The Argonauts Read Online Free PDF Page B

our concrete sliver of a backyard, a baby pool in the front, a Lego station by the wall heater, a swing hanging from the studs in his bedroom. We read books all together before bed, then I would leave to give you two some alone time, listen to your soft voice singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” night after night from behind the closed door. I read in one of my stepparenting guides that one should take stock of the developing bonds in a new family not every day or every month or every year, but every seven years. (Such a time frame struck me then as ludicrous; now, seven years later, as wise and luminous.) Your inability to live in your skin was reaching its peak, your neck and back pulsing with pain all day, all night, from your torso (and hence, your lungs) having been constricted for almost thirty years. You tried to stay wrapped even while sleeping, but by morning the floor was always littered with doctored sports bras, strips of dirty fabric—“smashers,” you called them.
    I just want you to feel free , I said in anger disguised as compassion, compassion disguised as anger.
    Don’t you get it yet? you yelled back. I will never feel as free as you do, I will never feel as at home in the world, I will never feel as at home in my own skin. That’s just the way it is, and always will be .
    Well then I feel really sorry for you , I said.
    Or maybe, Fine, but don’t take me down with you .
    We knew something, maybe everything, was about to give. We hoped it wouldn’t be us.
    You showed me an essay about butches and femmes that contained the line “to be femme is to give honor where there has been shame.” You were trying to tell me something, give me information I might need. I don’t think that line is where you meant for me to stick—you may not even have noticed it—but there I stuck. I wanted and still want to give you any life-sustaining gift I have to offer; I beheld and still behold in anger and agony the eagerness of the world to throw piles of shit on those of us who want to savage or simply cannot help but savage the norms that so desperately need savaging. But I also felt mixed up: I had never conceived of myself as femme; I knew I had a habit of giving too much; I was frightened by the word honor . How could I tell you all that and stay inside our bubble, giggling on the red couch?
    I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty. You said I misunderstood what you meant by honor. We haven’t yet stopped trying to explain to each other what these words mean to us; perhaps we never will.
    You’ve written about all parts of your life except this, except the queer part , you said.
    Give me a break , I said back. I haven’t written about it yet.
    In the midst of all this, we started to talk about getting pregnant. Whenever anyone asked me why I wanted to have a baby, I had no answer. But the muteness of the desire stood in inverse proportion to its size. I had felt the desire before, but in recent years I had given it up, or rather, I had given it over. And now here we were. Wanting, as so many want, the time to be right. But I was older now and less patient; I could already see that give it over would need to turn into go get it , and soon. When and how would we attempt it, how much mourning would there be if we turned away, what if we called and no baby spirit came.
    As concepts such as “good enough” mothering suggest, Winnicott is a fairly sanguine soul. But he also takes pains to remind us what a baby will experience should the holding environment not be good enough:
    The primitive agonies
    Falling for ever
    All kinds of disintegration
    Things that disunite the psyche and the body
    The fruits of privation

going to pieces
    falling for ever
    dying and dying and dying
    losing all vestige of hope of the renewal of contacts
    One could argue that Winnicott is speaking metaphorically here—as Michael Snediker has said in a more adult context: