Inquiry into the acquisition of language, part 1
Most of her sentences these days begin with I want or I need. This follows I like and I love, which were her first two sentence constructions.
A friend whose mother taught two-year-olds says, “Two is all about language development.” It’s amazing to watch this, this language development.
So we come to language full of desires, wants, passions. We learn through language to distinguish them.
In Michael Pollen’s fascinating recent New York Times magazine cover story on Julia Child, I was reminded of this tension in the mothering/work paradox: What do we need? What do we want? What are we allowed? How do we choose?
A recent conversation with new mother who feels feminism did not prepare her for the joy she would feel as a mother—that it let her down—because its message focused more on the triumphs and challenges of proving oneself in the work world. The phrase “the burden of choice” surfaced. This silenced us. Cut through our joy (she held a two-week old baby in her arms), brought us back to the earliest questions.
What do I want? What do I need? What do I like? What do I love?
A friend whose mother taught two-year-olds says, “Two is all about language development.” It’s amazing to watch this, this language development.
So we come to language full of desires, wants, passions. We learn through language to distinguish them.
In Michael Pollen’s fascinating recent New York Times magazine cover story on Julia Child, I was reminded of this tension in the mothering/work paradox: What do we need? What do we want? What are we allowed? How do we choose?
A recent conversation with new mother who feels feminism did not prepare her for the joy she would feel as a mother—that it let her down—because its message focused more on the triumphs and challenges of proving oneself in the work world. The phrase “the burden of choice” surfaced. This silenced us. Cut through our joy (she held a two-week old baby in her arms), brought us back to the earliest questions.
What do I want? What do I need? What do I like? What do I love?
Comments
http://tinyurl.com/mnve2f
I tend to agree with the skeptical commenters who ask things like "what feminists, exactly?" and "Why would they?"
At what point in history was the idea that mothers deeply madly love their babies news that needed to be broken? I guess contemporary young women could miss that message if they didn't feel it pertained to them, but I don't think it's been cloaked in secrecy, even post-70s.
And, historically, the information that women deeply madly love their babies has been used to exclude them from educational and career opportunities.
http://tinyurl.com/nycrby
I wonder if one answer is that American women roughly our age are the first to have grown up with access to the message that having babies doesn't need to be the be-all, leaving us unprepared for the enormity of motherhood. Maybe also the "personal is political" slogan led some women to expect that our personal lives and feelings could be knowable by a theory or movement, and so they feel almost betrayed by feelings they were unprepared for.
But I think this swings both ways. I was talking to a neighbor about his experience in newly-married couples course he and his wife took through their church. He recalled how many of the women expected motherhood to ennoble and fulfill them, and how devastated they were by the quotidian realities that sometimes overshadowed the bliss.
New parenthood can blindside anyone. Maybe people, especially those who have spent a lot of time preparing themselves for a certain role, just want someone to blame for being unprepared after all.
And even though I think it goes without saying for you and me and Katie Roiphe et all, I was reminded by this Johann Hari quote from a Slate article that biology still does remain destiny in some heartbreaking ways for many women.
"By the time I met her in a hospital in Bangladesh, Shahnaz's face flesh was a mess of charred meat: Her skin, the soft tissue of her cheeks, and the bones beneath had been burned away. . . Shahnaz was 21 years old, and her husband had just thrown acid in her face.
Her "crime"? To insist on continuing her studies—she loved science and poetry—when her husband wanted her to have babies. She smelled of a day-old barbecue left out in the rain. "
http://www.slate.com/id/2227598/