I had one of those remarkable encounters while reading Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, who was describing in almost identical words an idea I had explored years ago in a poem. It is an ambiguous moment in motherhood, knitting power and love in a fierce and consuming way. It's awful really, selfish as it expresses a desire to reclaim the flesh once freely given, as though it had it been a loan and was needed back again ostensibly to keep the child as safe as she once was in the womb, but really, as a desire to recapture youth and vigor. Jung describes the trauma of birth as the "unhealed wound" in the child's life -- but I think there is an echo of the trauma in birth for the mother too. Nine months of intimacy, of quiet internal reflection, communication, a quickening joined in blood and flesh, a fullness that is suddenly followed by an emptying. There remains a longing, because everything that comes after is a leaving, a leaning out and away from all that primal connection.
I stumbled and then stopped and re-read this passage in Kate Atkinson's brilliant and brooding collection of intertwined murder mysteries, Case Histories.
"...she loved her youngest child with a ferocity that didn't always seem natural. Sometimes she wanted to eat Olivia, to bite into a tender forearm or a soft calf muscle, even to devour her whole like a snake and take her back inside her where she would be safe. She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty."
Atkinson's passage lit up in my brain like lightning, recalling my own poem "Baba Yaga" -- which I wrote for my daughter more than a decade ago. It was eerie and familiar to read the two passages side by side.
"My daughter when you were small
How I wanted to eat you.
Cast off flesh of my flesh
I wanted to keep you in me,
Digest my fear of losing you as I swallowed
You whole, plumped and roasted.
Can you forgive the way I fretted over the oven
And took the measure of your
Wrists with my worried fingers?"
When I was pregnant with my daughter I developed anemia, which was discovered late in the pregnancy because I confessed to the ob that the sight of sand made me salivate, and I wanted to eat it. (I didn't tell him that I actually did eat a small finger full as the children were playing in it. ) That's when I learned about pica, a condition where anemic women, especially pregnant women crave dirt and sand. I also discovered that women in the South used to keep a little container of iron-rich red clay to eat during their pregnancy. The body's search for iron looks to the soil to enrich the shared blood grown thin. How like Baba Yaga, licking her iron tusks in pleasure, sucking marrow from the bones of bad children. Are all mothers always so hungry?
This is part of my daughter Taiko's reply to my Baba Yaga poem which we published as a duet. It is an answer from a young woman who had learned a thing or two about leaving and returning, about cooking and slaking a mother's hunger without turning first into the meal herself.
"Won't you be stunned to see,
in your weakened state, Old Woman,
that I have brought more than fish!
I will teach you, now that you have
burned your old recipes,
the new ones I remedied.
And I will uncover the hidden plants
I've stashed in my hair,
the worlds I have in my mouth,
the tattoos woven in my skin
and the sky I discovered in my breast.""Old Woman, this will surely be your
finest meal."
Art: "Mother and Child" by Kathe Kollwitz, "Vasilisa and Baba Yaga" by Vania Zouravliov, "Baba Yaga" by Kinuko Craft.