Suffer the Little Children . . .

I have been reading Anna Quindlen's novel Rise and Shine, which I guess you would call a feel good woman's novel, although I was constantly filled with dismay and frustration by the behaviors of the minor characters who provide the background and ultimately resolve the narrative.  In sum, two sisters, Meghan and Bridget, orphaned young raised by their Auntie Maureen, are described as they are living their lives in their forties in New York City.  As you may gather, there is an intense Irish Catholic feeling to the story although no one is the least bit religious.  But it manifests itself in the subject of children.  Bridget works in the Bronx in a welfare office having to sort out with a mass of women clients their manifold woes in terms of finding rent, clothing, custody of their children, protection from the men in their lives, whose fathering gives them the right to physically abuse the women constantly.  The women are described often if not always as much out of control and always by virtue of the heavy and constant demands placed on them by the unexpected babies in their lives, which they have produced from a myriad of fathers and almost never by any grand design.  They are women to whom I want to counsel abortion, and as I read the novel, the fact that no one brings up abortion made me want to scream.  The pregnancies never once seemed to me anything other than disasters, even the "charming"  we have to believe unexpected pregnancy at 43 of the maiden lady sister, Bridget, the director, almost simultaneous with the shooting of the other sister's remarkable son leaving him paraplegic following his intervention into the benighted lives of some of the thugs his aunt is responsible for up in the Bronx.  The shining prince is shot down by the spawn of unthinking sexual intercourse but the disaster is redeemed by auntie's producing, of all things, twins (that's when you know Quindlen is dishing out treacle).  It took me back to the years I taught at Lehman College in the Bronx where my classrooms were often populated by the much more successful sisters of the women who were the victims (no, I must call them clients) in this novel.  But their lives were dominated by child bearing none the less; there the women who were in class at age thirty, mothers at fifteen and sixteen of babies by whoever, now watched over by the grandmothers while the women tried to put some middle class structure into their lives by getting an education, who went home to a household of children where they were going to be doing their homework; there was the exceptionally intelligent young woman who was accepted to law school who asked for a year's extension for entrance so she could have a baby in the interval, and when I explained that law school was so intellectually challenging that motherhood was out of the question, insisted that after twenty two she would be too old to have children!  There was the oh, so bright young woman whose interests would be met by a graduate program I knew at Berkley who rejected my encouraging her into that because it would be unthinkable to leave the confines of her immediate family.  These women all saw themselves as something other than an individual, free to make a destiny, able to focus on something other than the flesh and blood that was family, to my mind, the woman's eternal dilemma.  By chance yesterday a young lady friend once the girlfriend of a young cousin of mine came to visit and help me with the gardening while we talked.  She is in her late twenties, exploring a career in broadcasting journalism, and beginning to have the kind of success that merits national prizes and awards.  She has had a couple of candidates for serious men in her life since my cousin and we talked about them at length, and how at this stage of her life, she could not possibly think about a relationship that would confine her into marriage and motherhood.  Her sense of her self as an individual, as someone who needs to make her own choices, was so refreshing to listen to after being mired in the impossible stew of the tangled, tortured, confused, and misguided lives of the women whom Bridget was responsible for in the novel, and again and again I wished that Bridget's office were offering the counsel if not of the virtue of abortion then at least concentrating on the absolute disaster that unplanned and reckless flirting with motherhood brought into society.