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.
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