Black Milk (27 page)

She was a girl-woman who mothered herself.

When she turned nineteen, Lessing got married and had two children, a son and a daughter—a revolutionary experience that she talks about in great detail in her two-volume autobiography,
Under My Skin
and
Walking in the Shade
. She writes candidly about the conflicting feelings she had during this period—a longing to spend more time with other new mothers, talking about babies and mashed food, and an equally strong desire to run away from them all. Lessing is highly critical of the ways in which many capable women seem to change after giving birth. She believes such women are happily domesticated for a while, but then sooner or later they start getting restless, demanding and even neurotic. “There is no boredom like that of an intelligent young woman who spends all day with a very small child,” she says. Looking back at the early years of motherhood, she is surprised to see how hard she worked and how tired she was all the time. “I wonder how I did it. I swear young mothers are equipped with some sort of juice or hormone that enables them to bear it.”
¹⁶

The triple role of housekeeper, mother and wife did not make Lessing happy. In 1943 she left her husband and two children to get married to Gottfried Lessing, a Communist activist. They had a son, Peter. The marriage ended in 1949. By this time she was unable to bear life in Rhodesia, particularly the racism of the white ruling class. Taking her son, some money and many ghosts with her, she moved back to Britain. It was a big, painful decision and one that required her to leave her two children with her first ex-husband. She came to England with the manuscript of her first novel,
The Grass Is Singing
. The book was published a year later and henceforth Lessing dedicated herself fully to writing.

A cauldron boils in my mind. What if I fail to become a good mother and a good wife? I do not want to betray myself or to pretend to be someone I am not. What scares me most is the possibility of an adverse chemical reaction between authorship and domestic responsibilities. Novelists are self-enamored people who do not like to draw attention to that fact. Mothers, on the other hand, are supposed to be selfless creatures—at least for a while—who give more than they take. Perhaps I am worrying too much, but worrying comes with thinking.

How can I tell my brain not to think?

 

Eyup calls whenever he can between field exercises. The line is always crackly and there is stomping and marching, shouting and yelling, in the background, which is the complete opposite of my life in Istanbul, where I watch Baby TV and listen to the rain fall on the begonias.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Eyup says.

“Hi there,” I say. “How’s it going, my love?”

“I lost eight pounds,” he says, “but I’m surviving. We do a hundred push-ups, a hundred lift-ups and run two miles every morning. I now have biceps like Chuck Norris and my face is so tanned from exposure to the sun that I would stand out even in a dark alley.”

I smile—as if he could see me.

“I’ve missed you sorely,” he says, his voice wavering a little.

“I’ve missed you, too.”

“What were you doing when I phoned?”

“I was putting ten droplets of gripe water onto a spoon for the baby’s hiccups and thinking about Doris Lessing.”

“Does it help?”

“Not really, perhaps it makes it worse.”

“Which one? Gripe water or Doris Lessing?”

“Both,” I say.

There is a brief silence at the end of the line. Then, softly, Eyup says, “Honey, you are thinking too much. That makes things harder for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Many people do not constantly analyze and reanalyze every little thing, you know, they just go along with the daily routine,” he remarks. “Like when you know you have to do a hundred push-ups, you just accept and do it.”

“You want me to start doing push-ups?” I ask.

“Come on, you know what I mean,” he says with a gentle laugh. “Can’t you do without thinking for a while?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Let me think about that.”

T
he next day in the evening, the Choir of Discordant Voices begins to yammer inside me. I ask all of them the same question: How is it possible to feel so down when I am, in fact, happy and grateful?

She could be right. I should call my doctor. But my pride—or vanity—won’t let me do it. I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me or make assumptions about my sanity. My doctor has always been friendly and fatherly, and we have a superb relationship; I don’t want him to see me in my freak-on-wheels moment.

“Let me pull myself together first, then I’ll talk to him,” I say.

So I make a plan: I will go to see a professional when I am much better and no longer need to go to see a professional.

She could be right. My mind might settle into some kind of order if I start reading novels again. If I focus on other people’s stories, I’ll stop running in circles around my own. Proust will save me.

But there is something I can’t confess to Miss Highbrowed Cynic. I have started to suspect that in the months following birth a new mother’s brain doesn’t work like it used to. I couldn’t read even if I wanted to. Forget Proust, I can’t even focus on a tomato soup recipe.

She could be right. I might feel better after a visit to the hairdresser, and from there, to the shopping mall. But I just don’t feel like it. Quite to the contrary, I want to cling more firmly to my oily hair, my pallid skin, my tattered clothes. In a world that feels increasingly foreign, only this nightgown is familiar and comforting.

She could be right. If there was a literary festival or a book signing now, I could possibly ditch this gloomy mood. It is always a morale boost to meet my readers, listen to their sincere comments, answer their questions and do more readings. But I have little, if any, ambition or desire these days. How can I sign books when my hands are tucked into my armpits for warmth all the time? As Jane Smiley beautifully shows in her
13 Ways of Looking at the Novel,
there is a difference between the novelist as a literary person and the novelist as a literary persona.

Smiley says the literary persona is always a more mature personality, more polished and worked upon and with a different set of duties and responsibilities. It is shaped by three major inspirations—literature, life and language—and is therefore not fully in the author’s control.

If Smiley is right, and I think she is, then the gap between my literary persona and me as a living person has never been wider. There is a huge postpartum canyon stretching between the two sides now.

She could be right. Spending time with my lovely daughter makes me feel good, elated and blessed. Perhaps I should close myself off to the outside world and just be a mom from now on. Perhaps I am depressed because I haven’t fully enacted that decision yet.

But there is something I can’t explain to Mama Rice Pudding, something that I know she would never understand: In a society where motherhood is regarded as the best thing that can happen to a woman and with an upbringing that tells us to settle for nothing less than excellence, how can I not compare myself to other mothers? And when I weigh myself against other moms, how can I not be envious of their accomplishments and ashamed of my deficiencies? I am not proud of feeling this way but this is what I experience deep down. It is not my love for my baby that I doubt. Love is there, pure and tender, enveloping my soul in its pearly glow. It is my talents as a mother that I find lacking.

She could be right. I must not forget that this is a temporary phase and probably some good will come out of it, though I cannot see that now. Later on when I look back with hindsight, I will judge things from a different and brighter perspective.

But there are some things I cannot reveal to Dame Dervish. I know there are thousands of people out there who try hard to have children, who put themselves through all sorts of medical procedures, make huge sacrifices and suffer endless frustrations, individually and as a couple, and yet still cannot reach their goal. I know how appreciative I should be, and I am, but my embarrassment for not being happy enough, thankful enough or good enough is so profound, I cannot even talk to God anymore.

All I know is that after a period of oligarchy and a short interval of military rule, this monarchy, too, has come to an end. Now there is only anarchy in the Land of Me.

W
hen I was a little girl, maybe six or seven years old, I stayed with my paternal grandmother for a few weeks in Smyrna. The idea was to make sure I got to see my father and spend quality time with him, but I ended up seeing more of my grandma than my dad. She was a stern woman who wore large glasses that magnified her eyes and spoke in sharp, curt sentences that usually boiled down to “Do that! Don’t do this!” She often talked about the fires of hell, which she described in vivid and frightful detail. To her, Allah was an unblinking Celestial Eye that saw everything I did and recorded every single one of my sins, even the ones I only thought about.

I came back from her house with a glowing imagery of blazing flames and boiling cauldrons, and the idea of God as an austere father frowning down at His creation. I don’t know if this experience had any role in my choices later on, but as soon as I was old enough to know what the word
agnostic
meant—that is, around the time I was seventeen years old—I decided I was going to be one. I have never felt close to atheism—for I found it too arrogant in its outright rejection of God—but agnosticism seemed befitting of people who were perpetually bewildered about things, including religion. For an atheist, faith is not a very important matter. For an agnostic, however, it is. An atheist is sure of his convictions, and speaks in sentences that end with a full stop. An agnostic puts only a comma at the end of his remarks, to be continued. . . . He will keep pondering, wondering, doubting. That is why he is an agnostic.

I went to college to major in international relations. At the time, I was a rebellious young woman who liked to wrap several shawls of “-isms” around her shoulders: I was a leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, anarcho-pacifist. . . . Though taking questions of faith seriously, I wasn’t interested in any specific religion, and the difference between “religiosity” and “spirituality” was lost on me. Nevertheless, having also spent several years of my childhood with my maternal grandmother, I had a feeling there was more to this universe than I could take in with my five limited senses. But the truth is, I wasn’t interested in
understanding
the world. I wanted only to
change
it.

Then one day Dame Dervish came into my life. She introduced herself as my spiritual side and explained to me that the Creator was not a nucleus of “fear,” but a Fountain of Limitless Love. A kind of wonder possessed me. At first, her very presence in my life was more intriguing than anything she said. Around her was an aura of light and calmness, like the moonlight shining on a gently rolling sea. Motivated by her, I started to read about Sufism. One book led to another. The more I read the more I unlearned. Because that is what Sufism does to you, it makes you “erase” what you know and what you are so sure of. Then you start thinking again. Not with your mind this time, but with your heart.

Of all the Sufi poets and philosophers that I read about during those years there were two that moved me deeply: Rumi and his legendary spiritual companion, Shams of Tabriz. Living in thirteenth-century Anatolia, in an age of deeply embedded bigotries and clashes, they had stood for a universal spirituality, opening their doors to people of all backgrounds equally. They spoke of love as the essence of life, their universal philosophy connecting all humanity across centuries, cultures and cities. As I kept reading the
Mathnawi,
Rumi’s words began to tenderly remove the shawls I had always wrapped around myself, layer upon layer, as if I were always in need of some warmth coming from outside. I understood that no matter what I chose to be—“leftist,” “feminist” or anything else—what I most needed was an intimate connection with the light inside me. The light of Truth that exists inside all of us.