Peripheral Visions

these aspirants in separateness.
    Only poverty, it is sometimes implied, would make parents share their bedroom or their bed. This once near-universal human closeness is now seen as bad for the child. New mothers are often told severely that if they bring their infants into bed with them they may suffocate them; sometimes that pressure is reinforced with innuendo about sexual abuse. We have so little information about forbidden sexual activity within households in other cultures that it is hard to be certain, but it strikes me that some violations of the incest taboo depend on distance, on a deficit of intimacy. The very close contact in which kibbutz children are raised, like a group of siblings in the children’s house, seems to lead to a reduction in sexual interest in each other, so they grow up and seek romance outside the kibbutz.
    Putting the baby in a separate room must lead to a heightened awareness of separateness and a more palpable time lapse between need and satisfaction, especially when an infant is left to cry, tasting abandonment as often as freedom, a self rooted in solitude. We think of this as laying the groundwork for independence, yet times of sleep are imposed and enforced by adults, not chosen. For one held in a warm bed between two protecting bodies, combining the scents of different skins and different rhythms of breathing, it must be easy to feel oneself part of a larger whole. Lying in the sun on a hilltop, you can have the same feeling of immersion in the living, breathing biosphere, full of scent and rhythm, as if you had never been expelled from the womb.
    Becky and Shahnaz offer a glimpse of alternative approaches. Becky maintained a visual connection with her mother, but she will grow up to face the possibility and the compulsion of autonomy and will need to be able to make herself at home in strange places. Shahnaz acted almost as if she and her mother were one body, yet she was acutely aware of boundaries beyond them, for the sense of being part of a larger whole may go beyond the family to a community, yet may set that community at odds with other human groups. Iranian boys also separate from their parents more gradually than American boys and may suffer from deep loneliness if they travel abroad; decisions of career and education are often made for the welfare of the extended family. In Iran, not only do infants often sleep with their mothers but they stay by their mothers, dozing and waking, until the mothers are ready to sleep themselves. The reality of human infancy is dependency, but some cultures create charades of early independence and project individualism and the rhetoric of rights onto infants, sometimes even onto fetuses. Other cultures go to the opposite extreme: autonomous membership in the wider community may be conferred only at adolescence or later, perhaps never for females.
    It was in the Philippines, where I became pregnant myself, that I began to think of personhood, both the inner sense of self and the assurance of membership, as something that comes into being and grows through relationship and participation. I wrote a poem in that period using the imagined image of the Virgin Mary to express the way mothers and other caring adults turn infants into members of the human community:
In cradling that small god she had conceived ,
    She made him Man by loving .
    Mothers do .
    Not only mothers, and not only in infancy. The gift of personhood is potentially present in every human interaction, every time we touch or speak or call one another by name, yet denial can be very subtle too, inflicted in the failure to listen, to empathize, to attend. Membership in a human family or community is an artifact, something that has to be made, not a biological given. Membership both acknowledges and bridges separateness, for it is constructed across a gap of mutual incomprehension, depending always on the willingness to join in and be changed by a common dance. Western culture associates independence and autonomy with strength, but there is a sense in which an awareness of being part of a larger whole, of being defined by context, a self in adaptation, can offer a different strength, leading to flexibility and constant learning. One can define a human being by DNA or by the physical traits of the species, but I prefer to use the word person for the focus of a pattern of relationships. Caring and commitment are what make persons, and persons in turn reach out for community.