking about a child at once holding on to me and straining against me to get out in the world—that’s what knocks me, so that I can hardly walk out of those rooms of the exhibit without staggering.
When I find, later, Mann’s own discussions of her work and her relation to motherhood, it makes that grasp of her work on my bones that much stronger, how I feel held in her grasp and both settle into it and pull away, necessarily. I listen when she says of her exhibit Still Time, at the Alleghany Highlands Arts and Crafts Center in 1988, “I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanence, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me: my love for the place, for the one man left, for my children and friends and the great green pulse of spring."
It is far from spring here—that “great green pulse”—and winter is uneasy in its coming. The house frosts over along with the yard, the boiler spurts and fails and costs a pocketful of money to fix. Then, suddenly, the sun is brighter than it should be in December, and coats hang in the closet unneeded. My body is only now beginning to show my pregnancy, but the last sonogram showed a fetus kicking and squirming, active and real and undeniably alive. A great pulse of its own. Discrepency is what I feel, too.
For so long, it seems, I’ve wanted a child, and I am thankful for each day I go without losing the one I’m carrying now. But if I count it out in my life, there are likely more years that I swore against ever being a mother, knowing the failed family I came from and the dread fears that childhood can hold. Then I met my husband, took hold of my own life, grew into it, met people who had and raised children who seemed to be—impossibly enough—relatively happy and undamaged. I looked to my husband's parents, who truly loved each other, and it was like watching a movie unfold scene by scene in which I understood a whole different storyline about what family could be. Family became not a bad word, but a desired one. And as I built my life up and looked out the windows of this little bungalow that has my name on the mortgage, employed in a steady enough job (as any nontenured university job can be) that lets me use my brain; settling back onto the couch with my serious, watch-the-world dog; eating dinners at a wood table where the conversation is easy and smart and funny, and where I learn something more about this man I met some 18 years ago, I could not help but think this life and home would a good place to raise a child and that I might just have earned the license, finally, to do it.
But here again, those photographs in Chicago come to have their say in challenge. There is Tina Barney, in houses overdecorated the same way so many houses I knew as a child were. How she makes her family subject. Where she catches the same couple—a father and daughter—10 years apart and revealing the world of difference and distance come between them.
Here is Philip-Lorca diCorcia, taking photographs of Christmas in Hartford in 1977 and 1978, that connect to my own childhood landscape, having spent my early years in Connecticut. How he scuttles completely just what a storybook life is.
I can’t turn away from Nan Goldin, black-eyed and drawn or radiant in self-portraits, onto those harrowing pictures of loss, of her friends being taken by AIDS, those pictures of all the people depending and dependent on each other in the round she heard as a ballad. Call them snapshots; call them iconic images--either way they talk about the ramshackle, intricate ways we assemble and insist on alternate families, the people we find and make closest to our hearts but still cannot keep.
Larry Sultan: well, I just have to sit down to take him in. In his work, he involves an old trove of home movies and family photographs, seeing in them the push for a mythology of American family, and he comes back to his aging parents to shoot them again, catch them in time, and decide something about them. That discovery he made of the old films, he says, was “remarkable, more like a record of hopes and fantasies than of actual events.” What he finds, then, is the act of the making of family in all its, to come back to Mann’s word, discrepancy. Two things touch me beyond Sultan’s successes with his prints and this project: his own, admitted confusion about what the project means—his own struggle with it—and the room he gives his father, on the walls of the museum, to answer back to what we, as viewers, might read there. In explaining his own difficulty with this work, Sultan comes at it at the most human and honest of levels; “I realize,” he says, “that beyond the rolls of film and the few good pictures, the demands of my project and my confusion about its meaning, is the wish to take photography literally. To stop time. I want my parents to live forever.”
Because my father died last year, there will be no more family photographs with him in place. There is no way for me to hear his answers to what I think of him, how I read him--not unless I make them up myself and ascribe these inventions to him. But I can’t help but wonder, if he were here now, if I could answer him back against what he might have thought of me. If what I’m doing right now, in fact, is trying to tell him something true about family and daughterhood and the way it really was to live in his house and how I have my own house now, decidedly different, with its own rules.
All this time spent talking about pictures isn't meant as artistic pretense. There’s a reason these works hit me so hard and that, weeks later, I cannot help but come back to them and think so much about them. While my father was alive, it turns out he had his own trove—a series of digital pictures recorded on a flash drive, of women he’d had affairs with over the past few years, one of them up through the last year of his life. My brother found the drive when we were cleaning out my father’s work office, right after the doctor had given the prognosis of one month to live. And though some of my father’s other secrets came to light to all of us in the family after his death, this record is one that my brother and I keep on for him, keep those images from my mother who is, nine months later, trying to find her way into a kind of mourning that does not, cannot follow the regular ways. Even after his death, he still has that hold on us and the story he decided to make, of his multiple lives, none of them intersecting the other. Each its own, private, intact and perfect story, only allowed to be read in his voice.
What I want to ask, knowing there can be no answer, is where is the line between the necessary story each family makes for itself and the outright lie? Every good family, it seems, has to build its own mythology. The world is too hard to face without the comfort of shared tale within a house about what a family is and the times that they have come together best. But these stories so often suffocate. Where they once drew us in in comfort like being held in the crook, a mother’s arm warm across the child’s body, they also can come to constrain, delimiting who we are and those hard truths we inevitably come to see about the world around us. How do we record that discrepancy? Where is the film that will catch that? Where are the words, for that matter?
The very part of me that wants to make the nest of story recognizes how easy it is to topple it out from the tree. I have this little, precious egg that is coming ready, something in the shell of this body that wants to be born, whether or not I can reckon the word birth in my dry mouth. The truth is I have already committed it, the act of family, by the ways I tell the story of house and home, marriage and pregnancy. Family is that blind faith I think I cannot find, but which comes over me, and that will happen, anew, in that moment my body takes over and a child gets born out into the world, starting, in that first breathing second, the most necessary story there is to tell.
The usurping, the taking back of the story and completely retelling it? If that family story gets upended, the careful family photo reconsidered, then that's the child's job--and birthright--to do. As a parent, you've either done the storytelling completely right or completely wrong, and only the years will tell. But for now, what we can divine is this: the want to tell a story, to make a family, is its own story and carries its own rightness. It is a kind of birth that comes from a good place--the deep hollows of the brain and body coming together in a moment where no lie is possible, where there is only the hardest truth and where birth and death come closest together to push life, life, some reason and righteousness, but most of all mere life, up into and out into a world that waits with everything untold and just begun, with discrepancy and consistency, with that pulse, truly great, of place and the people that we come to call family, blood and nonblood alike, and with the stillest and most active silence of the camera shuttering, the body shuddering, the word birth coming into the birth of itself.
*Link to the placenta brain report courtesy of SaraS-P at The Island. All linked photographs from the So the Story Goes exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago are connected directly to the Institute's official webpages.
