That other place
"On Immunity," public health, diaper rationing, the two kingdoms, my daughter's first cold, and as always, breastfeeding.
This essay1 started out about Kate Middleton.2
Over the past several weeks, it has morphed, turning into this essay about grappling with the limits on my ability to protect my daughter. The common thread of this essay’s permutations is, of course, a mother’s worst nightmares—the dreaded consequences of those limits.
My daughter’s cleaving from my body is still so raw, my love for her still so feral and uncontaminated, that I am unable to tolerate stories that involve suffering children. I admit this means I have not been able to dwell on the news lately. “Unable to tolerate” translates to looking away, skipping over Instagram stories quickly, fearful of hearing the sound of a child crying for her slain parent or a parent crying for her slain child that I will not be able to unhear. I am still leaking, leaking milk and urine and tears, depending on the hour or the day, and ascribe my inability to tolerate the news any longer than it takes to form a political opinion to hormones, but I suspect the truth is that I will never again be able to consume the stories of suffering children with anything resembling emotional distance.
We were in Chicago last week, and my instinct to look away was thwarted by the volume of migrant mothers and children on the street. There are men too, but I find myself more numb to the sight of a man pan-handling or looking for work. It is the sight of mothers nursing their babies, wrapped in fleece blankets, in the Chicago wind, outside the entrance to Target and Walgreens and Zara, that haunt me.3 I have never seen anything like it. It is the juxtaposition between their children, cold and hungry and bored, and my rosy-cheeked well-fed bundled daughter that eats away at me. It seems there is nothing that distinguishes us mothers, except that they have actually crossed the Darién Gap in an effort to secure their children a better life and I can only wonder whether she and I would survive such a journey.
My daughter gets her first cold only three days after she begins going two houses up the road, to spend her days in the care of a nanny alongside our neighbors’ five-month-old daughter. The other family also has a preschool-aged daughter, and so we are beginning the preschool germ chapter of our lives. Two days after snot starts streaming out of her nose, Ben and I come down with the cold, and now we are a snotty-nosed family of three. Even the dog sneezes.
I am struggling with this new arrangement, wherein my daughter is out of sight for 45 hours a week and comes home smelling like someone else’s laundry detergent. The cold feels like a metaphor for the panoply of dangers that await my daughter outside of our house, outside of my arms. Germs, I know, are the least of these dangers. It is good for her immune system to be exposed, to learn how to mount a strong defense. In an effort to identify what pains me about placing her in the care of another, I find myself making a list of things I wish I could shield her from. It includes all of the diseases for which we have vaccines and spans gun violence, bullying, and acne. I stop listing things after ten bulletpoints, half because I have already wept in this coffeeshop earlier in the week week after leaving my daughter with the nanny for the first time, and half because I am superstitious that identifying all of the things I would like to protect her against will render her vulnerable to the things I do not list, like Thetis inadvertently left her son Achilles vulnerable in his heel, which she held while dipping him in the River Styx.
For many years, I feared having children would take up so much emotional space that I would not have enough empathy leftover for others. I feared I would turn in toward my family and any altruistic spirit in me would shrivel.
Instead, I find that I have never been so sensitive to the plights of other mothers. It has never been so easy for me to imagine myself in the shoes of another. Any mother with a sick or bleeding child could be me. I’m reminded of Susan Sontag’s famous quote about how we all hold dual citizenship:
“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
Only as a mother am I now acutely aware of my dual citizenship, as well as my daughter’s. I share the anguish of the mothers watching their child pass through from one kingdom to other. (As I write, I’m reminded that
wrote a beautiful essay a few weeks ago about this invisible bond between mothers.)In Linea Nigra, Jazmina Barrera’s record of her earliest days of motherhood, Barrera spends hours in a breastfeeding chatroom. “For the last couple of days I’ve been keeping a close eye on the posts in the chatroom, feeling deeply worried,” she writes. A child of one of the other mothers in the chatroom has cancer. “He’s on my mind all the time, I think of the photos his mother sends us. Maybe this is due to the hormones, but I don’t believe it’s normal to feel such anguish.”
I think of the St. Jude’s Children Hospital advertisements I’ve turned away from my whole life.
My daughter’s cold drags on, and one morning, when we go to get her from her crib, her face is smeared with snot and boogers and tears. She had cried out in the night and I didn’t go to her. I’m haunted by the fact that I allowed her to suffer like this, alone in her crib, unable to breathe easily for the first time in her life.
It is tempting to want to keep my daughter at home with me in order to protect her. But the notion that she is safer at home is, if not entirely flawed, not entirely true. I know I would be doing her a disservice, not only to her immune system but to her emotional and social development, by isolating her.
Is it normal to feel this anguish?
I’m spiraling, as I confront the reality that I cannot guarantee that my daughter will be spared suffering when she is off in the world without me. I remember a friend recommended Eula Biss’s maternal exploration of the history of vaccinations from a decade ago, On Immunity: An Inoculation. Biss probes the origins of vaccine hesitancy alongside her investigation of the history of inoculations through her lens as a new mother who yearns to spare her child suffering. But as Biss inspects her own basest protective instincts, she observes that the desire to protect is as fierce among parents who decide not to vaccinate their children as it is among parents who decide to. This purported tension—between the “natural” and the “synthetic, between biology and chemistry—is even more familiar in 2024, now that we have all lived through a global pandemic and the vaccination wars are as fraught as ever. On Immunity, which was written after swine flu and H1N1, feels eerily prescient, even as those viral blips and our erstwhile fear now seem somewhat … quaint.
When my daughter is sick, I cling to breastfeeding, wanting her to receive as many antibodies as possible. But in this new arrangement, I am able to feed her only twice as a day. With the nanny, she drinks breast milk pumped days or weeks ago, or formula, and I agonize over not being able to imbue her with an additional layer of defense in real time. The distance between us during the day is also causing my milk supply to dip, a fact that causes me tremendous sadness and fear.
It’s funny that I feel I can protect her best, this same baby who received the proceeds of nary a vegetable in utero. Biss feels similarly, writing that “[as] long as a child takes only breast milk . . . one can enjoy the illusion of a closed system, a body that is not yet in dialogue with the impurities of farm and factory.”4 But breast milk, reports Biss, “is as polluted as our environment at large. Laboratory analysis of breast milk has detected paint thinners, dry-cleaning fluids, flame retardants, pesticides, and rocket fuel.”5
But my body’s evolutionary wisdom has not kept up with the tragedies to befall our environment. I can’t shake the illusion that breastfeeding is a form of protection. Maybe it’s just that, as I’ve written about here before, it seems like no harm can befall her while she is in my arms in the dimly lit nursery, on the boob, ingesting antibodies.
Barrera fears her son’s “suffering in every verbal tense and mood: the present, the future, the past, even the conditional perfect; he might have suffered.” “There’s no end to fear now,” a friend tells her. “It starts in the first months of pregnancy, with the fear of miscarriage and the birth, of childhood illnesses; it changes form , but stays with you for the rest of your life.”
Biss ultimately offers a beautiful and redemptive perspective on the role of vaccinations in public health. Whereas unvaccinated children are more likely to “be white, to have an older married mother with a college education, and to live in a household with an income of $75,000 or more” (in other words, they are more likely to possess various forms of privilege), undervaccinated children are “are more likely to be Black, to have a younger unmarried mother, to have moved across state lines, and to live in poverty.”6 Vaccinating your child is not only a way to protect your child, but a practice in utilitarianism. Not everyone will get vaccinated, for whatever reason. But “vaccination works,” she writes, quoting her doctor father, “by enlisting a majority in the protection of a minority.”7 I’m reminded that my daughter is not amongst the most vulnerable. “When relatively wealthy white women vaccinate our children, we may also be participating in the protection of some poor black children whose single mothers have recently moved and have not, as a product of circumstance rather than choice, fully vaccinated them.”
It feels radical, this notion that by loving and protecting my daughter, I am contributing to the protection of others. I think about the ripple effects of parenting, the effects of teaching my daughter to be kind, parenting as a way to connect to others. It is a relief to step out of my fears.
Thank you for reading. You’ll note that I have not yet asked any of you to pay for Turtleneck Season. If you are a regular reader (or even if you are new!), I’d ask you to consider buying something off the Instituto del Progreso Latino’s Amazon wishlist as a gesture of support. The Instituto del Progresso Latino is a Chicago-based organization helping migrant families with their essential needs as they build new lives in the United States. This wishlist is updated regularly to reflect ongoing needs. I can’t imagine forcing my daughter to reuse dirty diapers, let alone being newly postpartum in a new country, dealing with urinary incontinence, leaking boobs, and a changing body, on top of the challenges of living in shelters with a new baby. Buy some pads and diapers and deodorant please.
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The title of this essay is an allusion to a passage by Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor, quoted here, about the two kingdoms to which we all hold dual citizenship. The kingdom of the sick is “that other place.”
If you live under a rock, the Internet was abuzz with rumors attempting to explain Princess Catherine’s disappearance from public view when Kensington Palace finally announced that she was receiving chemotherapy for cancer. She (quite reasonably imho) claimed to have wanted to keep her diagnoses private until she had more information and could explain to her children “in a way that is appropriate for them.”
For an overview of what is going on in Chicago, after Texas Governor Abbott began bussing migrants to “blue” cities, see https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/us/chicago-migrants-eviction.html.
Eula Biss. On Immunity : an Inoculation. Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, 2014, 73.
Biss, supra, p. 74.
Biss, supra, p. 27.
Biss, supra, p. 27.