mother's blood
mother's blood
porn, youngest daughters, and how the poison drips through
I highly recommend either reading in browser (mobile or on a computer) or scrolling to the bottom if you’re in the app, as the Substack app doesn’t let you click on footnotes, and that is where I have placed a content warning. Please proceed with caution.
I was nine years old when I was introduced to watching porn.
It was innocent, of course. My best friend had heard that there were videos of sex on the internet and, in the way that many nine year old girls are fascinated by the grotesque and sexual and all things dubbed “adult”, we ventured into the search engine on her father’s iPad to find it. The first video we found was thirty minutes long and of a blonde woman in a hot tub performing oral sex on a man, which fascinated us to no end— the movement of their skin, the stretch of her mouth, her unnaturally orange tan, the way his hands pulled her hair. The man’s face was never shown, but he loomed over the video, abstract and omniscient. We somehow both understood that even though he wasn’t shown and the woman looked like she was enjoying it, it was about the man. When it was over, she and I giggled and avoided eye contact as we switched back to looking at pictures of puppies.
I wasn’t done, though. Over the next four years, I spent whatever spare and private screen time that I had to look at porn— not because I liked it or because it made me feel good, but because the stories that were built to lead up to sex cast the women in the same roles over and over again, and I wanted to know why. The women were nannies, stepmothers, stepsisters, employees, stepdaughters, someone who lives in the house the man broke into, cleaning ladies, students. In return, the men were simply “the man”, because men don’t need to be defined by another person to be deemed worthy of attention or existence. The men had power and choice where the women didn’t. It was there in non-cishet porn, too, just less noticeable— there was always someone dominating and degrading the other(s). The power imbalance was everywhere and entirely unavoidable.
Ultimately, the formula that became apparent was that one person was the aggressor, the other person was at the other end of that aggression, and we called it sex and then filmed it and then sold it and then made it into a multi-billion dollar industry. The aggressor was always the man, and if it was same sex intercourse, then the aggressor was whoever was closest to the American masculine ideal— the lesbian with the strap, the male CEO as opposed to the male employee, the teacher of the naughty schoolgirl/boy.
For me, the most fascinating part of all that domination was the implied child. If you think back to the list of roles, a surprising amount of them involved some sort of child-rearing, and those children (never seen, thankfully, but implied) were rarely ever birthed by the one who was taking care of them. Let’s use the nanny as an example. The average plot of porn involving a nanny is that the nanny is at the man’s house and then the man finds and fucks her. The man always has a wife (birther of the children, no longer deemed desirable by the man) that isn’t the nanny, and sometimes she would find them and join in, because the man’s utmost pleasure is found in knowing he can get away with anything. Forget about the man here and focus on the women. The nanny is desirable because she exists as the caretaker of the children (meaning she’s in a position to be dominated) without the degradation of having birthed the children herself (absent of stretch marks and loose skin; she hasn’t already been “conquered”, which retains the illusion of purity that man enjoys so much). On the other hand, the wife is desirable because the pregnancy has made her less desirable, which leaves her in a better position to be dominated and degraded (the ultimate desirable trait being “lesser” than the man, of course).
It echoes throughout non-porn media, as well. The mother is either a neutral or an evil character, and in many cases is only depicted to serve as a roadblock to the character’s development or storyline. They are only shown because they gave birth to the character— without their ability to bear children, they wouldn’t be deemed as someone worth showing at all.
What makes the media’s dislike of mothers so dangerous is how sympathetic it is. Who hasn’t been kept from something they want? Whose mother hasn’t wronged them in some way? Isn’t it so easy to reduce them to a person without humanity, whose life started when you were born and will end when you die? For the daughters, it’s more complicated than that— there’s a stronger reflection of self for us, a constant threat of this could be you someday hanging over our heads. But of course the daughters are angry at their mothers! We have the right to be angry. We get created in their images and don’t get asked if we wanted to bear that weight at all, the same way they never got asked by their mothers. Even if there’s no pressure to have children, to be like them, it still manages to be something we can’t put down.
In this way, mothers become our worst fear, our most essential assets, and oftentimes the most hated person in our lives. And we would like to think that none of that’s true— we would like to think that we give mothers the appreciation and rights they deserve, that we don’t hate them, that we don’t take as many steps as possible to avoid becoming like them, that we don’t pin our problems on their failures.
At the very least, it’s a nice thought.
It’s a Wednesday afternoon. The house has eased into the secluded silence of a summer evening, doors and curtains closed in an attempt to keep out the heat. The road outside hums with the 5 o’clock traffic and the wind.
My father and I are in the kitchen, playing choir to my mother’s preacher. It’s a familiar dance— we are often the sole audience to her ills, which she has many of. The situation has been exacerbated by her mother, who stayed with us this last weekend and departed Sunday afternoon, leaving a trail of resentment and anger behind.
“I thought I was nice to her,” my mother says. “I only yelled at her once, when she started taking shots.” My father and I share a look at that statement— the you actually weren’t that nice and the you actually yelled at her quite a bit and the you put the alcoholic with alcohol-induced dementia in front of a platter of hard liquor, what did you expect go unsaid. It’s not the right time to bring these up; it never is, not with my mother.
She looks at us, expecting a reply. My mother is very good at making statements that seem rhetorical but aren’t.
“I think you did the best you could with what you had,” I say. It’s a cop-out answer and she knows it, I can see it in the way the skin around her mouth tenses for a heartbeat, but it placates her enough that she lets it go. My father hums in agreement. It’s not untrue. I do believe that my mother tried her best in dealing with my grandmother. Tragically, the best is often not enough.
“It's just— it’s so scary to me, how much of a bad person she is. She was always like that when I was a kid, too, but it’s never been this bad. It’s like the dementia made her forget how to not be a dick,” my mother continues. “And I try my hardest to not be like her but now I can’t spend money on myself without feeling like I’m just repeating the cycle.”
My father and I exchange another look at this. My mother’s spending has been hotly contested for many years— it brings her joy to buy things, and she does so frequently, easily dropping $200 on an item of clothing she never wears. It achieves nothing but a temporary patching of the hole my mother has in her, sending my father, who grew up extremely poor and hasn’t quite figured out how to outgrow the trauma that caused, into a panic, and annoying the shit out of me because she often complains about how expensive my medical bills are. She’s repeating the cycle. She’s just doing it in a way she approves of, and her mother is doing it in a way she doesn’t approve of, which makes all the difference.
“And she’s so narcissistic—” my mother is working herself into a passion now— “Which really pisses me off, because it’s one of the worst things a human being can be, and God, she’s so critical too, of everything.” (Another look exchanged— neither my father nor I can comment on my mother’s behavior or words without her flying into a rage and claiming that we’re intentionally being cruel to her, which is ironic considering how we can hardly exist without getting constant unhelpful criticism from her. She is immune to criticism, which is actually number eight out of nine on the list for symptoms that qualify someone for Narcissistic Personality Disorder.) “Entirely ungenerous! She walked through the house and pointed out everything that used to be hers and then had the nerve to ask if I stole it from her.” (Look exchanged— she often does this to me and the clothing she gives me.) “And I’m doing my best to not do that as much, because I know I do that to Lee.” (Look— out of all my problems with her, much of them that affect my father, that is the least of my concerns.) “The vanity, too, it’s so terrible. I couldn’t go anywhere without her commenting on how heavy or skinny people were.” (Look— the entire household is kept on a strict diet, akin to keto, and I’m only allowed one meal a day “for my own good”.)
The rest of the one-way conversation proceeds in a similar manner of her ranting about all the traits her mother has that make her a dick, most of which are traits she shares, and my father and I doing our best to placate her without revealing or outright disagreeing with our own views. It ends when my mother decides it does— her friends call her to tell her to meet them at a bar, and she leaves with little fanfare.
I want to be clear here, to leave no opportunity for misunderstandings, to be perfectly unbiased and neutral. In my mother’s house, this is the only way to exist if you aren’t her. I don’t think my mother is a narcissist or a bad person— I actively try to avoid armchair diagnoses and growing up the way I did means that I don’t believe in good and evil, that I can’t because then it’ll all mean something and I can’t let it mean something. I think she’s hypocritical and her actions are harmful in ways she doesn’t allow herself to recognize, and that she’s following a self-destructive path and won’t let herself be pulled away from it. I am going to live through this, of course. Chances are that I’ll escape largely unscathed as well, because I have a tendency to escape most situations unscathed, but the issue is that she is not irredeemable and so I can’t, with any dignity, let her destroy herself. Aside from a few obvious issues, I actually think she did quite well with raising me and I have a lot of respect for her as a person, which annoys me because it makes me feel obligated to get her out of the cycle she’s stuck in.
This makes me sound like I have a savior complex. I don’t— at least I think I don’t. Without any help, she would easily be fine in her later years if not alone because she’s driven anyone that loves her away. Her decision entirely, and honestly not my problem. But ideally she gets stopped before it reaches this point, so I am resigned to suggesting to her friends that they convince her to find a therapist, because I need to work in subtle ways to get her to do anything.
It’s worse, actually. This makes me sound like my mother when she talks about her own mother. Around and around we go.
Research is arguably one of the most important things in my life— not because my life has an abundance of things that need to be researched, but because I enjoy learning to the point where I often feel unfulfilled if I can’t absorb information. Because I want to know; always, always, I want to know. And I don’t like it when there’s no answer.
There’s no answer for why the fuck God, perpetually working in mysterious ways, has decided to inflict me with baby fever.
As it turns out, baby fever hasn’t been looked into all that much. There’s really only been one study done on it and the results were inconclusive. This irritates me. I can’t cut it out of me if I don’t know what it is and why it’s here.
It’s not necessarily that I don’t want to be a parent— I know that, depending on the child, I’m anywhere from a decent to a great parent. I spent far too much time taking care of kids much younger than me, playing babysitter-big sister-mother to them, to think that I have no maternal instincts or would be lazy or overly permissive or the hundred other things that turn children into cruel adults. No children now, of course— absolutely not know, I’m barely an adult— but I know that I have that option in the future and I’m not closed to it.
I don’t like that my organs feel weird when I see a child, though. I don’t like it one bit.
Here’s the kicker. I know there’s a millions girls out there just like me, vaguely against the idea of having children but in the quieter moments think: maybe a daughter. Someone who might understand.
We’ve all heard this story before. We all want to prove that we’re not our mothers, so here comes a baby girl and we think, I’m not going to fuck her up because I am not my mother, but then it’s nothing like we thought it would be and we aren’t raising our younger selves but a separate being, and we fuck them up. Because there’s nothing else for us to do. Because there’s no other option.
Of course we’ve heard this story before. It’s the same one our mothers all told themselves.
My grandmother is not that hard of a person to be around if you’re into talking to a bigoted non-player character, I think— I was never into video games enough to know if they’d match up or not, but I have a feeling it’s pretty close. You sit next to her, you click through the dialogue options (the weather is nice → I’m going to move to this area → I grew up in Alaska— potential to discover a family secret there → I did so well raising my children → I miss my husband → retelling of his death— sunrise, a herd of deer on the lawn, gentle kiss on the lips, died— and an awkward pause) and then the conversation starts all over again, following the same old tired tracks and randomly interspersed with comments about what you should or shouldn’t be doing to be more beautiful. Pluck your eyebrows, never gain a single pound, shave your legs, wear more makeup, all repeated over and over again enough to make anyone crazy. If I had an eating disorder, this weekend would’ve made me spiral.
I’m sitting outside with her, partially because my mother wants me to spend more time with her and partially because there is an absence of guilt for intentionally avoiding her that tells me I should feel bad, even if I don’t. We are halfway through the loop. She’s talking about growing up in Alaska. I’m thanking my lucky stars that she seems to not remember the Good Friday Earthquake, which she watched kill half of her hometown.
“It was a good place to grow up,” she says. “I had a lovely family. My brother Del used to take me to school in the mornings— because I was in primary school and he was in high school, and I was the baby of the family just like you and your mom— he used to drive me to school in his hot rod. And boy, did I feel like the Queen of Sheba pulling up with him every day.”
I give her a hum of encouragement. It’s all you can do. She’s lost to the time loop again.
“I sure did love him.” Her eyes go misty. “He was my first kiss and my first everything, really.”
“Your husband?” I ask, sure she got confused and started talking about my grandfather without me following.
“No, no. Del. My brother. I sure did love him. My first kiss and everything. He was real sweet on me, too— he brought me flowers after every single one of my pageants. And I just felt like the Queen of Sheba.” She says it casually, like she’s not even aware what she’s admitting to. Like incest isn’t a crime in every single state. Like she wasn’t in elementary school while he was in high school.
She takes my silence as a means to continue. “It was different from my daddy and Dee.” Dee, her eldest sister. I watch the leaves on the trees across the street. I bear it. I bear it. I bear it. “Del and I loved each other. And Dee hated us both for it, that bitch. Because she didn’t love Daddy. But Del and I got along real nice because he was my favorite, and I was the only one who cared when he cut off the tip of his finger cranking his hot rod or when he got arrested.”
“Dee probably was angry because she was being forced into something by your father,” I say, putting as much effort as I can into not letting my voice break.
“My father fucked her because she was a whore,” she says airily, like she’s discussing the weather and not her sister’s molestation. “She was always jealous of me anyways. Of me and Del.”
“That doesn’t mean she deserved to be sexually assaulted,” I say. I am looking at the leaves on the tree. I am looking at the leaves on the tree. I am looking at the leaves on the tree and not her face, where something I already knew has been brought to light— there is nothing I can tell her.
“No. But she could’ve just left. She was old enough and had some money and everything. She could’ve just left.”
No. No, she couldn’t have. Because she had two younger sisters in the same house as her father and it was better that she keep a stiff upper lip and bear it so they didn’t have to. Because she married a man who promised to take her away only to turn around and work for her father, to idolize him like Jesus fucking Christ. Because of you.
“I’ve never told anyone that before,” she says brightly. She chuckles. I am thirteen again, trying to salvage myself. “It all stopped when I met Jim, anyways. State Trooper. I was nineteen and home from college, and there he was.” Just like that, we’re back in the time loop. She won’t remember what she told me. When I go for my walk that day, Ethel Cain’s Inbred buzzing in my earbuds, I don’t throw up no matter how nauseous I get. It feels like a game that needs to be won. I am not letting her win. I’ve lost enough.
It might be 3 a.m. I’m honestly not sure. There’s a strange fear in me of looking at the clock during the early hours, the same way I’m scared of looking in the mirror past midnight or of turning on a main light or of not putting pretty beads and stones in the garden. Habits from a past life— routines embedded in me by all the stories my grandmother told me about fairies and their anger, from the exaggerated stories my mother told me about the IRS and what happens if your utilities bill is too high, from the stories my sibling told me about ghosts and their vengeance. Familial practices. We're superstitious folk.
I seem to have worked myself up into a tizzy— too many edibles and loud music and too little sleep, I reckon, added to the new weight of knowing that the cycles I’ve been doomed to are worse than I thought. My entire body crawls with imagined and welcomed maggots. I am indulging this. This insanity will be dulled in the morning, but for now, it’s phlegmatic and uterine and it holds me so tenderly, like a lover or a grave. I am indulging in this for now. Some things just have to be succumbed to.
This is the part of the post where I say something reassuring and optimistic, although not excessively positive so it seems relatively achievable. This is the ending, I suppose. It’s ending because there’s nothing more I can say without betraying some tender part of myself that can’t see the sunlight quite yet, and because I’m entirely sure you already know anyways, and because it’s gone on for far too long at this point. And because I can’t stop saying “because”, like enough explanation will tie up the cruelty and the loose threads into a tidy and satisfying narrative that I can open and close at whim.
Most days I don’t feel like anything at all— I could curl up into a ball and keep folding into myself until I was a fruit fly that would die in a minute, and that minute would be a year, and then I would go to Wonderland to play with Alice and all my dead friends forever. This is all in my head, of course. But you know that already. And it’s always very painful for a lovely little nothing such as myself to confront that things cannot be folded in or out of, things like family and the aggressive realities those present.
My words are doubling back on themselves. In I go. I am folding like a house of cards.
Somewhere in the dark, my grandmother is singing, high and bright the way she sang in high school. The way she still sings. I can see clearly now the rain is gone. I can see all the obstacles in my way. And that’s all in my head, too.
But you know that already.
Content warnings for: discussions of sexual violence against adults and children, incestual statutory rape, and molestation by a parental figure. Stay safe, please.