Piercing the bubble
On intrusive thoughts, dead babies, innocence, and the powerful empathy of mothers
My maternity leave coincides with my favorite time of year in the Bay Area. Come fall, the haze and heat of the summer clear, leaving us with blue skies, crisp mornings, and warm afternoons. Though taking care of a newborn requires levels of exertion previously reserved for final exam season, it is hard not to feel cheerful as I stroll down the street with my daughter in her stroller, her alert little face looking up at me. In the last couple of weeks, she has started to smile, for real. Things that make her smile include, in no particular order: my face, the light hitting the leaves on the red-leafed tree outside our living room window, Paul Simon’s Graceland, and the literature of Sandra Boynton. Though her smiles are infectious, at least once a day, her new little grin—tongue sticking out—threatens to break my heart. Her innocence! Her awe of light, of color, of texture! While she experiences delight for the first time, I am pummeled by an overwhelming need to protect her from this stinky world I brought her into! How can I bear it?
In seventh grade, I briefly considered a new girl in my advisee group1 a friend. (The new girl, whom I’ll call Kirsten, turned out to be a pathological liar. When I mentioned to my parents that Kirsten said her father was serving in Afghanistan, my dad raised his eyebrows because her parents were fixtures at the oyster bar in town.) Even though I remember being uneasy around Kirsten 95% of the time, seventh grade was a social rough patch. I kept hanging out with Kirsten because Kirsten seemed happy to hang out with me, a nerd with passions for showtunes, the Italian language, and Prince William. However, it’s obvious to me now that the reason Kirsten hung out with me was because she was the kind of person who got a kick out of making people uncomfortable. And one way Kirsten quickly learned she could make me uncomfortable was by telling dead baby jokes.
I don’t know what the origin of the “dead baby joke” is or who popularized it in the early oughts. I think of it as a grotesque version of the “how many xxx does it take to screw in a lightbulb” genre - riddles that follow the same question and answer pattern, but that all somehow involve dead babies. I don’t really want to repeat any here, but as an example, I will say that I remember one involving dead babies in a blender. Still years before social media, I don’t know where on the 2001 Internet Kirsten was finding these jokes, or how late she was staying up to watch Comedy Central. I just remembered feeling repulsed by the jokes—and repulsed by Kirsten, who would whisper her punchlines to me with a sociopathically flat delivery, and laugh maniacally when I expressed revulsion and told her to stop. There was a line my sense of humor would not cross. And that line was dead babies.
My editions of this newsletter often arrive weeks behind the political and cultural moment from which they originate. While I often treat this lag as a personal failure, if I’m being honest, it’s not just that I don’t have the time to bang essays out within 24 hours, but that I lack the inclination—all too often I am simply slow to know what I think or believe. When I was younger, I viewed this reticence to participate in contentious classroom or dinner table debates as a weakness. My lack of conviction felt intellectually hollow, if not morally bankrupt, and I feared my tolerance for nuanced both-sides-ism derived from a reluctance to piss people off. While there are some subjects on which I remain a confident and ferocious voice (e.g., abortion, gun violence), time has only reinforced my cautiousness about throwing my voice into a debate before I’ve done my homework, especially on social media. And it can take weeks—if not months or years—for a mushy point of view to solidify into something resembling an opinion.
There is perhaps no issue on which my opinion remains as mushy as it does for the Israel-Palestine conflict—not just the conflict of the last few weeks, but the conflict that has been around since before I was born. Even though I’m a week away from being old enough to be President, my opinions still have not solidified. Or perhaps it is that my opinions seem mutually exclusive—Israel has the right to exist and Palestinians should have more rights than they do now, including the right to a homeland. Does this mean I believe in a two-state solution? Honestly, I’m not really sure.
Israel-Palestine has always served as a sort of a Rorschach test, your point of view turning on which of the two oppressed groups you identify with more.2 The current chapter of the conflict, triggered by Hamas’s abduction of over 200 Israeli civilians on October 7, has not made things any clearer for me. For a moment it did. At first, Hamas attacked innocent civilians. Babies were killed. This was the crossing of one of my bright-line morality rules. Dead babies. In the words of Ezra Klein, “[t]here’s a part of me that would like to stay in my feelings from from right after Hamas’s attack, but that is not where this has held.” In the weeks that followed, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians, babies and children included. Thousands more are now without access to food and water. More dead babies. More parents forced to witness their children’s suffering.
This is not an essay about the Israel-Palestine conflict, a conflict that predated my daughter’s birth by decades and that is unfortunately likely to outlast her. This is an essay about witnessing atrocity as a mother for the first time. October 7 pierces the bubble in which I have been living with my daughter since her birth in August, a warm milky bubble of oxytocin that smells like breast milk and my daughter’s hair, freshly washed with Mustela shampoo. This bubble has floated gently in a sea of community and unlocked levels of generosity—meal drop-offs from loving neighbors, thoughtful gifts from my parents’ friends, gentle interest from strangers on the street. My dog stands guard, resting his sweet little head on the dock-a-tot when my daughter sleeps on the couch next to me. I savor each moment in which all is well in our soft little corner of the world, each moment in which her chest rises and falls while the sun streams into the living room, each moment in which she sleeps in my father’s arms, on my husband’s chest, on my breast.
When the bubble bursts, my heart is shattered by her helplessness in the face of the world’s evil and indifference. Her wails when I can’t get my boob out fast enough are agonizing. In those moments, I can’t help but imagine what it would feel like if I had nothing to give her. What if we were hiding in a safe room, if her cry threatened to alert the bad guys to our presence? I think of the mothers who are in the middle of a contraction when the hospital is bombed. I think of the women, nine months pregnant, for whom nowhere was comfortable—now nowhere is safe. What if our new and precious little family were torn apart? What if we had to leave our dog behind? What if I had to wipe blood off of my daughter’s face? What if she was stolen out of my arms? What if my husband and I spent every night clutching her in the living room, waiting for a bomb to fall?
Intrusive thoughts are a common symptom of perinatal mood disorders like postpartum depression and anxiety. But to some extent, intrusive thoughts may be adaptive. The image of my baby slipping under the water and drowning in the bathtub keeps me from walking away from her to get a towel in the other room. These thoughts signify the brain’s recognition of the baby’s helplessness and vulnerability, and the mother’s recognition of her tremendous responsibility to care for the being who is dependent on her for survival. Under the weight of this responsibility, it’s not surprising to me that the mother’s exhausted brain plays out scenarios involving harm to her infant. Twenty-two years later, I think of Kirsten’s dead baby jokes, as these images punctuate otherwise blissful moments. I am overwhelmed by my daughter’s innocence when looking at her face, realizing she knows nothing of the world but the comfort of my arms and breast. It is as if my brain can’t believe our luck.
The news of horrors involving innocent babies and children half a world away trigger intrusive thoughts with increasing frequency. Could it be that these thoughts are also adaptive in that they serve to induce empathy? In the words of Annie Lennox, “Motherhood was the great equaliser for me. I started to identify with everybody.”
When I was deciding whether or not I wanted children, I feared that having children would be so all-consuming that I would be blinded to the suffering of others. I feared that my desire to protect my children would come at the expense of others. But so far, my experience has been the opposite—I feel a heightened sensitivity to the fragility and vulnerability of all children, and the overwhelming inherent terror of parenting in a world where your child’s safety is always at least a little bit out of your control. I suddenly feel connected to every mother in the world trying to protect or soothe her child. These are the early days of parenthood of course, and it is naive to believe that my instinct to secure middle-class advantages for my daughter will not, at some point, mean that I am, however abstractly, elbowing other children out of the way. For now, however, my daughter’s cries produce a visceral reaction in me, one in which I hear her suffering and can’t help but hear the cries of all babies, hungry, tired, and scared, overstimulated by bomb blasts and sirens. And yet, I remain consumed by caring for my own baby.
I jot down preliminary thoughts for this essay at a coffeeshop while my daughter sleeps in the stroller next to me. This idyll is shattered when she wakes and begins to scream, and keeps screaming for the duration of the 17 minute walk home. She screams when I speed up, she screams when I slow down, she screams when I try to pick her up to console her, when I try to wear her in the baby wrap, and when that fails, when I put her back in the stroller. Tears pool in the corner of her eyes as her tiny face turns purple, her hands in tight fists, her little body oozing with inconsolable need until I stick my boob in her mouth the minute we walk in the door.
By the time we get home, I am crying too, unable to endure the sound of her suffering, which triggers my mind to imagine her suffering in ways I cannot soothe. Such intrusive thoughts hardly seem unusual in the era of push alerts. While I am writing this, the New York Times tells me via push alert that infant deaths have risen in the last year for the first time in 20 years.
I wonder whether the depth of emotion I feel when I think about other parents witnessing the suffering of their children is true empathy. My emotional reaction is certainly more visceral than it was before I was a parent—I am more prone to a physical response like tears or nausea. I’m putting myself in the other parent’s shoes and imagining something happening to my own child, which feels egocentric, but isn’t such perspective-taking the hallmark of empathy, as opposed to sympathy? While non-parents can certainly experience empathy, there is surely a level of parental pain I could not identify with until I had heard the screams of my own child and felt the weight of her writhing in my arms.
The empathy of mothers is a powerful force when translated into action: look at Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Moms Demand Action, and Black Lives Matter, all movements led by women who invoke their maternal status as a source of moral authority. There has been powerful discourse by mothers calling for peace in response to the current Israel-Palestine conflict, by groups like Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun. And yet violence remains the way of the world, despite the plaintive calls of mothers for peace for millennia. As I remain consumed by caring for my daughter nearly every waking hour of my day, I am in awe of the women—particularly women of color—who have made space in their lives for organizing and protesting on top of carework and wage-earning. I can barely make space to stretch my back and take a shower.
I oscillate between punishing myself for the privilege of being able to afford to not take action while giving myself a pass during these tender and exhausting early months of parenting. But I know if I wait for a moment when I’m not exhausted, when my child doesn’t need me, I know I could be waiting for years. I wonder whether I will become numb to the sound, real or imagined, of other children crying and whether my empathetic responses will dull over time. I wonder how I will cope with sending my child to school every day in a world where a madman could break into her school with an AR-15. I wonder how and when I will have to explain to my daughter why children are being killed both close to home and abroad. I wonder how I will be able to tell her with conviction that she is safe. I wonder what it will take to make me feel like I have no option but to translate my fear and empathy into action.
Independent school-speak for “homeroom”
Some of my readers may balk at my suggestion that the Israelis, who undoubtedly hold the reins of power in Israel, are themselves an oppressed group, especially when the state of Israel enjoys the support of the United States. But it is a fallacy to believe that the oppressor cannot also be oppressed, and such a belief ignores the millennia of Jewish persecution and anti-Semitism that spurred the creation of the state of Israel in the first place.
I felt the same nausea when Russia invaded Ukraine just weeks after I gave birth. The images of a bombed maternity hospital will never leave. Becoming a parent has meant I see death everywhere, deaths that happen and deaths that dont. Ghosts of loss and near loss, my loss and someone elses.
This was a beautifully written piece, so full of maternal raw emotion. The notion of a safe world for children is one that we didn't have to contend with, but is now all pervasive. It breaks my heart and you have captured the vulnerability of parents around the world in 2023.