I had one of those remarkable encounters while reading Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, who was describing in almost identical words an idea I had explored years ago in a poem. It is an ambiguous moment in motherhood, knitting power and love in a fierce and consuming way. It's awful really, selfish as it expresses a desire to reclaim the flesh once freely given, as though it had it been a loan and was needed back again ostensibly to keep the child as safe as she once was in the womb, but really, as a desire to recapture youth and vigor. Jung describes the trauma of birth as the "unhealed wound" in the child's life — but I think there is an echo of the trauma in birth for the mother too. Nine months of intimacy, of quiet internal reflection, communication, a quickening joined in blood and flesh, a fullness that is suddenly followed by an emptying. There remains a longing, because everything that comes after is a leaving, a leaning out and away from all that primal connection.
I stumbled and then stopped and re-read this passage in Kate Atkinson's brilliant and brooding collection of intertwined murder mysteries, Case Histories.
"…she loved her youngest child with a ferocity that didn't always seem natural. Sometimes she wanted to eat Olivia, to bite into a tender forearm or a soft calf muscle, even to devour her whole like a snake and take her back inside her where she would be safe. She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty."
Atkinson's passage lit up in my brain like lightning, recalling my own poem "Baba Yaga" — which I wrote for my daughter more than a decade ago. It was eerie and familiar to read the two passages side by side.
"My daughter when you were small
How I wanted to eat you.
Cast off flesh of my flesh
I wanted to keep you in me,
Digest my fear of losing you as I swallowed
You whole, plumped and roasted.
Can you forgive the way I fretted over the oven
And took the measure of your
Wrists with my worried fingers?"
When I was pregnant with my daughter I developed anemia, which was discovered late in the pregnancy because I confessed to the ob that the sight of sand made me salivate, and I wanted to eat it. (I didn't tell him that I actually did eat a small finger full as the children were playing in it. ) That's when I learned about pica, a condition where anemic women, especially pregnant women crave dirt and sand. I also discovered that women in the South used to keep a little container of iron-rich red clay to eat during their pregnancy. The body's search for iron looks to the soil to enrich the shared blood grown thin. How like Baba Yaga, licking her iron tusks in pleasure, sucking marrow from the bones of bad children. Are all mothers always so hungry?
This is part of my daughter Taiko's reply to my Baba Yaga poem which we published as a duet. It is an answer from a young woman who had learned a thing or two about leaving and returning, about cooking and slaking a mother's hunger without turning first into the meal herself.
"Won't you be stunned to see,
in your weakened state, Old Woman,
that I have brought more than fish!
I will teach you, now that you have
burned your old recipes,
the new ones I remedied.
And I will uncover the hidden plants
I've stashed in my hair,
the worlds I have in my mouth,
the tattoos woven in my skin
and the sky I discovered in my breast.""Old Woman, this will surely be your
finest meal."
Art: "Mother and Child" by Kathe Kollwitz, "Vasilisa and Baba Yaga" by Vania Zouravliov, "Baba Yaga" by Kinuko Craft.
oh yes – so happy to see you back here! the question and answer of the poems is wonderful, and i will need to read them a few more times to digest. but these lines in particular grabbed me: “Nine months of intimacy, of quiet internal reflection, communication, a quickening joined in blood and flesh, a fullness that is suddenly followed by an emptying. There remains a longing, because everything that comes after is a leaving, a leaning out and away from all that primal connection.”
everything that comes after is leaving. that says so very much, so simply and so profoundly.
Thank you for this wonderful post!! I know the Baba Yaga/Vasilisa story well and will be writing about it in two of the psychology books I am working on now, one a second book on mothers and daughters. [The first, In Her Image, was published by Shambhala in 1989, now OOP]. I would dearly love to read the entire poem that you and your daughter wrote— is there some place I could find it? It had me in tears….. I was also reminded of the differing responses of my son and daughter when they were little and I’d play with them the ‘devouring’ games we tend to play with our kids. “I am a big brown bear and I am going to EAT you up!” My son, when I said this to him, burst into tears and cried out “Don’t EAT me, Mommy!”which of course made me feel horrible and I never did this again. But my daughter, at around the same age, 3 or 4, LAUGHED and said, ‘No, I am the big brown bear and I am going to eat YOU!’. I’ve reflected on that for years……. Another thing your blog piece made me think of is an article I read recently–I’ll try to find it for you, if you like– that claimed that all of us mothers, after giving birth, continue to carry some cells of each of our children within us for the rest of our lives. Cells! That still totally staggers me and, intuitively, makes SENSE, because isn’t that really how we FEEL? [Finally, I just want to add that you don’t know me but I met you years ago at WisCon……..]
Actually, I was thinking of you Greta as well as my own experience when I wrote that — lately you have been posting about your sons and I was thinking how oh so familiar is that ache of pride in their accomplishments and sadness at not being part of their daily life. My son has been here for the last year — but it is a watershed in his life and I know the day is fast approaching when he will be off again. I will be happy for him…but I know there will also be that crash.
Hi Kathie — I love your children’s responses! A sort of mythic-intuitive logic embedded in dna. The link to the duet is here: Baba Yaga Duet. The red text here is a hyperlink — which you should be able to click on and get to the post.
One year at Wiscon, I had the pleasure of doing a reading of this poem with the simply awesome Catherynne Valenti on a panel about Baba Yaga — I read my part and she read my daughter’s — it was really stunning to hear her read. The poems really opened up in a new way.
And yes! I read the article too on how our children leave their cells in our body after birth — it seems that science has finally caught up to what mothers have always known — but isn’t it wonderful to have it made concrete?
Thank you.
My daughter just turned 21. During the week of her birthday I have been hungry. Hungry all the time, craving bread, meat, fat — I feel like I could eat all day. While reading your post I realized that it is the small, needy, warmth of her infancy that I have been longing for. Hungry for the weight of her in my arms, that warm milky smell of infancy. While she was growing up, I was growing old. I would not have guessed that I was hungry for the past.
Oh, I liked this, as well as the comments… Loved Baba Yaga tales as a child.
I didn’t know that business about leaving behind cells, but it’s an interesting thought that there is a real chain of humanity, one to another, even when a child does not know her mother.
Hi Paula — I think it’s one of the reasons when my adult children come home for awhile, I FEED them! I cook constantly, and if I visit them, I fill their refrigerator. If they are leaving to drive a distance home again, I pack enough lunches for a week. My daughter is giving birth to our first grandchild this spring — a little girl — and I am beside myself with joy — just to experience again a little of that warm holding, that milky smell, and the face that lights up when you speak.
It’s cool, isn’t it? Here’s one article about it from the Atlantic Monthly: Your Baby’s Leftover DNA.
I love these companion baba yaga poems. They are poems to re-read
i suspect we are always part of their daily lives, though they may not tell us so. 🙂 and we know we have succeeded as reasonably good parents when they “launch” and still continue to talk to us. love, after all, knows not the limitations of time and space.
Not a mother ever, still I understand. Perhaps every child of a womb understands this insatiable hunger. We wanted to crawl back, re-inhabit, to conquer and devour the mother thing in order to become it ourselves, own the power of it. This primal bond of flesh to flesh is the most powerful ever devised.
“I’ll eat you up I love you so..” I never understood this until I had my son. But it’s so true. Sometimes he’ll come over for a long hug, I put my arms around him and he starts “gumming” the flesh on my arm. When I ask him “what are you doing?” he says “I just love you so much.” I know he will likely grow out of it but I know we both feel “put together again” when we just sit and hold each other.
Regarding Baba Yaga, I woke from a dream about her the other night – her and her iron teeth and children, but instead of her teeth being a threat to her children it was somehow linked to the oven where she cooked and where she warmed her children (as Russians used to do) on nights of illness and Winter cold. As she fed them, she clanked her teeth forging their bond of love, finding her hunger sated too.. (it was a weird dream I guess!).
PS Welcome back! (eats up your posts hungrily…) We’ve missed you but we also understand and are glad you took time when you needed to.