The following two articles are written accounts of the experiences of two women at ISIS.
"(She) Changed My Life"
by Rossana Cambi
My first pregnancy was the classic "bed of roses". At barely 20, healthy as a horse, I basked in my family's pride and the world's approval (isn't producing babies, once safely married, the most recommended occupation for "nice" girls?), took to wearing maternity clothes far earlier than necessary, felt practically no discomfort and had only occasional qualms. Actually, having grown up as an only daughter with no younger relatives, I hadn't the slightest idea of what a baby looked like, much less of what
its presence meant. Nobody had ever warned me that, once there, it stays there for a minimum span of 18 or more years... So I blissfully went to pre-natal courses, dutifully read all the right books, dieted for 9 long months in order not to gain more than the prescribed weight, and serenely entered the delivery room. There a first surprise awaited me : in spite of terrifying accounts glimpsed in novels and trash-magazines during my short-lived youth, I hadn't really believed it would hurt. And It did. My labour, however, was short and fairly uneventful, if not painless.
When things really started to go wrong was when the nurse unceremoniously dumped my new-born baby daughter midway between my breasts and stomach. While trying to think momentous thoughts and to feel appropriately moved, I couldn't help being acutely aware of the baby's weight on my chest, making breathing difficult. She was dark pink, shrill and wiggling. The arm with which I awkwardly supported and tried to restrain her was rapidly going numb. The gynecologist was still fumbling between my legs. The sun fell directly in my eyes. I was growing more and more irritated and I thought: "Why in hell doesn't anybody take her AWAY 1" And was immediately struck with guilt for such an unmaternal, unnatural, monstrous wish.
Those two feelings — the unavowable desire of HAVING HER TAKEN AWAY and the resulting guilt and self-loathing — would stay with me for most of her first year of life, driving me almost to despair.
I grow so anxious that I couldn't bathe her without fearing of fainting and drowning her (without ever having experienced a "faint"), or I would wake at night wondering if I hadn't — by mistake — put rat-poison in her bottle (while knowing perfectly well that no such a thing as rat-poison was in the house). And I didn't need Freud to understand what my irrational fears really concealed. I felt totally alone in a sudden hostile world, and the fact that I was living in a foreign town and country, with no friends or relatives to support me, and that my husband was away at work 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. did not help.
Bored and depressed, I discovered that people smile on young mothers only when their children are still and well-behaved —preferably asleep —, that my big, plush navy-blue pram was impractical, that my daughter and I were not welcome on buses. In shops, restaurants and other public places I... I resented it. But mostly I resented HER, for having so abruptly, so drastically, so definitively changed my life. Worse yet, I knew I had no right to feel like this, that something was surely badly wrong with me,
and that I wasn't up to fulfilling the sacred duties of Motherhood.
Happily my daughter and I survived to tell the sorry tale, and our present relationship is as good as can be expected between mother and teenage daughter. However it took me two more pregnancies, more misery, anger and guilt, and finally the discovery of feminism to realize to what extent women are misinformed, manipulated and misled. And when I think back to those years it still hurts. I think that both my daughter and 1 have been cheated, in the name of the fake institution of blessed, unselfish Motherhood, of whatever pleasure and terderness we could have had in each other during those first, crucial months.