Aeschylus, the Mommy Wars, and Me
When I was in graduate school, I took a seminar on the Oresteia, a trilogy of plays by the 5th century Athenian tragedian Aeschylus. For those who don’t know, the first (and best, don’t @ me) play, Agamemnon, tells the story of how the Greek general Agamemnon returns from the Trojan war and is immediately beheaded by his wife Clytemnestra. In the second play, Libation Bearers, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s son Orestes, now an adult, returns and murders his mother to avenge his father. It ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, with the Furies (also known euphemistically as the “Kindly Ones” or eumenides because of just how not-kindly they are) chasing Orestes down and harassing him for killing a blood relative. The last play, Eumenides, resolves the conflict between Orestes and the Furies with what Brooklyn 99 established as the only way to handle when two people have diametrically opposing views on a subject:
I did my presentation for the seminar on a passage in the Libation Bearers spoken by a slave woman called Cilissa who had been the primary caregiver for Orestes when he was an infant. When she hears about his death, she’s absolutely gutted. (He’s not really dead, it’s all a complicated ruse, sometimes Greek tragedies have weirdly heist-movie elements to their plots. Moving on.) Here’s the passage:
but my dear Orestes, I spent my soul on him,
and I raised him when his mother passed him to me.
I never complained, even though his screaming
would keep me up half the night, I worked
my fingers to the bone for him, all for nothing!
A baby’s like a little animal, it can’t think for itself,
it needs to be nursed. You have to know its mind.
I mean, when he was that small he couldn’t talk,
so he couldn’t tell me if he was hungry, or thirsty,
or when he wanted to pee, and a baby’s insides are a law
unto themselves, let me tell you! I had to foresee
his every need, and a lot of the time I was wrong,
then I would have to wash his little baby clothes.
(Ch. 749–59, trans. Meineck)
One of the major scholarly debates around this passage centers on whether it’s intended to be a moment of comic relief, because it mentions bodily fluids, and therefore is better suited to the genre of comedy than tragedy and must be intended to provoke laughter. After all, what could be funnier than watching a woman learn that the baby she poured her heart and soul into taking care of has died young?
See, for those who are confused about what a joke is: the previous sentence was an actual joke, because you sound ridiculous when you make this kind of argument. And male. You sound ridiculous and male.
This debate about whether we should laugh at Cilissa’s grief was actually why I chose the passage for my presentation. I was working at the time on a dissertation about how comedy influenced tragedy. I’m not going to talk about it more than that because I’ve learned since then that the #1 rule of dissertations is: nobody cares about your dissertation. Suffice it to say that, even though my dissertation argued that Aristophanes had a substantial influence on Euripides (SORRY, I swear, I’m done now), I wasn’t sold on the comedy argument about this particular Aeschylus passage. I thought it was less about providing comic relief than positioning Cilissa as a strong maternal influence on Orestes and problematizing Clytemnestra’s role as Orestes’ mother. The role of the mother is a central problem for the trilogy, since it is the blood relation between the son and his murdered mother that provokes the Furies’ wrath. Also, spoiler alert, that structured debate leads to Orestes getting acquitted on a technicality: Athena, the judge, decides that mothers don’t contribute meaningful genetic material and are just a vessel for the father’s seed, so Orestes didn’t actually kill a blood relative. He’s just a regular murderer, not a kin murderer, so he should get to go and live his life harassment-free.
Obviously, this is all misogynistic as hell, and specious to boot. Even Euripides was making fun of the whole “the mother is just a vessel” argument a few decades later in his Orestes. But my most vivid memory from that presentation is how the grad student boys in my seminar were absolutely convinced that Cilissa’s speech was funny, because poop jokes. So convinced they didn’t even stop to consider whether our professor, eminent feminist scholar Froma Zeitlin, would squint terrifyingly (hard to explain, but I swear, her squinting could make some grad students break out in a cold sweat) at how swiftly they dismissed the pathos of the speech to reduce it to puerile humor. Even though I’d chosen the passage specifically to discuss that debate, my classmates’ response left a bad taste in my mouth. And I wasn’t even a mother yet! My sympathy for Cilissa has only grown in the intervening years, as I discussed in an essay I wrote for Eidolon a while back about Medea and birth trauma.
Because I wasn’t a mother yet, and hadn’t immersed myself in the world of mommy blogs, I didn’t even realize that Cilissa seems to be talking about an early form of what we would now call “elimination communication.” I kind of wish I had known, and had centered my presentation around diapering in antiquity, because that would have really made those twentysomething guys squirm. But I digress.
I started reading mommy blogs in 2012, when I was pregnant with my oldest child. This was, incidentally, where I first became aware of the Red Pill community, because they were trolling the comment sections, harassing single moms. But I also became aware of the concept of “attachment parenting.” Every decade needs a kind of parenting to make fun of, and in the 2010s, attachment parenting was it. Gentle parenting is the new attachment parenting, I guess.
I didn’t have a robust understanding of what it even was, except that attachment parenting moms were allegedly crunchy and cringey. As I understood it at the time, this meant never putting your baby down and never letting them cry, because if you did, they would be unable to form healthy relationships as an adult or something. In practice, that meant you should definitely breastfeed, you monster, preferably for at least two years, and you should co-sleep too. And, for the super-intense: elimination communication, a diaperless technique for infant hygiene where you attune so closely to your child’s bodily cues that you can predict when they need to pee and poop and position them over the toilet.
I cannot stress enough how much all of my information about attachment parenting came secondhand from people who had already decided that it wasn’t for them and were making fun of it. This was the conflict that was often played up and framed as “the mommy wars,” between stay-at-home mothers who felt shamed for wanting to be with their kids all day and working moms who felt shamed for not wanting (or being able) to be with their kids all day. Obviously, that framing is an oversimplification, but that’s kind of my point - the conflict led, as many such conflicts do, to mocking caricatures of the other side. And elimination communication was easy to mock, because who has the fucking time to stare at their baby all day watching for that one kind of wiggle that suggests they’re about to blow? In this economy? (This was before “in this economy” jokes were common.)
I have never met someone who was a serious proponent of elimination communication. A friend who’s a pediatrician said the easiest urine sample she ever collected came from a baby whose mom practiced elimination communication. She just positioned the baby over the toilet, the baby peed, and the sample was collected. Done. Honestly, from that anecdote, it sounded sort of like magic.
And yet, I never even slightly considered trying it. Instead, I did the normal thing: filled the landfills with Pampers, stressed myself out that my kids weren’t that excited to start potty training, only to find that when they were ready it happened remarkably smoothly and easily.
Well, it did for two out of three of my kids. The third was having accidents for well over a year. The amount of stress and exhaustion and yuck that produced in both my and my ex’s houses… let’s just say it really made me understand the appeal of elimination communication, because it was hard to feel like the problem wasn’t one of attunement. With an infant, you have to be attuned to their body signals, but with a four-year-old it’s a question of signals but also communication, of getting the kid aligned with you on why not peeing in their clothes several times a day is important.
Sometimes, when I’m trying to figure out why something is funny, I start off by saying, “As a scholar of comedy…” to make fun of myself. So, as a scholar of comedy, I wonder if elimination communication is particularly ripe as a target for mockery because that the level of attunement between the mother and child feels hilariously unattainable but also in some way mystical and alluring. And also, poop is gross and funny.
Except, having said that, now I wonder if I’m no better than those grad school boys. Wasn’t “poop is gross and funny” basically their whole argument? In fact, maybe I’m even more misogynistic than they were, because they never even bothered to take the essential labor of caring for kids seriously – whereas I did take it seriously, but projected my anxieties and insecurities onto other moms, the worst possible outlet. Even now, I’m ashamed that I haven’t reached that level of attunement with my kids, but I’m also definitely not going to do the work to attune more because that sounds hard and boring, so I guess my only solution is to marinate in my shame and lash out.
Just kidding. Obviously those guys were worse. Although, if you’re the kind of person who cares about authorial intent/originalism – and I won’t yuck your yum on that, no matter how much I want to – I guess it’s worth saying that maybe their perspective would have been more like the original Athenian audience’s than mine, so maybe they were better readers of Aeschylus than I was. That audience was exclusively made up of dudes, after all, and I have no idea how involved Athenian citizen males were in the changing of diapers. Maybe I’d know that if I’d done a presentation on ancient diapering, like I clearly should have.
A few months ago, I was workshopping an essay with my writing group about learning to share the title “mom” with my ex, and everyone kept getting stuck on how I apparently can’t shut up about what a terrible mom I think I am. Even my own Jewish mother has switched from criticizing my parenting to telling me I need to not be so hard on myself, so now I have a new and exciting thing to fail at and feel bad about.
I keep hoping there’s one easy trick to help me with my parenting insecurities and shame, but if there is, I haven’t found it yet. For now, I can just fantasize about the presentation I wish I’d given in grad school 15 years ago.