Yesterday I looked after Elfe, a nine months old baby girl. She is the daughter of my friend and colleague Gulengul. She first came to us when she was six months old. Seda (love of my life) and I thought we could look after her one-day a week and let Gulengul have some time off this full-time business called mothering.
Since in Turkey we cannot adopt a kid and since if one of us gives birth to a child the other will have no legal claim on her/him whatsoever, it doesn’t seem likely that we will ever have a kid. I am not very sure that we would have had even if we could.
You see this ‘owning’ of kids has long bothered me. When a kid starts to cry in a public place if any one is interested at all they start asking each other where the mother is. No one feels the urge to do something apart from finding the responsible person the, person who owns the kid. I don’t want to even start ranting mother’s who see their kids as precious possessions for years and feel bitter when the kid proves to have a will of its own. Of course this bitterness arises provided that they ever let the kid to develop a will of their own which is not a very frequent occurrence especially in places like Turkey where the family is the name of a totalitarian regime. Consequently most of my friends who live in complete contradiction to the dictates of ‘the norm and the normal’ still feel the need to somehow get along with and try and justify their way of life to parents. And the easiest way to do this is to keep most of who they are a secret from their families. Which brings us once again to the topic of passing and coming out.
Therefore for Gulengul to leave her six months old kid at the hands of “mere friends” let alone a lesbian couple once a week in order to do as she pleases is extremely radical and only some one as strong willed as Gulengul could have done it. I can imagine what her family members think of that! And I have no doubt ,whatever they think, they will not be persuaded to keep their views to themselves. I am sure things will get even more complicated when Elfe starts to talk and related her experiences with us to them. In fact I only hope we can continue this practice that long. However for the time being once a week seems like a perfect dose of relating with a baby and I am grateful that we have a friend radical enough to have given us the opportunity. I am also grateful to both Gulengul and Yuce, her husband, for not turning out to be fussy parents who scream when their baby puts back into her mouth what she dropped on the floor. I call this fussy but it seems to be norm for middleclass families!
I realised yesterday that I like Elfe better nine-months-old then I did six-months- old. There is such a huge improvement. Now she is ‘aware’ of her surroundings for one thing and she was not 3 months ago. She can sit straight on her own whereas she couldn’t even keep straight propped up. It was so very difficult to feed her because she didn’t know what you were doing and had no idea about the relationship between the spoon at her lips the act of opening a mouth etc, nor the relationship between the act of swallowing and the things inside her mouth. Now when you bring the spoon to her lips she opens her mouth, takes it in and swallows. You had to rattle a toy in front of her with one hand while putting the spoon to her mouth with the other (which is impossible, so Seda did the rattling and I did the spooning. God knows how Gulengul did it on her own). Now, however, she rattles her own toys so all you have to do is feed her.
Of course there are drawbacks to this new awareness and motor coordination. When she is left in a room all on her own for even a second she cries. But this is no problem because now you can actually leave her in a room all by her own for a few seconds while you couldn’t do that 3 months ago! Sounds from the other room also seem to unnerve her only because she now has awareness that the “other” room has some connection to her. She is nervous when some new person enters the room for a few minutes until she is satisfied that this new person is ‘alright’. However, she does not cry when Gulengul goes away as long as she is not left alone and she does not show any special attention when she comes back. I am dreading the day when she will cry after her and wonder when that will happen.
To combine all these observations with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory I will have to say that I like Elfe in her Imaginary phase more than I did in her Le Real phase! And this suggests to me that little babies are prone to kindle the dread of falling back into the Real.
well. it feels so nice to hear some compliments about our parenting. not something that i am used to. i must confess that i also like elfe much more than she was little. i don’t know if it is because she was triggering some fear of returning to le real, but it felt more like because she was… how shall i put it, boring? now she can make me laugh as much as i can make her. so we have a more equal relationship. although she expects more attention than she was in ‘le real’, now her world is so colorful, so full of amazing discoveries that giving her the attention she need is much more rewarding.
and about parents… long before i have persuaded my parents to keep their decisions to themselves and now that we have elfe, it became surprisingly easier to keep them shut up. because they, again surprisingly, realized by themselves that if they will get on my nerves and as a result of that, if i will keep my distance at them (like i did many times in the past) this time it will not only me, but also elfe who they will be deprived of.
so i should be very comfortable, no? no i am not. because everybody around me, especially the ones that i have no idea who they are, suddenly found (i don’t know from where) the courage to act as if i am (or elfe is) their child. they are dreadfully crowded. they inhabit everywhere. i feel like there is an evil, monstrous dimension opened before my eyes and i became visible to them as much as they became to me. this new army of parents are divided into two groups: the ones who are very sure that i am one of them and have no hesitation to confirm this through suffocating me with their pathological conversations (these are mostly women.)
the second group have the ability to determine that i am ‘different’ at one sight (these are mostly men.) they are more dangerous. they are ready to attack, to correct and to put me in my place, and that is of course is my house (or at least next to my husband) i could never imagine that being a mother is even more difficult than being an alone woman in the streets of istanbul.
only listen to that… elfe and i like to drive a lot. she enjoys skimming outside world from her window and the enhanced swinging options when she would like to sleep. and i enjoy the freedom of easy mobility with her. once we were waiting for the red light when a middle aged man knocked on my window angrily and told me that i should place the bag (elfe’s bag which i keep next to my seat for easy accessing) on the floor, because some thief can break the window to get it. and here comes the marvel: “lady, you are alone with the child,” he said, “we (the monstrous parent army) don’t want you to be put upon!” that is what he said, and this is what he really wanted to say: “how dare you execute an action related to phallus (that, driving a car) publicly. this is a crime big enough for any woman and you, other than that (that, being a woman) is apparently under the possession of a man (since you have a baby, no there is no other option, you couldn’t be that daring). you castrate your husband, and through him all of his kind (including me), with your recklessly exposed independence. so your window shall be broken and you shall be put upon. you and your bad seed deserve worse.”
here comes another one. this is more creepy. one of my neighbors have a daughter a little older than elfe. once we went to visit them. she hurried to let me know that she never leaves the house with the child because it is winter and the baby once got cold so bad that she had to stay at the hospital for a couple of days. i said i am sorry, and i hurried to ask that for how long they have been not leaving the house. she said, a couple of months. and so i asked, aren’t you bored? she apparently didn’t expect that question and felt a sudden, unexpected (and most probably unwilling) intimacy to told me that she is very much bored. but than she immediately pull herself together and said her sisters come to visit frequently. suddenly the door of the apartment was opened with keys and her father came. (how wired is that her father have his own keys and finds the liberty to use it when even she is at home? anyway…) he was very pleased to see his ‘other granddaughter’ (elfe?) and not after a long while he shared his observations on my frequent departings with car and asked me where should i be leaving? i make him sure that those departings are for my absolute pleasure and nothing else. he, being disturbed enough as i was expected, told me that: “you should be careful. i am sure you are a very good driver but this is Istanbul, there are a lot of crazy people out there. what would you do, if someone will come and hit you from back. god protect you! haven’t you heard of the news about that poor babies who died on their mothers’ arms just yesterday.” he was reminding me of a news that i read that morning: a truck hit a minibus and two babies (one two, other three months old) died. how sick are these people!? of course, according to him the truck driver or the minibus driver have no share on the guilt, it was a matter of destiny. it is the women who left those little babies to the mercy of the destiny by their reckless behavior of leaving their house with their babies should be found guilty. i said nothing and left soon enough, showing the least civility as i can. after i cool down after a couple of hours, i felt a deep sorry for my neighbor remembering the look on her face while she was confessing me that she is bored indeed.
ps: i would like to thank tuna who created this space which i propably abused to express my apparently over accumulated anger. thank you.