The Argonauts

by Maggie Nelson

You don’t do labor, I was counseled several times before the baby came. Labor does you. This sounded good—I like physical experiences that involve surrender. I didn’t know, however, very much about experiences that demand surrender—that run over you like a truck, with no safe word to stop it. I was ready to scream, but labor turned out to be the quietest experience of my life.

If all goes well, the baby will make it out alive, and so will you. Nonetheless, you will have touched death along the way. You will have realized that death will do you too, without fail and without mercy.

People say women forget about the pain of labor, due to some kind of God-given amnesia that keeps the species reproducing. But that isn’t quite right—after all, what does it mean for pain to be “memorable”? You’re either in pain or you’re not. And it isn’t the pain that one forgets. It’s the touching death part. As the baby might say to its mother, we might say to death: I forget you, but you remember me. I wonder if I’ll recognize it, when I see it again.

The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time.

To me, at the moment anyway, it is a tremendous relief, an incitement to give Iggy no memory, save the sense, likely unconscious, of having once been gathered together, made to feel real. That is what my mother did for me. I’d almost forgotten.

Don’t produce and don’t reproduce, my friend said. But really there is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.

When all the mythologies have been set aside, we can see that, children or no children, the joke of evolution is that it is a teleology without a point, that we, like all animals, are a project that issues in nothing. But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don’t know. I know we’re still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.