The Cry of the Orphan, Part One
For the newly postpartum mother, the exact tone, pitch, and key of her newborn infant’s cry can trigger panic, milk, and tears simultaneously. This is not coincidence. This is not emotionalism. There is nothing in the world like the cry of a newborn mammal, and there is no one in the world more equipped to respond to that cry than that newborn’s mother.
But what is at the heart of this cry, and why does it affect the mother so profoundly? A newborn’s cry can hold the tenor of undisguised terror and the shrill purity of absolute desolation. When Lizzy was four weeks old, I complained to my midwife that Lizzy cried in such fear and desperation when I just went to wash my hands in the bathroom for a matter of minutes. I told her, “It’s like, I’ll be back in just two seconds, and she’s still freaking out.” My midwife quietly responded, “But she doesn’t know that you’ll be back.”
As humans, we neither initiate nor orchestrate our own existence. We owe our existence to the choices of our parents. And once that existence begins, everything that we are and that we become is dependent upon the protection within and nourishment from the mother’s body. The womb is a microcosm of earthly delights in which every need and want of the growing fetus is infinitely and immediately satiated. Birth marks the transition from womb to world that thoroughly ruptures the infant’s paradise, thrusting him or her into the cold, stark reality of differentiation. Birth is thus the moment when the infant first encounters the sense of I-Thou; the mother moves from being indistinguishable from the infant’s identity to becoming the first object of inherent relationality.
It would be ignorant to pretend that this abrupt transition does not mark a moment of utter existential terror for the infant. Biology does its best to protect both mother and infant through this transition with a cascade of hormones. Oxytocin, prolactin, vasopressin, catecholamines, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and beta-endorphins combine to bathe the brains and bodies of mothers and infants, smoothing the way for what would otherwise be an experience too similar to death to consciously tolerate. Birth, if left uninterrupted, is designed to facilitate an ontological imprinting process between mother and infant, neutralizing the implicit terror of I-Thou and instead transforming it into a foundational sense of home and belonging.
Unmedicated newborns left unassisted on their mother’s bare chest will scoot themselves to the nipple to begin to nurse within the first hour of life. The smell of amniotic fluid and the color and smell of the areolae act together as the infant’s north star. The immediate initiation of breastfeeding, in turn, triggers a rush of oxytocin in the mother, helping detach and birth the placenta. From these first moments of blood and milk, infant and mother are forged together into a new kind of symbiotic unit; both their separation and reintegration are immediately enacted, establishing a new identity for each, incomprehensible without the other.
The infant now understands him or herself to be distinct from the mother, and yet the mother remains the source and summit of the infant’s need, desire, and fulfillment. Mammalian infants cannot survive without the nurturance of their mothers. In the case of human beings, infants are born early to accommodate increased brain size, resulting in acute immaturity and fundamental incapacity for self-care or self-regulation. Some evolutionary psychologists term this concept “exteriogestation“, suggesting that the human infant requires an additional, approximate nine months of gestation on the mother’s body following birth. For most infants, the mother represents the tangible barrier between survival and death, existence and non-existence. For all infants, a primary caregiver represents this barrier.
And so we return to the cry of the newborn. Human babies are born with fully developed reptilian brains, partially developed mammalian brains, and totally undeveloped neocortices (human brains). This means that the instinctual brain that regulates breathing and bodily functions is fully intact and the mammalian brain that regulates emotion and intuition is partially developed, but the brain that regulates reason, logic, empathy, and conscience is fully undeveloped. Therefore, a mammalian infant is totally incapable of understanding that his or her mother’s momentary absence is not the absolute end of existence. The infant remains trapped in grief and panic, drowning in cortisol, thoroughly unable to regulate him or herself. Within the span of minutes, the infant can move from loved to abandoned, together to alone, cherished to orphaned.
The mother, with her fully developed neocortex, is uniquely designed to understand the terror of her infant and respond accordingly. She is physiologically built to bridge the gap between existence and non-existence, loneliness and belonging, home and wandering. I remember Lizzy’s first car trip to visit my family on Mother’s Day. It was a long ride, and she could neither understand nor bear my absence; even the sound of my voice could not soothe her. I sat paralyzed in the front seat, tears of devastation running down my cheeks as I listened to her cry. Finally, I climbed into the backseat to nurse her while she remained in her car seat, and from that moment on, I always sat beside her in the car.
Most of us grow out of the inescapable dependence of infancy and into a self-sufficiency and independence that is somewhat delusional. After all, we can never escape the reality that we only exist because our parents made choices that resulted in our existence. The problem is that a regression ad infinitum has to result in an aseity of existence. Most of us name this aseity God. And if God is the source of all existence, then God is, by extension, the parent of all existence. This makes us as human beings the “children” of God–a principle fundamental to the teaching of Jesus Christ.
For most of my life, I have been obsessed with the concepts of home and belonging. This is likely because there is a very real way in which I feel I have never had a true home, nor belonged anywhere. In the deepest parts of myself, I fear that I am more an orphan than I am anything else. And when I am alone and lonely or afraid and foundering, I fear that my orphanhood began with a God that never existed and therefore can never save me from myself.
I think this fear is what remains at the heart of the newborn’s cry and perhaps even at the heart of the mother’s response to that cry. Perhaps the mother steps in to rescue her child from existential terror because she herself is so afraid of the meaninglessness of her own existence that she feels she must act to preserve the illusion of meaning or face the alternative of suicide. I know I have felt this way in my darker moments. I have felt that it shouldn’t be so hard to simply keep an infant alive. I have questioned the basic good of keeping myself or my babies alive. I think every mother facing poverty, depression, grief, war, or abuse has encountered these thoughts. And I think her choice to preserve life in the face of such despair is nothing less than heroic.
I think there is an orphan living inside of every human being. I think that orphanhood originates long before the parents to whom that orphan was born. I think it’s traced back to God. In a world in which the experiences of grief and suffering seem to significantly outnumber the experiences of hope or grace, faith in a omnibenevolent deity can seem a little like believing in Santa Claus. When a human person encounters the limits of his own mortality or the suffering or death of a loved one, that person also encounters the clawing presence of the orphan within himself–that emaciated, hollow-eyed, filthy, and desperate creature who belongs nowhere and is loved by no one.
At the root of such despair is an existential loneliness that makes us question everything we pretend to believe and everyone we pretend to know. What if life is ultimately a quest to distract ourselves from the inescapable reality of this loneliness? What if everyone you have ever claimed to love will ultimately abandon you, especially if they knew the truth of that starving and terrible orphan who lives within you? What if the fear of being more orphan than cherished son or daughter lies at the root of every decision we make? What if our cries as a newborn never change in essence, but only in appearance as we slowly age and smoke or drink or copulate or drug ourselves into believing that we actually matter and we’re not alone?
I think the cry of the orphan can be seen in the red-faced and terrified newborn, the resentful five-year-old in time-out, the teenager searching for new and harder pornography at 3 am, the surgeon watching his patient bleed out on the operating table, the wife taking her husband to yet another round of chemo, the mother staring dully at her screaming and inconsolable toddler, the husband who wakes up to find a note from his wife that motherhood just “isn’t her thing,” the grandmother forced to bury her 2-year old granddaughter, the 86-year-old regarding his doctor numbly, unable to respond to the statement, “The treatment is no longer working.”
“It’s a mother’s job to protect her children: to keep them alive until adulthood,” I sobbed to Father Wyble, four weeks after Lizzy died. “No,” he responded quietly, “It’s a mother’s job to get her children into heaven, and you’ve already done that.”
I still feel as though I didn’t “do” anything to get Lizzy into heaven. There was simply no other place for so innocent and beautiful a child to go. I still feel that it’s a mother’s job to protect her children, to provide that irreplaceable barrier between self and the excruciating chasm of non-existence. But I’m beginning to suspect that even the best parents cannot always protect their children from the cry of the orphan. I’m beginning to be afraid that the cry of the orphan exists because faith is something that cannot be proven.
If there is no ultimate and eternal parent standing between us and the chasm of non-existence–if there is no God– then we are all truly orphans and this place is nothing more than the recreation room of an immutable sadist. To believe that there is a God standing between us and the meaninglessness or negation of our existence requires an act of faith that is, at the most basic level, almost impossible to perform. But faith cannot be faith if it is resting in proof. And heroes cannot be heroic if they never encounter danger.
So we are always courageous, although we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight.
2 Corinthians 6-7
What if the entire human experience is like the experience of a child at birth? What if we are taken from this intrinsic relationality and belonging and thrust into a world of suffering and terror where death is always threatening, and the only thing standing between us and death is a God that we can’t see, feel, or touch? What if the parent that we are all blindly searching for is someone that we cannot encounter in this life–or cannot encounter in the way we find most necessary? Is our entire existence one long, unending cry for God that cannot be answered as long as we remain enfleshed?
I have said before that I don’t consider myself to be a good Catholic. I struggle, doubt, despair, and question too much to deserve such a label. Often, I find it is my experience with motherhood that makes me believe what I believe more than anything else. And, lately, it is the experience of mothering a blind child that helps me combat my own tendencies towards non-belief.
I do not pretend that I do not scream the cry of the orphan to the dark sheets of night that lie smothering over my bed. I’ve sobbed the cry of the orphan to church bathrooms and lightning storms alike. I’ve felt orphaned, homeless, abandoned, unwanted, and unloved for most of my life, without considering how those feelings impact the people in my life who love me silently and desperately. I don’t know how to silence my inner orphan anymore than I know how to bring my first child back to life.
What I do know is that when Lizzy was born, I was home. Immediately, unthinkingly, I belonged to her, and she belonged to me, and we both bolstered one another against the terror of existential loneliness. I know that when she left me to go to God, Cecilia lay within me, waiting, flowering, filling me with the knowledge that I could not follow Lizzy–not yet. And when Cecilia was born, I was resurrected, and she became my new home.
Cecilia still wraps all four limbs around me when we hug. I still cup her tiny cheeks in my hands and tell her tenderly how desperately–how absolutely–she is loved. We belong to one another without thinking or trying, as we belong to Lizzy, and Lizzy to us.
I am weak and proud and afraid. Most days, I am not someone I admire. I cannot understand why someone like me was chosen to mother Lizzy and Cecilia. I do not think it was to provide me with a sense of home in my homelessness. I think it was to teach me what home actually meant–and where it was. I think it was to teach me what faith actually means–and where to find it. I think it requires me to listen to a daughter that is no longer living and to see through the eyes of a daughter who is slowly, inexorably losing the little sight with which she was born.
On days like this, I have no answers. I’m deafened by the screams of the starving orphan inside of me and blinded by the fear that I will never be able to be strong enough to fight the disease that silently waits inside of Cecilia. And yet, when Cecilia screams in frustration or pain or anger, I stand between her and her pain, helping her navigate it. And when she stumbles and falls over objects she cannot see, I help her get back up and then move the objects out of her way. For today, I think I will continue to stand between Cecilia and the chasm of meaninglessness, and choose to believe that in doing so, I am also standing against my own.