On illness & autonomy
A literary dispatch from sick season, maternal scripts, feminism and outrage culture, Brutalities, and other thoughts on bodies in pain
Two weeks ago, my two children were both home sick with what eventually turned out to be strep throat. After a couple of days at home, we took the throat cultures; we got antibiotics. My kids would rather suffer through any circle of hell than take grape-flavored Ibuprofen, so I knew we had some trouble ahead the moment the doctor wrote us a prescription.
Since publishing Touched Out, I’ve answered many questions about kids and bodily autonomy. How do you talk to your kids about this subject? I’m often asked. Which is always a bit strange to answer. I am a writer. My PhD is in literature. I have an MFA in writing. I teach writing. I am not someone who gives parenting advice in a professional capacity. But these are the kinds of questions one gets asked, I guess, after publishing a book about motherhood— or perhaps just when one is a mother who writes.
What I usually say when people ask this question is that, like anything in parenting, it’s an endless, ongoing conversation— a dialectic. Parenting does not, actually, happen in moments, at least not singular ones. It happens over the course of at least eighteen years, if we are lucky. It’s a cummulative act, a process, an accretion of language that circles throughout our domestic spaces for years— and so in that sense, parenting is a kind of writing, a type of storytelling. Parenting, perhaps, as ghost writing.
But trying to get your kid to take disgusting medicine is perhaps the greatest lesson I can offer on the complex politics of bodily autonomy in parenting. Forcing kids to ingest something they need (without, say, pinning them down and squirting it in the back of their throat—though I’ll admit I did this a few times when they were infants) tests any parent. It’s also an opportinity to explore how we talk about bodies, illness, pain, caring for ourselves, and the limits we push our bodies up against for something called “health.”
In her essay, “On Being Ill,” Virgnia Woolf wrote that there is no great literature on illness, because it’s not a topic studied seriously in art. Love, jealousy, war, these are considered the subjects of high art—but not what Woolf called “the drama of the body” that comes with sickness, when the world falls away, ambition dissolves, and the body is revealed to be anything but “a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear.”
Kids getting sick has, alas, since the pandemic, become a trope in parenting writing. We laugh at ourselves and how hard it all is, how little anyone cares, how hidden away this work is, insert obligatory line about the need for better leave. But the work of caring for sick children has not yet become the stuff of literature or art.