Finding jouissance when you're caring for a baby

When I was writing my crying baby books, local possums destroyed our vegie garden

Here in Brisbane, we cannot grow a vegetable garden unless we keep the possums out using ingenious chickenwire constructions. Possums eat the tomatoes, the zucchini, the lettuce, the beans. Once, I made the mistake of hiring a fly-by-night landscape designer, who cleared away our tangle of chickenwire covering the garden beds, and planted out naked strawberry seedlings. Which the possums razed.

Then she planted orange trees, gardenias, and camellias. Which promptly died, because the possums adored their succulent shoots.

In the bush, possums eat native flowers, lillypilly fruits, grass roots, fungi, seeds. In drought they eat grubs and moths. In the city, possums take bites out of the cumquats and limes which grow in terracotta pots in our courtyard. They demolish the parsley. They punch holes in the ripe yellow fruit dangling from our skinny-trunked pawpaw trees.

Possums, you see, love the sweet spot.  

When I was writing my crying baby books, I had sweet spot worries

"No"’ Emma says over the pork roast that she cooked for us on our arrival in New York from Belgium. "No. The ‘sweet spot’ is out. You can't use it in your writing."

I am taken back. I'd just been trying explaining to her what it was and why it mattered:

• The sweet spot: that place where the sound between two speakers is perfectly balanced for the keen ear of the music lover.

• The sweet spot: that place on the cricket bat or golf club or tennis racket, where minimal effort achieves maximum effect.

• The sweet spot: nurturance of each employee’s unique talents to create a winning business culture.

Eeryone agrees that if you experiment with finding the sweet spot, it is a thing of beauty when you get it right, not only in business, but in education, in athletic training, in the tuition of musicians.

The neurological sweet spot, my social worker friend says, that place of mindful living and joy. Finding the sweet spot, finding a new perspective, a solution which might not appear obvious - but when it emerges, everything sings.

I thought this concept would work well for the things I was trying to describe in the care of women and their babies.

"It has sexual connotations," my daughter continues, firmly. She tells me later, in private, that those connotations are orgasmic, akin to the G-spot in the vagina. Really?

"But why should we let such an idea be co-opted by a simplistic sexualized meaning?" I ask Peter rhetorically, when we are alone later on.

Then to my amazement, F., who is Peter's much younger colleague, agrees with Emma! This feisty lawyer and academic, mother of baby G., is currently working with Peter to evaluate the development of the 2015 Millenium Development Goals.

"When you tell the story," she says, "make sure you let them know that I only read Fifty Shades of Gray to find out what everyone was talking about. Let them know it’s bad writing. Poor literature. And do not tell them I read the second and third sequel.’ She glares at me humorously.

"Got it."

"Anyway," she goes on, "in Shades of Gray, whenever she is close to an orgasm, there’s mention of her sweet spot." I haven’t read the books to verify this, but F. is an accurate kind of person.

She concludes: "It’s embarrassing to have to tell my boss’s wife this. But basically, you can’t use it. You might get the wrong audience."

I’m grumpy about the homogenization of metaphor, so that nuance is lost and the immensely broad and nuanced sweep of embodied female pleasure is simplified and focussed and shrunken down, reduced, once again, back to sexual intercourse.

Finding the sweet spot has its foundation in skill and practice, in attention. There are many ways of feeling embodied joy and ease and pleasure which are not sexual: one of which is finding the sweet spot in your relationship with your baby.

But after the dishwasher repairman had tinkered around for a while, he produced a dead brown beetle. It was long and oddly rectangular.

"Found its way to the sweet spot between the active and the neutral wire and fried the electrics of your dishwasher," he announced matter-of-factly. There was nothing orgasmic about that, nothing even remotely sexual. Obivously he hadn’t read Shades of Gray.

I think of the sweet spot as that place of relaxed, alert, pleasure, where things flow, where it’s deceptively easy, juicy, fun. Where we’re in the swing of it. A mixture of control (the control of attention to sensation and the conscious making-room-for emotions or anxiety) and flow, the prefrontal cortex attending to the clamouring limbic system, choosing behaviours regardless of feelings. Sometimes, unbidden, there is jouissance. But Emma and F. insist I can’t use this word because one woman has become very wealthy writing bad literature about female desire and bondage? Frankly, that doesn’t seem fair.

Finding the sweet spot, I wanted to say before they started telling me I couldn’t, is the best antidote we have to infant crying.

You can be in the sweet spot even when you are out-of-your mind with sleep deprivation. In the sweet spot, you do what you can without pushing too hard so that you collapse into ragged fury or bitter tears or despairing paralysis. In the sweet spot, you hold the baby’s needs alongside your own needs, switch on the prefrontal cortex and find your way through without self-criticism or despair. You know that this too will pass. You do what you can, and find what pleasure you can.

In the sweet spot you are slothful and lazy and oh so relaxed, because you are keeping everyone more or less downregulated and that’s enough. So the house is a mess and the dinner is pasta and salad for the fourth night in a row and the toddler is running wild but you are all more or less happy (apart from toddler temper tantrums and spousal arguments, which must occur in any wholesome messy life) and you're coping almost as often as you're not coping and you muddle through months like that and everyone emerges just fine, better than fine, better than if you used sheer force of will to bow everyone and everything, including the pile of dishes on the kitchen bench, to your will.

We want to find the sweet spot between a mother and baby. This doesn’t specifically refer to breastfeeding, although breastfeeding, once sorted out, is usually very sweet for both. Breastfeeding may also be horrific, and also a parent who is formula feeding can find the sweet spot in her own feeding experience.

Then I have an email exchange with Tom, after I’d read a book he recommended on this topic called The Talent Code, which he was finding helpful for his volleyball. I texted him.

Tom, if you had a moment to help me – I’m putting together a little riff about the phrase "the sweet spot,' and wondered (since I saw it used in The Talent Code) if you could tell me what it feels like when you’ve hit the sweet spot in volleyball? Love, Mum xoxoxo

He texts back.

I think you might be misunderstanding what the author means by the sweet spot. [My adult children adopt a condescending tone when lecturing me on what they think I've got wrong.] He talks about it during practice – as the place where it is a struggle, but a struggle within your grasp. Accordingly, practicing in the sweet spot is the most frustrating thing ever and grinds you down, but the incremental improvements you notice occurring are the reward.

What he is saying, I think, is that the sweet spot doesn’t always feel sweet. It’s the edge. It’s concentration and commitment to the moment, despite it’s difficulty. It’s paying attention in the body. Like learning to breastfeed, it requires showing up, living according to one’s values (e.g. I want to breastfeed my baby so I’m willing to hang in here for a while even though it’s not pleasant right now, as I give it my best shot.)

A French version of the sweet spot

"Jouissance," the strange man says, pronouncing it badly. "You can’t use that word. Not if you want mothers to be interested in your writing."

I complain about him to my friend Wendy the day we climb to the Glastonbury Tor on our UK trip.

"I was talking with this male academic who is reviewing my work and reflecting on my use of the word jouissance, but this man replied that most mothers don’t know about Foucault. Then - he went: 'ha ha!' ... It was seriously unpleasant."

"Oh."

Despite the gentle cadence of her voice, Wendy could be very definite. Resting beside me on a bench halfway up the Glastonbury Tor, with the Somerset countryside spread out below us, flat green fields dotted with sheep and cattle, a clot of burnt orange roofs belonging to the town, Wendy announced in her thoughtful way that I really shouldn’t be afraid of using the word jouissance.

She pronounced it to rhyme with "chewy-sonse;" except the ‘j’ sounded like the ‘s’ in pleasure and the ‘sonse’ didn’t finish with an ‘ns’ sound, just a nasal hint of it. Her mother was a feisty French teacher, afterall, who instilled a love of French culture and language in the hearts of three generations of North Queensland children, sitting in their hot weatherboard classrooms amidst the flies, the smell of rotting fruit, the floods.

"He asked me what jouissance meant, exactly," I said. "So I started to explain: a sense of love – joy – relaxation – "

"That’s it," he'd interrupted, sagely. "Just use the words ‘love, joy and relaxation' instead." But to my mind, jouissance can also refer to a certain edge of pain, too. It’s a complicated word for a complicated female state, used by the French feminist philosophers who've so interested me.

"Jew-ee-sonse" Wendy says, with that lazy gliding juicy ‘j’ that was a cross between ‘sh’ and ‘j’. The breeze bit despite the summer fields. "You’ll just have to persuade him."

"It has an important history," she continues. Kristeva, Irigaray, those marvellous French philosophers from the third wave of feminism. "Mothers need a new language, we’ve not had a language."

Mothers dance the sweet spot

One Saturday morning my NIA dance teacher appears in a gold and purple headdress over her straight brown hair. She glides over the silky timber floor, her tuille shimmering with sequins as she calls our dance moves. Her daughter is in hospital. Again.

I had a dream in which my friend laughed that they must be jouissant bugs. We are shaking out the doona together, preparing Emma’s marriage bed, when vividly coloured bugs drop to the floor. Jouissant bugs!

"Isn’t she gorgeous," I say to another woman as we watch the dark eyed mother whose child dances around her like a shadow, swooping and fluttering.

"The joy of movement!" our dance teacher cries. I catch her words as we follow the dance and the music rises - "dance with your bones - flexibility - agility -" Her headdress feather is tickling the clouds, she tells us. "Make your bones long," she calls, "make your moves liquid. Delicious micromovements. Soft eyes! Surrender!"

The other NIA teacher is surrounded by small angels when she dances, she tells us, her lost babies - this teacher with her feline black hair, her coal black eyes ask us to become - she calls this out while we are dancing - the eagle, the jazz queen, the cat. Other mothers dance with us too, their bodies milk plump, rivers of milk, their babies bouncing heavily in carriers on their bellies or backs, some with tattooes and nose rings.

Maria loves the word jouissance. Sometimes when we are dancing she shimmies up close or pirouettes past me and calls it out at me, laughing joyfully: "Jouissance!" Just for the fun of it.

Jouissance, or the sweet spot, is body sensation and play. "Keep your nervous system juiced up," our teacher with the head-dress tells us. "Stay aware of sensation. Delish! Juicy!"

Other lovely words are part of her dance too, over and over each Saturday morning. Vitality, she cries. Sometimes she gets more scientific. "Through movement we find health," she says, "we find mind-body integration."

I think a lot about jouissance, precisely because I've had a strange knack for driving it out of my life. I’m been a GP who is both proud of her profession and at times unbearably burdened by it, a writer who never much writes, an academic who finds the academic life tedious, a mother with train-track slashes on my right cheek like the sequinned Haitian Erzuli Montpaigne who watches me from my lounge-room wall. I’ve had a jouissance problem, always being so frightened of life!

Glastonbury and the Holy Thorn, vandalised

"See," Wendy says later, when we were almost at the top of the Glastonbury Tor, "it might be love, joy and relaxation but it’s also much more than that. Women aren’t stupid."

"But he told me flatly I couldn’t use it. Mothers wouldn’t be interested." I'd been rather hurt by this, having trusted him with my manuscript to read.

"Women need a new language," she insisted. "We simply don’t have the words we need. We have to invent them. We have to forge new narratives."

The night before we left Glastonbury, I wrote the word on a piece of paper and tied it defiantly to a ribbon on the Holy Thorn Tree on Wearyall Hill near our bed and breakfast. Jouissance.

We didn’t know it was the Holy Thorn Tree when we first came upon it, walking up a goat’s path over Wearyall Hill on the outskirts of the town. The slopes were degraded, covered with goats’ droppings, clumps of weeds and eroded muddy dirt. It was spring but we wore coats and boots against the chill wind and the turbulent grey skies. Ravens cried. We came upon an old chopped off tree trunk, with a number of large rusty metal rings encircling it, and from the iron rings fluttered hundreds and thousands of brightly coloured ribbons, and icons, and pieces of paper.

In the distance, across the plain, a strange ridged hill rose up, with an 18th century stone triumphal gate on top of it. This was not the rugged, irregular, sprawling mountains of the Australian landscape, with bare rocks and gumtrees and gullies that Wendy and I knew so well, but a treeless symmetrical bump, covered in turf. The white-haired man from the National Trust told us that the Tor was built on top of a natural hill of chalk with unstable layers.

Later, someone else informed us that the chopped off trunk was the Holy Thorn tree, vandalized. All the branches been hacked off by vandals, she said, just above it’s bifurcation into two large bare trunks. Uncertain of its meaning except that it was obviously sacred to many, with pre-Christian as well as Christian significance, we offered our own prayers on ribbons. More precisely, we tied on a couple of stiff paper handles from a shopping bag with our messages written on them, since we didn’t have ribbons.

Jouissance, I wrote. OK, so it didn’t flutter either. Instead, my note stuck out. It stuck out stiffly into the breeze on the hill of clumped grasses and goats manure and weeds, around the wounded tree that had three or four shiny dark shoots unfurling from the deeply furrowed bark, wounded, broken, but still alive. Then our odd little messages were swallowed up by hundreds and thousands of brightly coloured ribbons, icons, prayers, mine just one little prayer amongst so many under the glowering grey sky, crows wheeling above and calling over the valley to the Tor on the hill in the distance, which was the entrance to the underworld.

May I live jouissance. May I give jouissance.

Fluttering with hundreds and thousands of ribbons in the wind, the Tor rising in its background, evening creeping in with shadows over the lowlands that were once under water and mists so that the Tor rose up like the islands of Avalon, or so the myths tell us.

Even when you feel deeply wounded, even when the despair is overwhelming, even when the baby screams and screams, we can look for jouissance, we can remember that even after the fire, the bare trunk sends out shoots.

Wherever I went at that time in my life, I was writing both the Biography of a baby's cry and then The discontented little baby book, and I could hear your baby crying, I could feel your exhaustion and distress. When we came to the oak trees by the great grassy ditch of the Avebury Stone Circle, walking past the small yellow flowers in the paddocks, we climbed in closer up under the branches. The grove was, we found, three great bodies of trees, roots spread like an ancient net over the earth, covered in moss and lichen, smooth oak curves reaching up above us.

The quality of air in there was different, cool, still: light filtered through the leaves. The world receded and we stood in a strange deep stillness. Something ageless, unable to be spoken, protected, deeply calm. I breathed it in, like a home-coming; ah, this place, this sacred grove. Jouissance.

A deeply lived celebration of the mother’s body, an intensity of feeling that takes you to the edge. A particular kind of flourishing of physicality. Jouissance, a flourishing, flowering vivification. An embodied fullness of experience, embracing both joy and difficulty. Sensual, even in pain and exhaustion. Soulful, though unremittingly physical. Ravishing moist.

There were ribbons tied on the oak trees' twigs and leaves, prayers tumbling everywhere.

"Thankyou for getting my husband and son through it," one read, a little black ink note on cloth.

I could hear your baby crying, just over the hill.

I’ll try to find the right words, I promised you, I'll keep on going with this work as best I can.

Brisbane, 2013

Acknowledgements

The second photo on this page is of the Glastonbury Tor, built on a conical hill of clay with a sandstone cap, which is terraced, though how the terraces happened remains mysterious. There have been buildings on top of the Tor since the tenth century. It's said that beneath the hill there's a hidden cave through which you can pass into the fairy realm of Annwn. There dwells Gwyn ab Nudd, the lord of the Celtic underworld, with the Cauldron of Rebirth. The third photo is of The Holy Thorn Tree, vandalised.