Sex — From First to Last
A heart needs a mind. In class, the moment of reckoning was nearing. We had to understand the cost of love. Everybody wants to profit from love. But who wants to pay the price? My generation has learnt the price but has decided not to pay it, and is little loved. The rising generation was never taught the cost of love, and can't help castle-building about love. Some have already had a rude come-down. Some have committed a suicide of the heart. Some have even committed a suicide of the body.
If love has sense, it must at least be a friendship. Love is more than friendship. So it is at least a friendship. A true friend is a person that is still around when the reasons for staying have evaporated. A real friend is a person that is still around when the advantages of staying have gone. We can have a lot of pals when things are bright. Friendship reveals itself when we are in the hole. How many pals are left in times of misery? A friend is still there. The person who truly loves us remains.
What about sex?
When would the teacher finally get into the subject matter of the course? After all, wasn't this supposed to be a course about Philosophy of Sexuality? After animal intercourse, a love novel and friendship, wasn't it time for sex?
No.
"I want you to think about the needs of a child," he said. Think of it from your own perspective as a child. You have all been children, your parent's children, whatever may now be your present developmental and social status. Recall your time as children, and reflect, on a sheet of paper, what should be your expectations as a child. As a child, what would your needs be? I'm not asking what your parents have given you or not. I'm asking what you needed from them, whether you got it or not. Illness teaches us as much about health as health does: you know your needs from those that were answered as well as from those that were not. Nothing elaborate. Go only to essentials, but to all of them."
They did as asked. The teacher summed the result: "Not everybody said all that follows, but all that follows has been said. You, as human children looking into your lives, said a child should be conceived in love, received in love and personally loved."
"One of you even added: ‘If there's one place where sex [that is erotics] is absent from love, it's in the love we want and get from our parents.’"
"Therefore, you want parents who give themselves to their child (to you). You expect them to care for his material needs (food, dress and lodging), to help him develop his physical aptitudes (walking, etc.), to help him know the world and people, to help him acquire a good judgement of values and to be tender and affectionate towards him.
"Of course, your present situation, in your late teens and young adulthood, had an effect on your retrospection. You all insisted that parents must accept that the child become autonomous. The should trust him as he becomes able to govern himself. They should respect him as he is, with his own tastes, and they should accept him with a full measure of pardon for his failings. They should give him his freedom of movement and choice in as much as he has the ability to use them in a sane and responsible manner. And when the time comes for him to go into the world, they should let him leave whilst keeping an open heart and a ready mind to help him.
"Finally, some of you have said that parents create a real home for their child: a place where they would really love each other and build a relationship of sharing with brothers and sisters.
"Exceptionally, a few mentioned the importance of putting God in their child's life."
Now we were ready for sex!
* * *
"What was your first sexual relationship?"
The question was rhetorically asked. No answer was expected from my captive audience. I usually do not organise discussion in class: that's part of my teaching limits. But, more importantly, I had no intention of imposing a psychological strip-tease. Each has a private life. No one should have the right to wrest it out.
I could well imagine the meaning given to my question: "Are you still a virgin?" Or, "How was it the first time? Let's have a bit of voyeurism, please." Yet, this wasn't the question, though the double meaning was a good teaser.
"Aside from our wants and our person, we have all been thrown into existence by two adults united in a sexual relationship… that we hope was a loving one. That is the first sexual relationship in which we took part."
"We do not know the meaning these people gave to their action. We do not know whether it was the result of being intoxicated with love or of just being intoxicated. We do not know whether it was amusement, voluntary self-giving or selfish gratification. What we do know, is the meaning their action took: we became alive. Thus, whatever may have been the intention or the occasion, as far as I am concerned, the meaning of their action modified or deepened the meaning they gave it. The living result of the meaning of the sexual relationship gave its meaning to the persons who interacted. And since you and I are there, it is hard to underestimate that aspect of sex.
"But ‘myself’ who is there, distinct from ‘themselves’ conjoined, ‘I’ am helpless and weak, a person dependent in body, heart and mind. I am radically a need, poor in a unique manner compared to the world of animals. I am a need and therefore a call for help. My call is addressed to those who have conjoined, to those who carry me into life. I call for their love. — I am not looking for an instinct that would coerce these adults, my parents, to unconsciously, dumbly, stupidly care for me. I am addressing myself to their consciousness, to their conscience, to their "selves" freely immersed into the real meaning of their action. I want them to acknowledge my presence, to give me a name that confirms (not creates) my human existence for them, for myself and before all. I need this. I genuinely want their answer. I am alone and beg for their free love.
"That is the love you have all asked from your parents. Did you get it? The fullness of its presence or the emptiness of its absence reveals to you that this love is the home of your being."
* * *
Hubert was a neighbour just across he hallway at the boys' residence at University, some years ago. He began as a straight guy, as much everyone would rather be. At a party, a girl grasped his itch. He yelled out of surprise. The girl apologised. She was shameful. "You're a nice guy" she told him with envy and sadness.
Then Hubert happened upon his dad in bed with another woman. Shaken, he ceased fighting it and became "a guy like all the others". He laid women whenever he could and felt he was quite a man. His lifestyle made some envious and shamed many who did not have his "luck".
He was a jolly fellow and a neighbour. We regularly chatted.
One evening, there was a knock at the door. Hubert was upset.
"Georges," he said, "I've got to talk to you. I have to tell you what happened."
This is what happened. He had fun with his latest girl friend for some time and finally, the novelty disappeared. So, the previous evening, he told the girl it was time for a change. He was splitting. But, he told me with flushed indignation: "She went into a fit. She threatened to go to bed with the first chap she met, if ever I left her. As if I cared. But her fit was real bad. It shook me up. Georges, the girl was mad!"
He felt no compassion for the emotional upheavals the lady was having. She was history. But he was still unnerved by the onslaught he had endured and was begging for understanding.
I went to my bookshelves and picked Antoine de St-Exupéry's classic, The Little Prince. Flipping a few pages, I then handed it to him: "Read this," I pointed to him.
Hubert read: "Men often forget this truth, said the Fox. But you mustn't forget it. You are forever responsible for whomever you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose.
"I am responsible for my rose… the Little Prince repeated, in order to remember it."
"Oh, Georges," moaned Hubert, "you're mean."
He felt cheated out of the compassion he wanted.
* * *
The "children" in front of me, as I myself was the child of my parents, were discovering the blood tie in the sexual relationship. Of the relationship from which we had come out of the void into life. So I hoped. We were not studying genes, the numbers of society or the impulses of the nervous system. We were intimately ensconced within our being, in our mother's womb, at the meeting place of herself and our father.
We were the fixed point. Dad and mom's attitudes were the variables. I couldn't not exist. They could fall in line behind my existence. In other words, they could become responsible towards me, answering for my life, or irresponsible. They couldn't be indifferent. They couldn't get away from their consciousness of me, from their conscience. My needs were the way of their truth. We didn't have a choice.
What were these needs?
A child needs to live; to live as a human being; to live as a personal human being; to live in Love. Each of these needs is a link, a tie, an obligation of his parents towards him. These needs imply do's and therefore don't's for his parents to be true towards themselves and their child.
Since the evidence in these matters was far from the common preoccupation of our times, it had to be spelled out, making each point clear for it to be assumed.
"Life is a person's first need, the pre-condition of all others. I am a human being, not an animal or a thing," said the teacher. "Amongst men, my primal innocence allows me the right to live. And this right is unconditional.
"Then, I have the right to live as a human being. I am body, heart and mind. As a body, I need food, lodging and dress, and the development of my physical abilities. As a heart, I need my feelings educated and my fears, joys, angers, desires and sadness conquered and guided according to my personal aptitudes. I also need to be made aware that human affection touches a person. As a mind, I need to realise there exist things and persons and to grasp the difference between them in order to respect persons and use things. Finally, I need to learn my own creativity.
"I have the right to live as a personal human being. I am a ‘self’, made for freedom and love.
"As such, I need a name and I need a love that is personal, giving priority, help and requirements.
"As a free ‘self’ , I need an education to discipline my feelings and form my judgement maturing into self-government.
"As a ‘self’ made for love, I need to learn self-forgetfulness. This implies requirements upon me, but it also implies requirements upon my parents: they must be true lovers of one another. Finally this implies requirements upon us all to accept to have as many brothers and sisters as possible to share our love-nest.
"Finally, might I not have the right to live a human life in relationship with Divine Love?
"When people love, these things are evident and call only for the courage of doing them. But when people are heartless, they need commandments and interdictions. It is not a matter of choosing between two moralities. It is a matter of choosing between a morality of love or obligation, and an inhuman immorality.
"We can thus formulate some ten commandments for parents.
"As a child, we tell our parents, and as parents our child tells us:
"1- You will not kill the child you have conceived.
"2- You will not leave him naked, starving and homeless.
"3- You will not leave him without physical training or under an impersonal tutelage.
"4- You will not leave him at the mercy of his unbalanced sensitivity or under a impersonal sensitivity training. You will not act towards him as a paid employee.
"5- You will not leave him ignorant of values and things.
"6- You will not let his creativity and his personality be blunted.
"7- You will not leave him nameless. You will not first be preoccupied with yourself. You will not abandon him in misery. You will not leave him enslaved by his weakness.
"8- You will not leave his feelings rudderless nor will you deprive him of a good judgement.
"9- You will not keep him under your authority once he has a mind and a heart capable of living his own life.
"10- You will not deprive him of the means to find the strength to love people in the Personal Love of God.
"You know that to go against these commandments is to self-destruct. You know that to follow these commandments is to self-fulfil. And you know that there are no restrictions for someone who loves."
I was satisfied. I had presented the exact needs of a child, what we ourselves tried to do at home, what the success or failure of life was all about. Everybody seemed to have understood the words. Some might have seen their reality. I would be going back home to a loving wife and ten children made out of love. What would these students be going to? Would they be finding an experience conveying the same meaning? Would their heart admit the challenge of love and being loved, or would they find a void from which they flee into work or play?
Did the safety of their children depend upon what they were now hearing? Not really. The value of life is best taught by the living flesh of a child than by the theories of a teacher, in the same way death can become more alluring amidst the difficulties of life than in the calm of discussion.
A girl leaned towards her neighbour: "Wow! A child is a heavy burden. I never thought it could be so much."
The other girl agreed.
* * *
"I have to speak to you," Danielle said as we were going to bed.
Her eyes and voice were serious.
She handed me a few pocket books. "This is what our oldest daughter is presently reading."
The were Harlequin books. Books sold by the millions in convenience stores. Books despised by boys and loved by girls who plunge into sweet illusions. Our daughter was no longer reading comic or adventure books. She was floating on a cloud in Dreamland.
"What did you tell her," I asked.
"I said her reading seemed unbalanced to me. She insisted I was upset over nothing, that there was nothing wrong with Harlequin books and she dared me to read them just to see."
"And what are you going to do?"
"I'm going to read these books to be able to talk about them with her."
* * *
I was on the castle walls watching the throng below. An advantage of being uncommunicative is to be able to say anything without attacking a particular student or betraying some private trust.
But I knew some out there were about to be wounded or vexed, or both. We weren't studying macramé, finger painting, first aid, scuba diving, or any other safe subject. We were caught up in sex.
"Two consequences flow from our first sexuality."
"The first one is evident for anyone who accepts to look. It is not a mother that gets an abortion. It is the child (the other ‘self’ in her) who gets the abortion, that is aborted, destroyed. And this existence is the fixed and unchangeable point of the sexual relationship in which he came about, where the other ‘selves’ who shared the relationship, as mature human beings, are apt to change the meaning of their own action."
"The change shall not always be without hurt, but whoever said maturity equated comfort? If freedom is something great, it implies challenge and hardships."
"Of course, we might prefer doing without the hardship. But then we mustn't fuss when its freedom is taken away."
"Also, the burden of freedom is light for people who love. Finally, there can be no philosophy of freedom than is not riveted in the will."
I was walking on eggs, caring not to break shells and splash their content. I realised how easier it would be to hide behind the screen of freedom of people's consciences rather than risk their wrath. But, in fact, that would not respect their freedom of conscience. It would be abandoning conscience if favour of the unconscious. If things cannot be named as they are, how can we become conscious of them? And if we are unconscious of them, these things act upon us unconsciously. To act in ignorance is it be had. It is slavery.
But there are ways of to tell things. How can things be clearly stated without provocation? I had tried to start far way, even though our subject was right in us: the fact of our being alive. Now I was arriving at consequences, one of which is: no one has the right to kill me when I am asking for the help of those who are carrying me. That might be understandable from a personal view point. But I had gone further: we do not have the right to kill those we carry. "You will not kill the child you have conceived," dared I tell the girls in my class.
I knew some agreed with what I said. But I also knew some were scorched in their minds, possibly in their lives. Would my soft tone of speech be enough to keep everyone cool?
No.
"You mean to say you are against abortion?" a girl finally said accusingly. After all, it was my fault, if I said such imbecilities. What I said had to be a product of the will and not a truth of reality.
I answered: "I mean to say that the child you were and the children that are now have the right to love. A child might be an inconvenience. But our inconvenience is of little measure compared to his death. Our comfort cannot be paid at the cost of his life. He is the truth of our being. We cannot not live a true human life at the cost of his own."
I explained as best I could, but knew I was in front of a will bent on destroying an inconvenient child and not of a mind bent on understanding reality. In fact, that will was fighting its own mind far more than mine. This girl could only solve the contradictions in her body, heart and mind by herself. But she would try to make me suffer for her own discomfort. And she was succeeding.
Her girl friend came to her assistance: "A girl has not always been a willing participant in a sexual relationship. What about the girl that was raped? Will you also force her to carry a foetus that was made against her own will?"
Could a teacher dare to be so inhuman? Are there still such dinosaurs around, who would allow a woman to suffer this ignominy? Yup.
"Let me tell you a story."
It might distract them for a moment, defuse the crisis and yet nourish the mind.
"Towards the end of World War II, the Germans on the Eastern Front were forced to retreat from the Russian army. The Russians would soon be arriving at a German concentration camp. The order went out to exterminate the camp prisoners before pulling out. Then the camp officers invented a game. They put the prisoners in line, in full view of the nearby villagers. They placed machine guns facing the prisoners. Then they offered their freedom to some prisoners if these would be willing to mow down their companions. Of course, the SS (the German guards) would watch the executioners closely to prevent them from turning the machine guns around. The prisoners accepted to save their lives by killing their own comrades. The SS officers enjoyed foreseeing that the turncoats would not get away with it. And they were right. When these prisoners were freed, after having killed the other prisoners, the horrified villagers massacred them. — But, even if these prisoners had managed to save their lives, do you believe they were right in killing their companions in misfortune?
"There are two victims of rape. The mother and the child. Would you ask the mother to pay for her freedom by turning against the second victim, her child? Do you want her to become an executioner, to side with her rapist and act like him?
"Do you even believe that she herself will gain something out of this? Psychology says a person pulls through a crisis by emerging from oneself rather than be shutting oneself in. A person must act to heal her wound rather than to repress it. A woman who succeeds in caring for her child, that other victim of life, instead of dwelling in self-pity, is on the road to recovery. She had broken out of her inner-dwelling. She had learned to love, and that love will cure her wounds and transform then into her child's life for her own liberation.
"I do not in the least pretend that suffering from rape and from the humiliation of being pregnant after rape are banalities. I am only reminding you that recovery from these wounds can only come from a generosity and not a contempt towards others."
Words. A career teacher inevitably finds the right words to win against his students. It doesn't necessarily mean he is right. On the other hand, the student's incomprehension or unwillingness to agree with his teacher doesn't necessarily mean the teacher is wrong. In mathematics, a student will accept to be occasionally overcome by his subject matter. In philosophy, this is not expected to be the case: "Everyone has the right to his opinions."
I added: "This is not true because I have said it so. I said so because it is true."
"What if your own daughter became pregnant?" the first girl triumphantly proclaimed. She was sure she had me. She took aim at my heart and shot. Even if I were a male, presumed unable to feel what a woman feels when she has an unwanted pregnancy, I was also a father. As such I should be disturbed in having a pregnant daughter.
But it didn't make any difference. Why should I prefer my own daughter to go through the destruction of her child rather than another girl? Why would I want her to become heartless? I answered what was evident: "I would ask her to let her child live."
If eyes could speak, the girl's eyes were saying: "The guy is nuts. Hopelessly gone." And she said no more.
The disapproval was clear. There were only a few minutes left.
The teacher hesitated. Dared he disclose his second point? It was in his notes. But it is unpleasant to displease. Yet, in a way, lives are at stake in displeasures. When things will go well, people go with the crowd. But they need the truth of love to walk through the minefields of life.
Uttering a few hard words in front a divided class is a petard compared to the mines these people will be walking upon. "So let's go for it."
"Second consequence of our first sexuality. The scientific imaginings of some Freudian psychologists has given birth to a strange idea, that goes against everybody's conscious experience, and that has however managed to run wild in the world. It is the Oedipus complex for boys and the Electra complex for girls. The idea is that a male child unconsciously desires to have his mother sexually and to kill his father, whereas the female child would desire to be her father's beloved and to liquidate her mother.
"This conception of childhood tells far more about the state of mind of the adults who circulate it than about the childhood we know.
"Of course, human sensibility starts off naturally unbalanced, in order to be mastered and directed by our freedom. And at times of grave imbalance, before having succeeded in maturing, a growing person can be assailed by all kinds of sexual fantasies. A boy might even fantasise having sex with his mother. But such bum feelings have nothing to do with the ordinary structure of a child's sensibility.
"On the contrary, clinical research has proven that child victims of parental sexual attentions are psychologically perturbed. They feel a deep insecurity, unconsciously sensing that they are abused instead of loved.
"Thus, a student amongst you observed about a child's needs, that there must be ‘love’ but no sex, that is erotics, in a parent-child relationship.
"Where does the Oedipus complex's success come from? I think it comes from the fact that sex and love are both rooted in mystery. Since love and its sexuality exceed our perceptions, we are expedited beyond our conscious life. This allows madness-pushers to fill the apparent void of the unconscious with all sorts of ideas to justify the mad passions of life, when we refuse to enter the realm of the true mystery of life. And there is no doubt that sex on its own is a mad passion.
"In fact, sex and love are not the only things rooted in mystery. Everybody's life is grounded into a ‘Force’ other than oneself. And therefore, various human attributes are made godlike in the absence of Him who is God: eroticism for some, power for others, and violence, science, race, business.
"In the end, we must admit Mystery, because, as my beloved friend Chesterton said, there has to be a sun to give light to the world. Without mystery, everything becomes dark."
Dissidence had the last word. It was to be expected. How dare one attack an imagining dressed up in the scientific white smock that, for some today, has replaced the sorcerer's dress and pointed cap. But the teacher was surprised to see the person who expressed dissidence. She battled firmly in favour of the scientific analysis that proved beyond doubt the existence of a normal incestuous eroticism in childhood. After class, while everybody had gone their own way, the dissident girl kept arguing her point with the teacher.
Back to my office, I finally told her what was bothering me: "I'm surprised because you are the one who wrote that there is no sex in the love between parents and child."
Dumbfounded, she stared at me.
"Come in and I'll show you."
She entered. I went through the piles of paper on my desk and came out with the incriminating piece of evidence of her own signature.
She read it and remained pensive for a while. Then she looked up and said: "How strange it is that we can be shut up in ideas without seeing what we have lived. When I wrote this paper, I was in touch with my childhood. And there was no sex there. I wrote what I knew. And I now see that my mind has managed to be disconnected from life by baseless ideas."
The dissidence was over.
* * *
Danielle was reporting on her reading. She had managed to read two Harlequin books by cheating on her time for rest and on other practical priorities. Our children's needs were first priority. She concluded: "The books are well written. But they are pornography for girls. The story embraces their heart's desire and says nothing of a boy's reality. In each book, the young man she dreams about will at one time be a mystery for her. He will be distant and enigmatic. But when he finally opens up he is exactly what she dreamed of. His look will pierce her heart. His words will be like honey. She will become his only preoccupation now and forever. The story has nothing vulgar. After the crisis of mystery, the reality of the boy, or man, will be exactly what she wanted."
"This kind of book makes a woman palpitate with joy and keeps her from the challenge of learning to love a man as he truly is. It creates an artificial paradise that weakens a woman's defences against a man's fiery stare and leaves her maladjusted to love and true happiness. Instead of learning how to be self-giving, she learns to reduce a man to her own sensibility and then to kick him out when he finally proves to be different from what she feels."
"That's right," I confirmed. "It's like pornography for men, in which a woman is supposed to feel the same desire of impersonal masturbation and fornication as he does. Remarkably, girls are disinterested in pornographic magazines about the same way boys despise Harlequin books. With these kinds of readings, no wonder people drift apart."
"Yet, while most people realise pornography is an exploitation of women as objects, few notice that women are similarly exploiting men as objects when they try to transform him into their dream man of tenderness."
"Did you talk to our daughter?"
"I tried to explain it."
"And what did she say?"
"That we don't understand anything and that we are filthy-minded."
* * *
The greatest joy of teaching is to follow rather than to precede a student on the road to understanding, to read rather than to evaluate.
Second assignment: The sensation of love. It was time to test some modern wisdom. Thus I proposed (imposed) the study of a rather large selection from Wilhelm Reich's classic "The Sexual Revolution".
I knew that the worst insanities seem brilliant when they are in a proper environment and when they are presented with a complicated vocabulary. I hoped I had sufficiently changed the environment for Reich's insanities to appear as such to his readers' minds. For he was now in the context of human love. And I was rewarded with a blissful joy: reading Lynne (even if some points needed to be added).
"To love," she wrote, "means to be totally given, to forget oneself for the good of the beloved, to feel like giving without reservation, to think of the other and to suffer from his absence.
"When we are in love, we overflow in tenderness, in happiness, in generosity and in care for everybody. We feel we are in heaven on earth, that there are problems to be met, but that they can be easily overcome when we are two-gether.
"But love is more than that. It is the union of hearts, minds and bodies. That is why love and sex cannot be separated. Sex goes with love; we feel irresistibly attracted to each other physically and psychologically. There comes a time when we feel the urge to mutually and completely give ourselves to the beloved in the sexual relationship. The sexual relationship is a natural need for two persons who are in love; it is sort of a proof of love.
"For Reich, the sexual act is mainly an answer to organic impulses. … [He] reduces sex to a collection of impulses. I get the impression that he considers man as a machine driven by some physical energy. There's no place for love in that conception of man. (A robot cannot love a person). It's as if the sex drive was man's fundamental need. I personally doubt this!
"I agree each person feels sexual impulses, but one mustn't be prisoner of them. One must learn to govern oneself. Sensibility proposes actions to a person; but it is for that person to decide upon them.
"I also understand that problems stemming from sexual repression can be quite serious. But the cost of freedom is never too high. If one wants a rich and fulfilling relationship with another person, one has to learn to put sex into the perspective of love."
"A person who believes he will find happiness in sex will soon be proven wrong. The sexual act itself will become disgusting, because sex without love is tasteless and finally boring. That person will constantly be changing partners and be incapable of a stable relationship."
In the midst of love, Reich proved himself to be a boor.
Of course, points had to be reminded: the feeling of inloveness, which promises paradise on earth is not to be confused with the commitment of love which accepts to go through the minefields of life. Inloveness proposes, and proposes forcibly. Still love has to decide. The proof of love is to remain faithful when feelings (even the feeling of tenderness) would pull us elsewhere.
* * *
One of Christine's girl friends tried to ridicule her by ridiculing her family.
With an air of condescension, she said: "It seems you pray together half an hour each evening!"
Our eldest daughter personally had serious reservations towards her fossilised parents, but she spontaneously defended her own against the others, especially when she was part of those mocked. She hadn't the slightest idea how long the evening prayer was. It was mainly boring because it came back every day. But she knew it couldn't be half an hour. And she said so.
Still, she would verify. That evening, she checked. Starting with the offering of everyone to God, going through the invocation of each patron saint, then the "Hail Marys" for the grandparents, for the Pope, for our family, ending with an "Our Father" for Quebec, it took exactly… two and a half minutes. (As the family grew, the number of invocations would grow, and other Hail Marys would be added for other intentions, but the prayer would never top the five minute mark.)
Then there was the ritual of being put to bed. Since she was the eldest, her turn was last and her evening was the longest. Father and mother alternated in putting to bed the "girls" (John Paul, Isabelle, Philippe, Johanne and Christine) and the "boys" (François, Marie, Claude and Michel).
The majority explained the designations.
Each child was allowed a talk or a story for some fifteen minutes. With luck and imagination, a child could manage to extend this a few minutes more. Then there was a short bedtime song and the invitation to go to the toilet a last time. Kiss and "good night" ended it. The law of the land would have it that no one got up before reveille in the morning.
Bedtime was a privileged moment to have father or mother to oneself, without encroachment by a brother or a sister and without distraction by games or tasks. Mother ordinarily used that time to teach catechetics. At five years old, about to go to kindergarten schooling, mother explained Mass so that the child was ready to come to church on Sunday, with the rest of the family, at the end of summer. Church and school began at the same time. With the older children, mother would use the moment of privacy to read and explain, once a week, next Sunday's gospel. But mainly, mother carried each one's personal preoccupations. She knew or guessed everyone's joys and worries, discovered their origins and knew how to give them the better ending.
Father generally sounded the trumpet for adventure. With a few hundred comic books, illustrated books and just plain written books, he would read a different one with a different child. The Lord of the Rings was the longest adventure he read to Christine, every second night, till all three volumes had been done.
This short moment together was precious… till the bubble burst. It suddenly became evident to our eldest daughter that this was just a way to dragoon youngsters. The freedom to go to bed at the time of one's choosing (certainly later than that!) and to get up when one felt like it (far later than 6:30!) was not allowed. Then this silly kissing before good night was good for babies.
She would no longer stand it.
For her parents, daytime was already rough. Each service from her had to be won at the cost of an exasperating tenacity. Her bed left undone was a capitulation. Her room was a total mess. Would we loose the only short time we could have in her company?
The parents distressfully talked it over. They wanted to reach out to her heart. Would they allow her to raise the drawbridge? No. They mustn't. They had to keep a face to face presence even if it meant a face off each evening.
So, she became resigned to her fate and endured them. It was tiresome, but it didn't last too long. And it was occasionally profitable. Sometimes mother could be convinced into buying a new pair of pants. And father was persuaded into renewing the horse-riding lessons. They even occasionally had some better moments together. A bit of sunshine would pierce the clouds. A bit of warmth would soothe the encounter. Sometimes.
* * *
Michel was glad to have his older sister with him when he graduated to secondary school. She already knew the place. His world was being convulsed. He was changing school, friends, teachers, programs. To allow him a greater freedom of adaptation, his parents suggested that he might stop his flute lessons, at least for the first year. His music teacher was deeply disappointed, after the years of effort she had spent bringing him from cacophony to harmony. She had been especially proud of his progress. But what was a priority for her was accessory for the boy's parents. Adaptation to a new school environment was more important and the flute became a memory of past times.
Michel gradually got the feel of his new school and found his security in class where he hit high grades, playing in the nineties. Except for physical education, of course. After all, he was an Allaire. Clear challenges allowed him to hit excellence. But at home there was little interest in sports and insufficient experience to allow for success in this domain. He only excelled in swimming, which was an economical hobby and replaced his flute.
* * *
When Claude was born, fourth child of the family, his maternal grandparents considered that washing dishes had now become too great a burden for us and gave us a dishwasher. Thus clearing the table became a pleasure, since all there was to do was put the cups, plates and utensils in the machine and it did the rest. With the coming of chores, a child was made responsible for clearing the table.
But we were now ten persons around the family table, not counting the child that was at the smaller table and baby that would soon be part of the process. Putting the dishes and utensils and in the dishwasher began taking a lot of time. The present victim (and all further ones), was happy to hear, one day: "From now on, each person of school age and more will put his own dishes and utensils in the dishwasher. Mother is the exception, since she takes care of the baby. The table chore will now be limited to clearing the large bowls and plates and washing the table. Any objections? None? Well, get to work."
* * *
"I have the right to masturbate if I feel like it!"
Back in class. Near the end of the road. Many contemporary pedagogues begin their excursion into sexuality with the "natural needs" of sex. In step with Reich, a Quebec specialist proclaimed: "It is important to view children's sexual games as spontaneous and natural activities. We have sex drives and curiosities that need to be satisfied. The more natural is a child's evolution, the more fulfilling will his sex life be."
Of course, we can wonder whether 'tis best to have as a companion a person whose sexual feelings were developed according to the principle: "I feel like it, therefore I need it."
Indeed, the sequence is quite simple. If my sexual desires are needs, therefore rights, then they have priority over people who will partake in my sexual activities. The right to masturbate, and then the habit of masturbation, will lead the way. Then, we will desire, and therefore need and have the right to have a precocious sexual relationship. We will therefore have to sterilise that relationship. Should a child inadvertently happen by, then we will desire, need and have the right to get rid of him. Then there will be the need of another sex partner, because the erotic imagination tires of the same and is revived by novelty. In other words, this is the logic of the de-personalisation of our sexuality in favour of our itches.
Well, how do you explain to these unbalanced sex monsters that the itches of masturbation inviting a person to curl up inside are in fact challenges to self-control in order to be able later to love with self-giving? It's easier and "natural" to follow an impulse and later on to abandon those people we are committed to in favour of self-gratification. How then do you get through to muddled feelings and minds that the fury of passion simply indicates the gravity of the battle, the misery of defeat and the joy of victory?
That's why I started my subject so early in life, at a time when we don't feel like fornicating, when our only "need" is to live: at the time of our presence in our parents sexual relationship.
Fido and his mistress allowed us to discover love as a meeting of persons who can commit themselves to each other. And then we saw that true love (as in friendship) contains a mutual fidelity through thick and thin.
We had thus been able to determine human sexuality, our own, which we want others to respect and whose proper setting is human love: Sex is "a unified development, in opposite persons, that prepares the body, sensibility, heart and mind to totally conjoin in an intimate fusion, through a free and mutual commitment with the other person's ‘self’… allowing a mutual generosity of life to come forth and give life to a child who is both the expression and the proof of a fulfilled inloveness."
Explanation: In its intimate structure, human sexuality comprises a need for abstinence, because it must allow us (1) to break free from ourselves, (2) to be conserved for an intimate relationship, (3) to be committed to the innermost self of the beloved to whom we are given freely in a fusion of love, (4) to respect that person in times of sexual incapacity and (5) to be willing to go beyond each other leaping into the sexual generosity of life.
If this abstinence is not accepted, when love appears, sex becomes anti-love, an obstruction, a turning in on oneself, a visceral and selfish solitude.
The forbidden word had come out: "abstinence".
We could formulate the instructions for real human sex, with its musts and with its must-nots: Must: self-control for self-giving.
Mustn't: masturbation is an egocentric turning in on oneself.
Must: keep one intimacy free for a free commitment.
Mustn't: have sex without commitment. One mustn't use a person for personal satisfaction divorced from intimate acceptance of that person.
Must: a complete and respectful fusion with the beloved.
Mustn't: sacrifice the beloved as an sex object for one's own sexual fantasies.
Must: respect the beloved by abstinence at times when sex might be harmful.
Mustn't: hurt the beloved through sex, or seek gratifications elsewhere.
Must: go beyond mutual fusion into a mutual generosity towards the person whose will is meaning of mutual love.
Mustn't: shut each other up into mutual selfishness.
"In short, the choice of love is to give oneself to someone else or to destroying oneself and others by sex. Because Reality is personal and non impersonal."
But that was too much. The girl student felt her body scream in her: "What about me?" She was already intoxicated with herself. To each his drug.
"I have the right to masturbate if I feel like it!" she said defiantly.
"Of course, you can masturbate when you feel like it. But you cannot love that way."
The discussion hadn't gone any further. Nobody likes to strip in public. Strippers are known to use drugs to cover their shame. In class, sex is often painted over with a varnish of scientific jargon. But in this class, sex had been tied too closely to intimacy to be sullied in the glaring light of love.
Some years later, another girl from that class gleefully told me: "I am married. We are practising a sexuality of love and we are very happy."
* * *
Nine months of bidding for time were over. Nine months of self-enclosure had passed. The child of love, who had been a momentary refuge for his mother's feelings, would no longer be their consolation. He would now be drinking everybody's milk: cow's milk.
A woman told Danielle: "A husband has to understand breast-feeding. He has to make way for the child. We women must give ourselves to our children. We'll take care of our husbands later. Not now."
Danielle shuddered at this temptation. In fact, it wasn't true that the child is his father's rival. He is his parents' bond. His parents must become his niche, but a niche made up of both of them. That is the challenge. One time, François was walking with his parents who were holding hands. He slipped in between both of them. The parents' hands were separated and he held both, walking securely in between them.
Georges asked affectionately to Danielle: "Is he separating us or is he uniting us?"
The look in their eyes gave them their answer: he was uniting them.
They were united from the beginning of the present hardship. Both accepted sacrifices to allow breast-feeding. This nourished their fusion of self-giving even if they were not allowed a melting of flesh. But ambiguity was still menacing. Separated to be united, they had to watch not to find contentment in their private preferments. Removed from his beloved's warmth, her companion tended to think abstractly as a man does and let his gentleness slip. Cuddled in the warmth of her baby, the mother fantasised that the father felt the warmth she liked so much. There should be no hurry to come back to her husband. The lady had said: "A husband has to understand."
He did understand the value of a mother's milk for their child. But did baby need that milk so long? Couldn't he switch to cow's milk, that enemy of mother and child's sweet moments? How much does a baby need his mother's milk and how much does a mother need to feel her child living off her?
A man who is not a boor isn't at ease in pressing his feeling for his wife when she doesn't show a feeling for his presence. And it's so easy for her not to desire his presence when she is so well with her baby. Of course, she still wants words of gentleness and attention. Unfortunately, the words and that attention tend to become rarer when father "must understand" for a long period of time.
"A husband must understand." Firmly said. "A husband." A person far away, a stranger. No longer "my man" who would gently stay aside for a time of necessity. This was a stranger brushed away by decree.
Yes, he did understand. He had to understand. But was he understood? Does baby still need his mother's milk, or has baby become his mother's fancy?
That idea sent a pain throughout the mother's being. The pain of separation.
And yet, this pain met with a more silent pain: solitude. Her understanding man had become so distant. Was it necessary? Had not his absence been long enough? Had she not been too long gone?
Time had come to come back home, to a world of two, and thus energise a world of twelve, with a newly found smile and soul. After nine months, she had to open up to her man who understood but kept insisting more and more that his son become autonomous.
Richard was weaned. It was time to watch for the signs of fertility. It was time to start seriously thinking about the family's future. Mastering fertility and infertility was not the point. The point was to choose a goal.
Richard would be one year old in January. There were three months left to learn about fertility and infertility and to decide whether the rest period for the mother's body would be limited or unlimited. Limited to that year alone or longer.
Man and woman kept their thoughts to themselves in order not to put undue pressure upon the other. The next child was a possibility. But was he preferable?
"What if Georges no longer wanted to give me a child?" Danielle feared.
And, at other times, she felt a wave of panic, imagining herself bleeding to death with a ruptured uterus. She'd see a dead baby and her children and husband abandoned in the turmoil of life without their mother.
As for Georges, he tried to discern between the generosity of life and the selfishness of his desire to be conjoined to his wife without restrictions. And he swayed between the optimistic view of a relatively safe second and third Caesarean, according to medical opinion, and the fear of disaster repeatedly hammered in by doctors who wanted to tie his wife's fallopian tubes. These "experts" should know what they were talking about.
Danielle was learning to take her temperature to discern her fertility period. She was becoming sensitive to the telling feeling of moisture. Her husband, a stranger to these feelings, didn't trust his judgement in the matter and let her figure these things out by herself.
Learning the cycle of life within her was exciting. Danielle felt the growing call for a child. She knew when he was suddenly possible. On those days, she was near the miracle of a new life. On the same days, she couldn't welcome the man who fulfilled her life. They loved one another while keeping a safe distance from what might be reckless generosity. They felt an occasional twinge of sadness as the call for life receded. When the time was past, the spouses united into infertility. Once again, their fusion would receive no name.
December. In a month's time, they would have to chose. Danielle fretted: "What if he says no?" What if he drew away from the heartland of their lives? Her whole being rebelled at the thought. Then she wasn't sure about that day. It wasn't a fertile ùtime. Probably not yet. Maybe. Yes. No. Yes. Oh, what the heck… Her name is Mireille.
Done.
