#76: monoliths vs. ambiguity
finding the words to describe your life
Good morning,
My friend Kate recently wrote an incredible essay about friendship, or rather, the relationships in our lives that mean more than the words available to describe them.
Here, she describes what it was like to explain that she needed time off to help a close friend and roommate going through a psychotic break:
Continuously, I found myself lacking a vocabulary for the situations I found myself in. Standing in the hospital room with L.’s partner, parents, and doctor: Who was I, exactly? I’m his roommate. Notifying bosses or teachers: I’m his friend. Finally, when putting up an away message on my work Gmail, I cut to the chase: I’m out of office due to a family emergency. It wasn’t true, but I knew it was the only phrase that—without excessive elaboration—would communicate what I needed.
And here, she describes being her single friend’s birth partner:
In the end I spent about eight days in M.’s city: visiting and delivering food to the hospital; talking with nurses, doulas, and doctors; preparing her home for her return, and the baby’s arrival; coordinating care for her goldendoodle; and so on. I’m a freelance writer so it goes without saying I’d have no kind of parental leave, even if whatever role I was occupying in this situation had been legible to others, let alone the legal system.
I don’t want to take it apart too much here because reading it in its entirety is worthwhile, as is subscribing to Flaming Hydra, where it’s published.
But there is one part I want to unpack a little: what it felt like for her to read books about motherhood as a person who does not plan to have kids of her own.
I have often found the literature around motherhood—to be or not to be—alienating. Cusk’s* introduction distilled one of the reasons why. Here, she explicitly states the belief that countless essays, novels, newsletters, panels, forums, and conversations imply: The experience of parenthood, and the portal of birth, is so monumental that it wedges a permanent, immovable, and even spiritual divide between the people who give birth and undertake parenthood versus the people who don’t. So much so that there’s hardly a point in describing the phenomenon at all. After all, the childless among us lack the ears even to “identify,” let alone understand or empathize with their experiences.
I have generally felt suspicious of this belief, as well as the assumptions underlying this belief. As social animals who frequently share our personal experiences with one another in order to better understand experiences that are not our own, I have never grasped why, exactly, this capacity would cease to function precisely at the experience of birth and, by extension, parenthood.
THIS.
*She specifically is referring to passage from Rachel Cusk’s memoir on motherhood, A Life’s Work.
On monoliths
The single most complex feeling I have wrestled with since giving birth is finding the words to share with friends about my experience. Both while pregnant and post birth, I found that people seemed to:
have a limited vocabulary for asking how you are (how is sleep?)
be sincerely eager to do right (can I bring some food?)
not want to disturb you (no rush to catch up, whenever you’re ready)
tiptoe around the details (how are you feeling? without any follow-ups)
I couldn’t help but feel that this was a reaction to a world that sees motherhood as a monolith.
Monolith is described in several ways in the Cambridge Dictionary:
a large block of stone standing by itself that was put up by people in ancient times
a large, powerful organization that is not willing to change and that does not seem interested in individual people
a group of people who are thought of as being all the same
In the face of monoliths, I feel compelled to comply, to follow norms, to do the right thing. I think we all do. Before having kids, I believed there was a “right” way to interact with friends who were new parents. I didn’t have much exposure to babies outside of social media. I was so uncomfortable being an outsider to the world of parenthood that I didn’t want to do wrong. It felt something like walking into a room where you don’t speak the dominant language. In such spaces, you learn basic phrases and stay quiet.
But the reality is, my first few weeks of motherhood did not look the same as someone else’s. Where one person may have no capacity to talk to friends, another might be sitting long hours holding a baby and wishing someone would call to chat. For these reasons, it’s impossible to offer standard advice for how to treat a new mom, though social media is full of it.
On ambiguity
Here is how ambiguity is defined:
a situation or statement that is unclear because it can be understood in more than one way
In the face of ambiguity, I get curious. There is no norm to deviate from. There is simply understanding to pursue.
After having a child, I found myself enjoying so many options in how I chose to converse with people. Rather than talking about monoliths (parenthood, work), or even the monoliths within parenthood (sleep, feeding) I found myself experiencing greater access to people’s full lives. A single conversation could span childhood memories, a work project, bedtime rituals and spirituality in one short sitting. In other words, I found the words to seek truth.
Kate goes on to explore whether we indeed need better names for our relationships. On the one hand, they allow us visibility in a system of power (legal benefits, shorthand to explain why you need time off), but on the other the very fact that they are nameless forces us to choose feelings and experiences to describe them to each other, and perhaps truth is better captured that way. She writes:
The very namelessness of these relationships prompts me to describe them through the experiences, feelings, and habits we share, through the ineffable something that keeps us caring for each other. I enjoy living in this nameless place with these people. It focuses me on the truth, rather than the names, of what we are to one another.
Part of the reason we need to assign language to the invisible aspects of our lives, be they roles, identities or relationships, is to give them a chance for protection, elevation and power in the legal system, or value in our culture (get everyone to buy a flowers on Valentine’s day). But assigning language to something can also strip it of the power that keeps it alive.
That power, I think, can only be captured in details. In small, specific moments, we see windows into each other’s lives, and it feels familiar.
Where monoliths obscure and oversimplify, ambiguity invites us to search for connection and honesty.
So I’ll leave you with a little prompt today.
How might we ask a small, specific question that allows someone to feel seen?
This weekend, I stopped by the Mary Cassatt exhibit at Legion of Honor in San Francisco with my 9-month-old. Cassatt was famous—and revolutionary—for painting women and children at a time when caregiving was not depicted in art. To be in a room full of people appreciating scenes of “women’s work” (knitting and needlepoint, bathing children, nursing infants) felt so moving.
Perhaps it was because we shared no words (with the exception of my son occasionally enjoying the echo of his squeals). We just took in images—out of context, lost in time. And everyone got it. Everyone was moved. Visual art has a unique ability to offer this kind of understanding. Wordless witnessing fosters awareness, familiarity and awe.
But I also think we can challenge ourselves to try to achieve the same through language. So, here’s our prompt.
Consider the monoliths we often ask each other about, but only ever discuss at a surface level.
Examples:
How was school? Fine.
How was work? Good.
What are you doing for the holidays? Going to place X.
If we sought out ambiguity more often, how might we rephrase those questions?
Who is someone at school you were happy to see today?
What did you have for lunch at work today?
Are you getting anyone a gift this year that you’re excited about?
Questions, especially when small and specific, can allow anyone to participate. Generalizing about monoliths offers us very little.
What small, specific question could you ask someone this week that allows them to feel seen?
Related reading:
Lola Milholland, author of the memoir Group Living in a conversation with Anne Helen Peterson (Culture Study)
Non-Nuclear Families — Out of Necessity — Are Sought After, and on the Rise (Good Housekeeping)
The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake (The Atlantic)
Happy Monday,
Jihii