by Emily Poole
Laney Kate was maybe seven the first time we watched YouTube videos of kayakers running the annual Green River Narrows Race. Every year, paddlers from all over the world converge on the eastern escarpment of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where the Green River crosses Henderson, Polk, and Rutherford Counties. The river drops more than 500 feet over the three-mile section called the Narrows, with dam-controlled flow released from Lake Summit on a schedule that kayakers track with precision. It’s terrifying. Spectators can hike in to watch the race, and even the trail is treacherous. I’ve done it, but without ropes to both drop in and climb back out again, it’s impossible. Impassable.
Somehow, that day, videos of badass kayakers taking death-defying drops became the thing my kids all agreed was worthy of their attention, and even I, occupied with making dinner, found myself fascinated by the sheer audacity of these athletes. Who looks at cliffs and boulders and chutes frothing with whitewater—named things like “Go Left or Die” and “Gorilla”—and says, yes, please? More than 170 people enter the race every year, including a “juniors” division, all of them made of sterner stuff than me.
Since the race takes place in November—and because it’s incredibly dangerous—the racers are kitted out in dry suits and helmets, and they come through the video frame so quickly that one racer pretty much looks like all the others. But as we were watching, a kayaker flew by, and you could see long hair hanging out of the back of the helmet, gathered in a ponytail. And to my Laney, my only daughter, that hair meant something. As soon as she saw it, she sat up straighter and gasped, pointing at the screen. “Mom! Look! One of them is a girl!”
To her, that long hair was not just permission, but possibility. And, despite my efforts to instill her with the confidence that she can do anything, be anything, she had been sitting there, watching those kayakers, waiting for some marker that said yes.
I glanced at my boys, all older than Laney, to see if they had been similarly impacted by the realization, and of course, they hadn’t even noted the ponytail, which to LK, may as well have been highlighted in neon yellow. But then, why would they? No one needed to tell them that they could kayak the Narrows, if they developed enough skill that it wouldn’t kill them. They have never needed this reassurance that any dream they dream is possible, because no one ever limits the scope of their potential.
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Laney Kate just turned twelve in November. She is a bright, enthusiastic soul, open and joyful with no poker face and absolutely no tolerance for injustice. Once, when she was in kindergarten, her class learned about Abraham Lincoln, practiced drawing his portrait, and made combination beard-hats out of black construction paper. She had hers on when I picked her up from school and would not remove it for the rest of the day. In fact, everywhere we stopped, she carried her drawing around and smiled at each person we saw, compelling strangers by sheer force of will and cuteness to ask her about her stovepipe hat so she could recite everything she knew about Lincoln. Walgreen’s, the library, back to the school for another kid, Sonic for treats afterward . . . Laney Kate was a walking documentary, full of life, eager to make her stamp on the world, spouting kindergarten-level facts about the Civil War and Lincoln’s presidency and the Emancipation Proclamation.
No one had told her that we haven’t yet had a female president. That there are still some jobs biased in favor of men. That there’s still a sizeable wage gap between men and women. That women who stay home with their children sometimes struggle to reenter the workforce and that when they do, it’s usually for less pay.
Who is limiting her? I hope it’s not me. I think it’s not me.
I think about her future, about the choices I felt compelled to make, and I want it to be limitless.
Yet it remains that every woman must, in some way, overcome the fact of her body: the fact that her body is a place that can be occupied by another person; the fact that her body is the incubator made flesh, host to an alien life form, the fact that her body is the only means by which we can build another person, the fact that when her body is gestating, she is more vulnerable. That sometimes that vulnerability means that she is so sick, she can’t work, that she cannot possibly consume enough calories to feed both the babies she’s growing and herself, especially if she’s throwing it all up. That when the baby is born, her body produces what is arguably the best possible nutrition for the thing that she made, tying her to this squirming, cooing, grunting, pooping creature on a regular schedule for anywhere from the minute she decides she’s okay with formula to when she decides she can be done breastfeeding, and it will make her thirsty all the damn time. That after the baby is born, she will possibly sink into a deep and dark depression, so consuming that she will feel like her whole family would be better off without her. That she made this thing—this beautiful, beautiful thing—with her womb and her blood and her vomit and her exhaustion and her acne in weird places and her stretchmarks and her one-size larger feet and her heartburn and her bowl-shaped abdominal muscles and her saggy boobs and her forever broken bladder and sometimes her life.
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Rachel, the Old Testament matriarch, wife of Jacob, gave her life. Her value was so tied to her childbearing ability that maybe it was because of her barrenness that Jacob remained with his family in the household of Laban, Rachel’s father, until Joseph, her first child, was born. After all, Jacob already had sons—ten of them, through Rachel’s sister Leah and through Zilpah and Bilhah, enslaved handmaids forced into surrogacy. Those sons wreaked havoc, laying waste to an entire city when Shechem, the prince of that city, raped Leah’s daughter Dinah. What would they have done to Jacob’s barren wife, had they left the relative safety, for her, of Laban’s household? She was dangerous to them, as the favored wife of their father. And indeed, Jacob did give the birthright to Rachel’s firstborn, even though he was number eleven in the line-up and probably decades younger than Reuben, the oldest. Rachel’s last act, and one of the only places we hear her voice in the Biblical account, was to name her second son. “Ben-oni,” she called him. “Son of my sorrow.” And as she died, her husband, who claimed to have loved her, changed his name to Benjamin, “right-hand son.”
Rachel was just one of many Old Testament women who were identified by their most important characteristic: barrenness, the inability to conceive children. The authors of those stories clearly did not consider the potential male component of infertility, in the same way they clearly did not consider women’s voices to be important outside of the context, with rare exception, of their relationships with men. With their adherence to the patriarchal order. With their ability to produce a birthright son.
The Old Testament stories predate their actual recording by probably thousands of years—it’s not possible to know when the oral tradition originated. The versions we have date to no earlier than 900 BCE based on linguistic and contextual analysis, but the oldest physical editions of any of the books of scripture contained in the library Western Christianity calls the Old Testament are the Dead Sea Scrolls, some dated as far back as 400 BCE, and they predate the next oldest edition by a good 250 years. All were written by hand, copied over and over, assembled and compiled and condensed and abridged, sometimes comingling sources together into one document, creating internal textual disagreements. Some sources amplify women’s voices more than others, but none of them fail to privilege the male perspective.
This—this—is the set of documents most prominent in the establishment of Western attitudes about everything, really, but especially women and women’s roles. And we grasp at the stories we do have, the tiny details dropped in passing that tell us that Sarai named her son Isaac (“he will laugh”) because she laughed when she was told by a messenger from God that she would conceive in her old age after, yes, a lifetime of barrenness. The brief mention of Dinah as a member of Jacob’s household when they prepare to travel to Egypt, where they will be delivered from famine by Joseph, the brother sold into slavery there. The three short verses when we learn of Asenath, the Egyptian wife of Joseph, mother to their sons Ephraim and Manasseh. The tiny moment when Rachel refuses to move from the bench where she has hidden the household gods she stole from her father’s house as she prepares to leave with Jacob, telling them she cannot rise because she’s having her period.
How much richer would our tradition be had we heard in Rachel’s voice that perhaps her father’s household engaged in ancestor worship, common in that time and place, and, anticipating that she would probably never return home, one of the figurines she stole was an image of her long-dead mother, another woman absent from the Biblical record? If we could hear in Hagar’s voice—poor Hagar, an Egyptian, whose only name we know is simply the masculine form of the Hebrew word for “foreigner”—how bereft she felt when, after she was forced into surrogacy by Sarai, the son she bore, Ishmael, was first claimed by Sarai, and then rejected by her when they became a threat to Abraham’s “true” heir Isaac? If we could just hear from Eve what the serpent really said to her. If we could weep with Bathsheba, hear the story from her perspective rather than from that of her aggressor and murderer of her husband, the lauded King David.
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Just over eighteen years ago, my twins, my first two children, were conceived through in vitro fertilization, after seven years of sex didn’t get us anywhere. My husband and I used to joke that maybe the reason we couldn’t get pregnant was because in the early years of our marriage, we were hardly ever in the same place at the same time. He was in grad school, working evenings after class in the library and in a Wal-Mart vision center on weekends. I was juggling a full-time job with a piano studio of thirty students. Our reproductive endocrinologist called us his “pediatric patients” because we were so much younger than the people he usually saw. I took offense at this—after all, we, in our twenties, were paying him the same as the forty-somethings were, though we were using student loan money to do it. I didn’t want him to be less aggressive in his therapy recommendations just because he thought we “had plenty of time.”
And it worked, eventually—with a different doctor. I produced two birthright sons, screaming and healthy and fat—almost fourteen pounds, between the two of them. And then two more children, a son and a daughter, both times with no extra people in the room at the moment of conception. My body, it seemed, had remediated itself, ready to claim its divine purpose. I had filled the measure of my creation.
Except.
The equation of value with motherhood limits what a woman can become. And we have come so, so far. A woman can choose her partner. A woman can get an education, freely. A woman can vote, own property, get a bank loan, inherit, get a credit card—and birth control—without permission, and decide, in many places, if she wants to be pregnant at all. She can choose intentional childlessness or single parenthood or adoption—the giving and the receiving—or parenthood in partnership with another person of any gender identity. Or she can choose to do fertility treatments, partnered or not.
But still, there is the issue of her body. Laney Kate has not yet begun menstruating, but when she does, she’ll be ready. Somehow, this is a rite of passage she’s naively looking forward to. She carries pads in her backpack to school every day “just in case, Mom” and already has period underwear stacked neatly in her drawer, ready to deploy when the time comes. But even menstruation will need to be managed. Maybe she’ll have cramps. Maybe she’ll be moody. And I hope she’ll be able to acknowledge whatever she’s feeling without it invalidating her emotions or having others cast everything she says or does in the scapegoat light of PMS. She’ll deal with it, as every woman does, because her body, through no direct communicative path, will demand it.
~~~~~
When we brought Laney Kate home from the hospital, she, of course, immediately needed a diaper change. Her brothers, then aged four, four, and three, gathered around the ottoman where I had laid her and immediately noticed that her anatomy was different from theirs. Those external sex characteristics indicated her potential for future childbearing ability, and that role for her, should she choose it, will carry different burdens and responsibilities than it will for my sons. And we can acknowledge those differences without attributing any of her other characteristics—her strengths and her weaknesses, her talents and interests—or the future choices available to her as connected to the possibility that she may one day bear children. Childbearing can be a thing that holds value without being The Thing that gives her value.
And what I want for her is complex and so connected to my own competing convictions—that bearing children both made me who I am and made me delay who I could become. That the pressure to conform to the stay-at-home-mom “ideal” forced me into a role at which I expected to excel but which, in reality, challenged me to the point that I doubted my own identity as a capable, intelligent person.
She’s so unburdened, now. It’s late at night, and I just turned off the music in her room, Billie Eilish singing her to sleep. She doesn’t feel the pressure of conformity, not in the same way I did. The rhetoric has changed, and though the subtext is still there, we work hard to counteract its effects. I remember when LK noticed her pediatrician was a girl—the choice of a female doctor was one I’d made intentionally. She was cataloging, assembling a list of options. When Hilary Clinton ran in the 2016 election, “president” was added to Laney’s list—the word made flesh, possibility called into the world when she saw proof that it could be done. She watched the Olympics and noted women doing amazing things with their bodies. She watched me write this essay, read it, and hugged me, giving consent to expose her in this way to a world she is only beginning to know. She watched me, her mom, drop her off with Gramma when her dad wasn’t home in time for me to make it to symphony rehearsal. Then she watched me discover my talent as a writer, reinvent my career goals, and go back to school. She still watches, and I watch her taking it all in, waiting for the moments when her openness shuts down, when her light begins to dim, so I can help her navigate through the narrows, threading the needle just right so she can keep her head above water and emerge from the chute on the other side, arms in the air, triumphant, breathing, doing.
