Essays

Emily Callaci

I understand that Betty Friedan is starting a bank

I had recently given birth to my first child when I started looking into the history of Wages for Housework, the feminist campaign demanding compensation for women’s work in the home. I was wild with new currents rushing around my veins, spilling messily beyond the container of my body. There was a bird that often perched on the tree in front of my house whose song was the same pitch as my baby’s cry, and sometimes, in a moment of mind-body confusion, I would step onto the porch, hear the bird call, and milk would burst out of my breasts. Shuffling my obliterated postpartum abdomen around the block, I felt aware of my physical vulnerability for the first time in my adult life. Usually a fast walker with a tendency to be oblivious to my surroundings, I started deliberately making eye contact with people on the street to gauge their intentions, aware that all they had to do was give me a gentle push and I would be helpless, like a beetle on its back.

Then there was the work. Motherhood disciplined me into doing housework in earnest for the first time in my life. Being a messy person had never much interfered with my life before, but caring for an unruly body with an undeveloped immune system whose face was usually at ground level turned cleanliness into a matter of health and safety. I found myself scrubbing sticky banana off floors, cleaning nine puked-on outfits a day, wiping mustardy liquid feces off sensitive infant skin, endlessly doing dishes. The labor was physical. I learned to use my body — my breathing, my core muscles, the timbre of my voice — to hold and soothe and organize my son’s disordered body, to teach him, without the benefit of language, that those little flailing meaty things that kept whacking him in the face were his own arms.

The tiny, sentient creature in my care was miraculous, utterly singular. Yet he was also completely ordinary. This seemed to me obviously radicalizing.

I knew the window of insight opened by new motherhood would close as soon as I patched together my broken body and my chaotic life, and I didn’t want it to; I loved it. There were things I missed and wanted back — my social life, an intact pelvis, REM sleep — but I didn’t want to lose the wildness, what felt to me like new powers of imagination and feeling.