Hard Mother

Most spinal catheters—for example, those used to deliver epidural anesthesia during childbirth—are made of polyamide resin, polyurethane, and nylon block copolymers. By the time my catheter was placed between the dura mater (hard mother in Latin, from the Arabic al-‘umm al-jāfiya) and the ligamentum flavum, I also had in my body a dinoprostone suppository encased in a “knitted polyester retrieval system,” an IV line (polyethelyne) in my forearm hooked up to a bag (PVC) of saline, and a catheter (plastic) to eliminate urine. I was girdled in a poly-blend “stockinette” (its plastic packaging read “In-Place Queen”) to hold the disposable plastic-housed tocodynamometer tracking my contractions. When she was out, the baby’s cord was clamped with a disposable plastic alligator clamp, and heart rate monitors were taped to her chest with plastic tape. She was outfitted in a standard-issue newborn hat (poly-blend) and weighed in a plastic scale next to an (opened) AirLife Tri Flo Single Use Suction Catheter (PVC) in case she needed naso-gastric suction (she didn’t). I needed two stitches (Vicryl, a dissolving polyglactin copolymer). I made everyone crazy looking for a pink ethylene-vinyl acetate slipper I lost during labor. When we couldn’t find it, I threw the other one out. The placenta is in the freezer in a plastic take-out container, waiting to be planted under a tree when the ground thaws in “spring.” The tree will remain long after we both die. So, of course, will the plastics.

This is my homoreproductive Anthropocene confession. I could do this same bit about pump parts, the baby’s infinite stuff, my sex toys, the inconceivable volume of plastic I used to inject hormones while reading pamphlets in the fertility clinic about reducing exposure to plastic if you are having trouble conceiving. When I surveyed a group of mothers with same-age babies, all of whom had been living intentionally low-waste lives, they reported trashing an astonishing amount of plastic since giving birth. Every postpartum pad in a plastic wrapper, the tear-off tops of breastmilk bags, the packaging of premium “sustainable” diapers, the bubble wrap swaddling eco-friendly baby dishes, on and on. More arresting than the compendium of plastics was the intensity of affect around this waste: shame, panic, horror, guilt—a feeling of being trapped, of creating further inescapable traps. “Don’t blame/ the Junk for being discarded,” Tommy Pico reminds us.Tommy Pico, Junk (Portland, OR: Tin House, 2018), 7. Can we live without this stuff? Obviously. What is the material vanishing point of any individual effort? I wanted to give birth at home but couldn’t. What is “couldn’t”? What threshold of risk? Of pain? Hers, mine? What is an organic wooden exersaucer? Why does it cost 1001 dollars.

We’ve made things possible, we’ve made other things impossible. Reproductive freedom since the turn of the century has increasingly meant—especially for queers—less body, more plastic. The vial. The injection pens. The dish. The tubes. The romance—so many forevers. Almost none of this material, especially the medical waste, is recuperable. All of it will end up pulverized in the guts of living beings. Almost all of us have microplastics in our blood. They flow alongside the cellular threads the baby left in me, and they will flow in her blood, where my cells linger also.

A single hysterectomy, the second most common surgical procedure among women in the US, produces nearly twenty pounds of waste.Cassandra L. Thiel et al., “Environmental Impacts of Surgical Procedures: Life Cycle Assessment of Hysterectomy in the United States,” Environmental Science and Technology 49, no. 3 (2015): 1779–1786. Considering the formation of a “way out” in the absence of a way out (say, through a pelvis made plastic by relaxin), Catherine Malabou writes, “Plasticity appears diametrically opposed to form… [T]he formation of a new individual is indeed this explosion of form, an explosion that clears the way.”Catherine Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Decon-struction, trans. Carolyn Shread (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 68. For birthing parents, this way-clearing is not just physical; it is also profoundly cognitive. We know full-time caregivers experience a radical return to accelerated neuroplasticity, almost as rapid as their own infants’—but how we metamorphose or decompose into elements-in-formation is as difficult to quantify as it is to describe. Our containers rip, our minds unravel and braid themselves into novel, unrecognizable patterns. Our senses transform, including heightened hearing acuity and a more focused and purposive sense of smell. This total liquidation is normal, we are told.

“The body, bearing something ordinary as light/ Opens,” writes Aracelis Girmay, of childbirth. “This/ fact should make us fall all/ to our knees with awe.” And so it does, in all the ways. We melt and merge, become our own guts, our legs go limp and plastic, bathed in the pink glow of a plastic LED light brought from home for vibes. Remaking the sense of what accumulation might mean, Girmay speaks of the “the stacks and stacks of near misses/ & slimmest chances that birthed one ancestor into the next and next… how improbable it is that this iteration of you or me might come to be at all…. —& even last a second.”Aracelis Girmay, the black maria (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2016), 100–101. The duration and vastness of climate change are hard for the mind to compass. Critics liken the trying of it to sublimity, an impossible and unmediated witnessing of nature in all its terror and all its perfection. The ancestors through her, the baby is born into a trash-filled world, beneath a bright elastic sky, amid a pile of trash—it dysregulates the mind, the climate sublime’s inverse. Birth is a visceral experience not just of the body’s plasticity but also of time’s—the golden hour, the first latch, the shortest joy, her long life, inshallah, the everlasting waste.