Making Babies by Louise Eldrich

Making Babies

        In Making Babies, Louise Erdrich speaks of the journey of conceiving, bearing and raising a child. She speaks of her personal and emotional experience as a mother being pregnant, going through the different phases of pregnancy and the pain and suffering that goes with each phase of pregnancy. She describes what happens in different phases such as the morning sickness and the even criticizes the advice given to her. She outlines the struggles and suffering that women go through and yet women are hardly even noticed by humankind. Rather than being acknowledged for things like these, women are brought down in society and sooner than later the experience of childbirth only becomes a part of the child’s story rather than a woman’s great accomplishment.

        While Eldrich outlines all of these, she indeed uses different paradoxes and contradictions. For instance, she expresses her feelings when speaking about raising a child and how time passes by with parents trying to keep the moment and cherish each passing minute. She uses this line, “We snap photos, videotape, memorialize while we experience a fast-forward in which there is no replay of even a single instant.” The truth is that videotapes and so forth can be replayed but in truth one cannot go over any of these moments, the moments go so fast but you can never in reality go back to any of those moments. Another one that she uses is, “When we make love in the darkness of anticipation we are inviting accident and order, the careful lining up of genes.” Eldrich goes on in the article to use another paradox to explain what type of food to eat after going through morning sickness ad how to regard it as, “…provided you regard it now with nostalgic joy and are glad it’s finished.

        When Eldrich speaks about the love that a mother has for her child being different from that which she would feel for her other half, she states “It is twinned love, all absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure and in the face of it one’s fat ambitions, desperations, private icons and urges fall away into a dreamlike before that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence.”  I believe that Eldrich means that the love that a mother will have for her child is selfless. In other words, you give up everything for a child that has now come in to take away all that once was. In fact, one’s entire life changes. When she speaks about self-erasure, it means that everything that used to be centered on you has now been taken over by the child. It is almost like giving up your life to make another human being, a child live life to the fullest. Speaking from experience as a mother, this is basically what I come close to. I used to go shopping and buy everything for myself. However, after having a child, I would go shopping and come home with bag load of things, not for me as it used to be but for my child. I used to go out with friends, I used to come home with little to nothing to worry about, I used to find time to go to football games, birthday parties or just a weekend getaway. I used to imagine myself completing my master’s degree and all those ambitions and habits changed as soon as I looked into my child’s face the day he was born. And probably this is what Eldrich means to warm would-be parents about. Because while some may be willing to give up all of this. Others are not so ready to do so. However, it could also be an encouragement because something totally changes and while those things dawned, other hopes surfaced, a new joy, a new kind of love and happiness had surfaced the day I had my son. This is a push forward for those who had nothing to look forward to. Those whose desperations were abundant and whose life had been sucked out by another human being, a man whose love had died for them can find renewed love, an unconditional love for a child.  I have basically lived, still living what Eldrich is speaking about in these two sentences.