Separation Anxiety, Oliver O'Donovan, and Making vs Growing Children

The Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Painting Gallery in Brussels by David Teniers the Younger (1651)

This week I have a follow-up to my last post on ‘letting children grow’. I’ll preface this by admitting that I cried when my in-laws took my toddler to stay with them, as my husband and I needed to travel somewhere overnight. My son was perfectly fine, but I was upset by his physical absence. I, the parent, ended up having separation anxiety. It’ll become clear why this is important in a minute.

Between prenatal appointments and taking our toddler to the park, I haven’t had time to read (or think) much this week, but I did finally look at Oliver O’Donovan’s 1984 book Begotten or Made?. O’Donovan’s book pairs quite nicely with the book I mentioned last week, The Child, the Family, and the Outside World by D. W. Winnicott. While the latter deals with child development, O’Donovan, in a series of lectures, deals with the way children are conceived and brought into the world, discussing the dangers of what, in the 80s, were still very new artificial reproductive technologies, such as IVF. One of the points O’Donovan makes which stuck with me, is that we cannot really value a child as a human being equal in worth to us, if we become involved in the process of that child’s making. This is because we think of things we ‘make’ as malleable, at our disposal to do as we wish with them. Things we make are not part of us; they are subordinate to us. ‘What we make’, argues O’Donovan, ‘is alien from our humanity’; it is only with a being that we ‘beget’ rather than ‘make’ that we can ‘enjoy a fellowship based on radical equality’. Does this mean that parents of children conceived through artificial insemination or IVF do not love or respect their children? No, and O’Donovan makes it very clear that he sympathetic to the individuals who resort to such reproductive techniques, though he disagrees with their choice. The point is that, as a culture, becoming involved in the ‘making’ of our children makes us more likely to see children as commodities rather than human beings in their own right.

Winnicott could not have imagined a scenario where a child is ‘made’ in vitro when he published his book on child development in 1964. As I discussed last week, he assumed that childbearing and childrearing were activities profoundly distinct from categories of ‘making’ and ‘creating’. Let me quote the same passage here in which he addresses new mothers, for it is a powerful one:

Some of you have created works of art. You have done drawings and paintings, or you have moulded out of clay, or you have knitted jumpers or made dresses. When you did these things, what turned up was made by you. Babies are different. The baby grows, and you are the mother providing a suitable environment.

Winnicott reminds us that mothers (and fathers too, though less directly) are there to provide a safe environment for growth, not to ‘make’ the child and mould him or her to their wishes. O’Donovan, writing when this idea of ‘making’ children had started to look like a reality, warns us that there are profound consequences if we assume the role of ‘creator’ of our children. This is detrimental for the child, who cannot have that ‘radical equality’ with us because we are ‘moulding’ him or her, rather than simply accepting that new life with open arms. It also harms us as parents, because we are more likely to feel ‘alienated’ from something we create rather than ‘beget’. If you think that I’m going to far with this idea of artificial reproductive technologies ‘moulding’ our children, let me remind you that gender selection in IVF (PGD), while illegal in the UK, is practised in other countries like the US.

Now, I do not have the experience of being a mother to a child conceived through artificial reproductive technologies, so I can’t speak to that side of the experience of parenthood. But I can tell you how I feel about things I’ve ‘made’ vs the two children that I have conceived and been pregnant with. When I write essays, I am more or less in complete mastery of how they are produced and put into the world. When I make food, I make it to my liking. When I paint, I can tear my picture into pieces if I am unsatisfied with the result.

My children are different. My son already has a personality of his own as a young toddler. I cannot control when or what he wants to eat, how he wants to play, how he shows affection. When I gave birth to him, I had little control over how my labour and delivery went. He is a human being distinct and independent from me, yet tied to myself so much more deeply than anything I can creatively ‘make’, because he comes from my body; even when he grows up and leaves the home, I will always feel like a physical part of me is missing. Mary Harrington, in her recent book Feminism Against Progress, condenses this feeling in the very first sentence of the first chapter, describing how she felt like she ‘wasn’t a separate person from [her] baby’ after having her daughter. I had the same feeling; it wanes somewhat as your dependent newborn gradually transforms into a less dependent toddler, and one day, no doubt, into a fiercely independent teenager, but the point stands. When we ‘beget’ a child, another human being, we feel overwhelming love for him or her, not because we have made them perfectly to fit our vision, but simply because they are related to us. Although adoption is a wonderful and often selfless thing, it is good that we should be designed to feel such a bond to our own offspring, because that makes us more likely to care for them and value them as human beings equal to us in worth. Children don’t have to ‘be’ or ‘do’ anything extraordinary for us to love them. We simply cannot help it.

So, I realise now, it makes sense that I experienced ‘separation anxiety’ as a parent when my toddler was taken to my in-laws. Although I welcome the break from parental responsibilities, it always feels a bit strange when he isn’t around. When my daughter in born in a few weeks’ time, I’m sure I’ll feel the same about her. And when all my children have flown the nest but a few brief decades from now, I will no doubt fill my time with more writing, more baking, more painting, but none of those creative activities will quite be the same as the experience of ‘begetting’ and growing children.