The myth that women are “made” to want and have children is probably the hardest one to pulverize.
Possibly because folded up inside of it is the convenient (for the patriarchal types) belief/insistence that we’re natural nurturers. “Maternal.” A word that should be stricken from dictionaries and everyday vocabulary because it is for some reason considered synonymous with “nurturing,” yet there’s no sister-word to describe nurturing males (“paternal” doesn’t work).
The problem with the myth is that people so deeply believe it to be true that they feel justified in pressuring women to have children. Or even forcing them to (see: laws or abusive partners or institutions that compel women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term).
Two things not considered:
It simply isn’t true that having an unwanted child will automatically turn a woman into a grateful mother.
Men almost always knowingly contribute to pregnancies, and we tend to assume they’ll learn to deal with fatherhood, no problem. (“She wants a kid, so I guess we’re having a kid. SHRUG!”)
Many stories promote the by-circumstance father trope, leading us to believe the part of the brain that generates strong opinions about irreversible lifelong commitments is missing in men, and most stories feature women who are mothers, or who want to be mothers and become mothers on the “happy ending” final page, or who want to be mothers but can’t be mothers, or any variation of woman→mother/mother fantasy.
I wanted to introduce something to the story landscape that countered both notions, because they’re not only idiotic but also potentially dangerous to the mental, emotional, and even physical health of all parties involved. Because it’s a widely known fact that fiction can change thinking by inviting people to experience perspectives they’re not familiar with, I created Katherine, a woman who never wanted a child but was forced to carry an accidental pregnancy to term after a RvW overturn, and I’d like to introduce you to a part of her you may not like, but that has its reasons (developed in earlier chapters).
By this point in The Age of the Child (ch. 9), Katherine is a couple months into her parenthood experience (which is to say, her unwanted daughter Millie is a couple months old):
Police typically parked half a block, or so, from popular drop-off points. The unmarked patrol cars were the first thing Katherine had learned to look for when driving around with the baby tucked to rigid safety standards in her car seat. Until recently, she had of course not known what an unmarked police car looked like. On television, they were dark Ford sedans with tinted windows and painted black grilles. She now knew, from frequent runs around town since the last snow had melted, that they could be anything from a ten-year-old manual-drive Mercedes to a rumbling Mustang 6sT-AV. The only somewhat obvious tell, she had learned online, was a narrow LED strip behind the grille, which took some maneuvering to spot. Harder to search for (also learned online) was the pinhead reflection of a camera lens in the rear license plate’s dark, coiled snake graphic. Over time she had noticed on her own that the wheels on the older cars they used were often a bit too shiny, too modern.
Katherine pulled into the parking lot across the street from the Department of Social Services, an unlit cigarette between her fingers. She set the parking brake and was reaching for the door handle when she saw a man in a hooded jersey creeping away from the building’s entrance, his head bobbing over manicured bushes lining the sidewalk. Just then, a car she had hardly noticed screeched into motion, zipping away from the curb and skidding to a diagonal stop in front of the man before he could cross the street. He dropped to his knees, clasped his hands behind his head, and released such a guttural, sorrowful cry that he might have been dying.
The police cuffed the man and dragged him toward their light blue sedan, one of them knocking him off his feet with a sucker punch while the other officer looked back across the street. They bent to pick him up, and the cap of the officer who had punched him fell off as she swept his wallet off the ground. Thick blond hair spilled to her shoulders. She opened the wallet, took a moment reading what was inside, and closed it. The officers said something to each other, and when the male partner broke off to head toward the government building, the female officer picked up her cap and looked around—at her partner, at the sidewalks, at the windows of surrounding houses.
Katherine started to slide down in her seat, but remembered what Margaret had taught her and froze. The officer threw another quick look at her partner’s back, then tripped the man with a deft strike to his bare ankle. When he was flat on the ground, she kicked him between the legs. He screamed so loud Katherine heard it through her closed window. The officer dropped on top of him, then, and pressed her chest to his back while tucking a knee between his thighs. She seemed to say something into his ear as she stuffed his wallet into the back pocket of his shorts, and when she finished, he flattened his cheek to the road and lay limp. Using his body as support for her knees and the balls of her hands, the officer stood, kicked the shining metal toe of her boot into the man’s side, and casually opened the car’s back door and waited.
Her partner returned with a child Katherine could only tell was old enough to walk. Dark hair fell to the collar of a t-shirt worn with blue jeans and brown shoes. The officer was having a hard time keeping the small hand in his, grasping for it and smiling down every time the child yanked it away, until he finally surrendered and scooped up the toddler, who pressed away with elbows locked and palms flat against the officer’s shoulders.
When both officers were busy securing the child inside the car, Katherine lowered her window one click.
“…hell else was I supposed to do?” The man on the ground lifted his head. “I’m not a bad man. I am not a bad man!”
The male officer popped his head over the roof. “Quiet.”
“She said she couldn’t get pregnant! But guess what? She got goddamn pregnant, and then she left with the kid and came back a year later to goddamn drop him on me. Why don’t you go find her and arrest her?— Wait, serious, now. Can you do that? Can you find her?” He struggled for balance when the male officer yanked at his elbows to pick him up off the street. “Well, can you, or what? You’re police, aren’t you?—Why won’t you answer me?”
The officer tucked the man’s head and shoved him into the back seat.
Katherine could no longer see him, but she could hear him.
“What would you’ve done if you were me, Officer…?” His head emerged from the car as he struggled to read the male officer’s nametag. “Davis? Officer Davis? Do you know how many seventy-hour weeks I put in to make partner? It was all I ever wanted. I had—”
“Your little boy could have starved to death,” the female officer said. “He could have been raped. Tortured some other way. Murdered. Abandonment is a Class A misdemeanor, you know that? So, you see, Hurlbut, it doesn’t matter what you wanted. Thanks to the good citizens actually looking out for the welfare of this nation’s children, what you’ll get is the next full year of your life in prison for—”
“Up to a year, Sal,” Officer Davis said. “Most only get a month or two, tops.”
“Up to a year in prison, Hurlbut, for leaving this boy on the street. Do you—”
“Might not go to prison at all, Sal. Could be probation, but maybe house arrest with groceries delivered.”
“Well, there you have it, Hurlbut. You might or might not go to prison for subjecting your child to who knows what torment, but I tell you what you will most definitely have, and that’s a very dark tick mark on your record. Do you think you made the right choice, Hurlbut?”
Hurlbut screeched, “Choice?” And then he laughed. He laughed and he laughed. He laughed so hard and so loud Katherine smiled unconsciously. Sal silenced him with a slam of the door. Katherine remained perfectly still with her unlit cigarette until they disappeared.
Her drives continued over the next several weeks. (She had little else to do, having decided to seclude herself during the breastfeeding period.) When the most viable local spots were catalogued along with whether she noticed a law enforcement presence, she expanded her surveillance to towns ten, twenty, and thirty miles away, often spending much of every day in the car with her quiet passenger. So quiet, in fact, that Katherine habitually watched the back seat in the rearview mirror, waiting long stretches at a time for a foot or a hand to move. If after what seemed too long she saw no sign of life, Katherine would reach behind her into the car seat and tug at the baby’s sleeve until she got a kick or a gurgle.
When not analyzing covered entries and public parks—when driving on the interstate, for example, or through neighborhoods she would never even in fantasy consider—Katherine busied her mind building stories.
The first was a kidnapping, but she rejected it as flawed. Not only was she not yet wealthy enough to be an attractive ransom target, but almost anyone who desperately wanted a child could adopt. The last she had read, agencies nationwide had lowered the age requirement yet again, this time from eighteen to the individual state’s age of sexual consent, where any such gap existed, “to eliminate undue age discrimination by providing equal parenting opportunities to those deemed by the state to be legally competent to reproduce.” Agencies had also stopped requiring references and home visits. For the rare applicant who was turned away for having a violent criminal record, children—whether huddled in doorways or wandering the edges of the cannabis fields—were reliably in stock.
The next story, one she kept returning to, was the honest mistake: She had accidentally left the carrier in a store.
“I stopped the cart in the freezer aisle,” she whispered. “We needed peas.” She had read that for a lie to be persuasive, it was important to include minor, but not too many, details. “But then I also wanted a pie crust. It was only three freezers down, so I walked away. When I turned around, she was gone.”
There are unwanted children filling up shelters and adoption agencies all over the country, her husband would would say. Why would anyone steal one in a grocery store?
“Convenience,” she said to the quiet car.
But the ending, no matter how many times she revised the details leading to it, made her anxious. How, precisely, would a distraught mother behave the moment her husband breezed in from nowhere and, in a characteristic display of his impulsive and fleeting interest, ask, “Where’s Millie Willie?” The scope of possible reactions and imagining herself attempting to perform any one of them with conviction could haunt her for miles at a time.
More often than not she skipped past that part. Instead, she imagined the future, after Graham had accepted her explanation and they had moved on. As it was, Graham only saw the baby in the morning before work for a fast kiss and a nuzzle, if he had the time. When she needed a diaper change, a bath, or a response to her cries, he found other things to do. Were the baby not there anymore, Katherine was confident, he would recover.
Note: Katherine’s husband, Graham, is loosely based on an ex of mine who said he wanted children, but who, when I asked how committed he was, seemed to have little interest in the work of parenting: making & driving to doctor’s appointments, doing the clothes shopping and toy cleaning, parental hovering, whatever else would be involved if I died/decided I wanted to work instead of be the one to stay home, etc.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this excerpt from The Age of the Child, you can read the rest at the links below, as well as at Smashwords, where you can download it in your preferred e-reading format.
“Reading the news these days is terrifying enough for women concerned with bodily autonomy — why would I invite that into my leisure reading?! What I hadn’t counted on is how compelling Tsetsi’s storytelling is, and also how darkly hilarious some of the scenes are. This is a book that begs to be discussed and dissected.” — Amazon Reader Review
“Scathing social commentary.” — Goodreads Review
“The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm, to name a couple, have opened the dystopian genre to questions about reproduction; however, The Age of the Child is one of the first I’ve read to really consider the issue of reproductive rights and attitudes so deeply.” — Rebecca Maye Holiday, author of The Beaches