Case Study 1: child as self, child as other

Around the time 1986 turned into 1987, my father and mother each gave me 23 chromosomes.

Thirty years later, I would meet Professor Gerald Callahan in a graduate classroom. A professor of immunology with a dual appointment in English, he was a prolific writer whose work existed at the intersection of science and personal narrative. In his essay, “Forgiving the Father,” Callahan investigates the divide between himself and his father, turning to biology for possible answers.

Indeed, before we even are an I, it appears human evolution may have set up a rift between father and offspring. He writes, “Men contribute little more than DNA to the fetus. Mothers give more of themselves, much more.”

In addition to 23 chromosomes, my mother’s egg contained cytosol—and, in a process we still don’t understand very well, that cytosol turned some genes on and others off. Of all the possible me’s the 46 chromosomes might have crafted, it was my mother’s body that shaped me into the one who drafts this now.

Six months into pregnancy, my mother sent me her antibodies through the umbilicus we shared, writing onto my body spells of protection against the outside world, beginning to impart lessons to my body about self and other.

Among these messages of danger, one was about my father. For, when cells from fetus-me moved from the placenta into my mother, her immune system identified a foreign invader: my father’s genes. Her body responded to that invasion of other and taught my body to do the same.

There are so many ways to read this. Which way do I choose?

Case Study 2: child in the marriage plot

Marriage as conclusion. Marriage as happy ending.

Modernist Era writers like Virginia Woolf unraveled the marriage plot, critiquing the way earlier authors offered women either marriage or death.

I imagine my mother at the ages of various characters in Woolf’s novels—on the cusp of adulthood, just as ambivalent about the prospect of marriage, and just as pressured by family, society, and gender expectations—then as angel of the house, striving to be the perfect wife, perfect mother.

Though my mother didn’t die and did marry, in some ways the end of her marriage was a kind of death.

It was also where my story may have really begun.

My child-self saw both the devastation of the fall and the renegotiation of womanhood that followed, feeling the mother’s heartache as her own, not just because she loved her mother but also because she understood that she was walking the same road as her, just a decade or so behind. Her heart broke for her future self.

Marriage as context, as situation, as the before. Marriage as terrible beginning.

Case Study 3: childhood as the upside-down

One day, you wake up and find your nose has gone, or your mother dies and then you lose her wedding ring, as Cheryl Strayed tells us in “The Love of My Life.” Or, you wake up and find yourself a woman, as Virginia Woolf writes in Orlando. Or, you wake up and find your father has left.

The absurd happens, and sense isn’t to be made of it. You just go on. Linear narratives can’t always do justice to these queer experiences. They are not straight lines.

Childhood itself is disorienting in this way. As is asking an adult to see the world through the eyes of a child. The familiar becomes unfamiliar; everything is strange—and you long to know why.

I floated in this in-between, a space-time perhaps akin to the “upside-down” from the Netflix TV Series Stranger Things, in which a young girl is new to the world, has few words and a supernatural power. The upside-down is the same world, but not. It is fantasy and also real. It is trapped in time, yet time passes there. It is not safe, but nor is the regular world.

Case Study 4: child as subaltern

A child cannot tell her own story. A child does not have the language, and the child’s way of knowing is so different from an adult’s way of knowing as to be perhaps unrecognizable, illegible. And yet, we have all been children. Every author of the page has been a child, and the author of the pages’ author has been a child.

Because of their age and their inability to articulate, children are often not taken seriously. Often even their bodies do not belong to themselves. Even when they are deeply loved and cared for, they may still find their voices ignored, their experiences dismissed. In short, their personhood denied.

From teachers reminding us to use our “inside voices” to disapproving glances from adults if we got fussy, I learned the expectation, “Children should be seen and not heard,” before I ever knew it was an English proverb.

Our language lays bare this dynamic. We are cautioned not to infantilize because it is disrespectful. To call something “childish” is to belittle it. The implication is that we should grow up. Children, though, are refused entry into the grown-up world. How often was I told I didn’t understand and then, when I asked for an explanation, that I couldn’t understand? Because you’re a child.

And the danger of believing that age dictates one’s ability to understand and fit in the world runs both ways. Bad behavior is sometimes written off to age as we chock up shenanigans to adolescence. They’re just being kids, after all.

Case Study 5: child on all fours

The girl sheds skins like a snake. Like the one she found hiding under a rock across the street, picked up and presented to her mother, who recoiled thinking it might be a copperhead. Perhaps this is why she is never afraid of them the way other girls are. It’s not ignorance. She knows some are venomous. Like the copperhead. She knows they can bite. But she’s only ever been bitten by animals who smiled. She also knows snakes can slough off skin that is too tight or infested.

Underneath her layers of clothes and epidermis and dermis, she is feral, preserving what is pre-linguistic and true. The rules that domesticate and tame also kill. In this body, she can bare her fangs. She can bite back.

Case Study 6: child as reliable witness

In most ways, my childhood was unremarkable. The flaws of the adults in my life were largely unremarkable. But, the unremarkableness of a child being treated like a child is something I want to remark on. Childhood, even more than any other time in one’s life, is dominated by moments that adults especially might consider not worthy of acknowledgement.

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf describes how she desires, as a reader, to see “the accumulation of un-recorded life” on the page. She writes, “For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it at all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it.”

Indeed, she writes “biography [is] too much about great men.”

There is more to the official record than the adult voices.

I witnessed the life I lived.

Case Study 7: child on the line

The Fates measured a mortal’s lifespan by the length of the thread they spun and, ultimately, cut. Our life, especially as a child, is not always in our own hands. Yet, if we are willing to look, palmistry promises that we can predict our destiny by reading our hands. The fate line, which runs from the middle of the wrist vertically up the palm, reveals the effects that events in the outside world have upon us. Mine is broken and forked.

I prefer to imagine life as a different kind of line entirely.

The slackline may be fixed at two recognizable end points, but as you move along it, it moves too. What matters more than its length is its tension. Each step is a negotiation, and your body’s position impacts the line’s position. Balance is always in progress rather than found, and a body becomes acutely aware of its relative place in the world.

Or, perhaps better yet, a snake-line. Unfix the ends as well. Let us sink our teeth into the past and slip the world as we slide ourselves forward.