Creation Myth
When we were small, barely out of babyhood ourselves, the nights we slept at Grandmother’s house at the edge of the blue-black woods, she sent us to sleep with the story of how babies came to be born of women.
She told us how, long ago, babies materialized in the air as though out of nothing. They weren’t there, and then they were, but they were there a while before anyone took notice. Like Leuwenhoek’s wee beasties, one couldn’t see them early on without the proper magnification. But the air teemed with embryos. The people in those days unwittingly stepped on tiny embryos. Squashed embryos on their arms like bugs. Breathed embryos in like dust. Brushed embryos from their teeth. Upon waking, removed crusted embryos from the corners of their eyes.
Even the embryos that were just large enough to see with the naked eye, say the size of a grain of rice, did not garner any special attention. People didn’t hesitate to smash them between their fingers, drown them in their beer. Embryos were grotesque little things. Wormy, alien.
Only when the embryos reached about the size of a rat, Grandmother would say, did some people stop wanting to squash them. Then some of the people who had trampled and swatted and flushed thousands of embryos without pause would fight to the death over them.
This fighting to the death had nothing to do with sanctity of life, she said. Early on, before we knew the story through and through, one of us, probably Jacqueline, would ask, “What’s sanctity?” Grandmother would say, “Holy. Sacred.”
Grandmother’s house often smelled of ham and oranges, even after dark, after we’d brushed our teeth and nestled between the sheets of her sofa bed, even when what we’d had for dinner was roasted goose and peas. As Grandmother talked about embryos, I pictured shiny, little roasted hams on beds of sliced oranges.
Grandmother said that once embryos evolved into cute fetuses, the people talked about wanting to squeeze them and bite them and cuddle them. The babies suffered still. Too many people crowding around them. Too many people squeezing and cuddling. Some of the men had rough hands. Some of them squeezed too hard.
“What happened?” we would ask then.
“That’s when the babies decided to hide inside the women,” Grandmother would say, “where people’s hands couldn’t get to them.”
“That was a good idea,” one of us would say.
“It was,” Grandmother would say, “except that not all the women liked this idea. The babies hadn’t asked their permission, after all.”
“I thought you said the people thought the babies were cute,” one of us would say.
“Some people did,” Grandmother would say. She’d tell us then that some of the women were delighted by this arrangement. They felt special, chosen. Their very own baby!
But other women felt violated.
At home, our mothers complained about Grandmother to each other on the phone. She’d been a distant, selfish mother, they said. Why was she so much better with her grandchildren than she’d been with her own daughters? Their voices turned to whispers when one of us entered the room.
To Grandmother, our mothers were all smiles and thank-you. “Thank you for taking care of the children on such short notice.” “Thank you for giving us a much-needed break.”
At home, our fathers called Grandmother “eccentric.” At Grandmother’s house, they called her “Mother.” They kissed her wrinkled cheek and told her that whatever was cooking in her oven sure smelled good.
“And the most curious thing,” Grandmother would tell us, “is how once the embryos were inside women, the people started going on about how precious every life was, no matter how miniscule, no matter how burdensome. You think those same people don’t swat flies or smack mosquitoes? You think they wouldn’t swat embryos if they were let loose again, teeming in the air like dust?”
She said that most folk these days believed babies had always been born of women and that believing this made it easy to take for granted that giving birth to babies was what women were made for.
“That and cooking and cleaning,” Grandmother would say. Then she’d laugh a wicked laugh before saying, “Sweet dreams” and turning out the light.
This is the point where our own stories diverge. Emmy says the house went so quiet, she could hear the sounds of the night creatures calling out to each other in the woods. She says the forest outside Grandmother’s house was an orgy every night. Jacqueline says that through Grandmother’s gauzy, yellow curtains, the silhouettes of the trees looked like a horde of people with pitchforks. She would close her eyes and feel them pressing in on her. Phoebe remembers nothing after Grandmother turned out the light. She’s always been a good sleeper. What I remember is the pleasant heaviness of Grandmother’s bare feet on the floorboards. I felt Grandmother’s bulk as it redistributed with each step. I felt the obliteration of the grit and dust that dared get in the way of where she wanted to go.