Warning: Today’s story uses the r-slur in what was at the time an approximately medical context, but not really, we all know what it means.
As an aside, since I started this extremely sporadic series of reflections on early sci-fi by women, the direction chosen in part because I do try to stay in my damn lane, I’ve concluded that I am sorta nonbinar-ish, probably. As a conclusion to come to in one’s thirties after reading a lot of autobiographical comics, it’s not a particularly notable one, and this isn’t the place to get into a long series of “oh, so that’s what that was about” realizations about myself. I would prefer not to gender. And yet I’m gonna keep doing this little exercise. Why? Eh. Labels were made for people, not the other way around. I still think of myself as a lesbian out of habit and coziness. I certainly have thoughts about being a woman in various contexts, just like I have thoughts about being in Catholic school despite having not a lick of belief in nor respect for that institution.
So. “That Only a Mother.” Unlike the first couple entries in this series, this one could not be called obscure. I’d read it before I went digging, and it’s lingered in my head for years. It’s widely anthologized and appears in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One. Seen as dated and sort of a relic, sure, but no one could imagine this story is a forgotten bit of history. It’s also a bit later than I’ve been aiming, published in 1948, by which time a lot of the weird edges had been sanded off of science fiction.
So why have I chosen it? Let’s just say a mother’s (or any birthing person’s) experiences of autonomy, making decisions about potential little humans in a doomed world, and the limits thrust on parent and child by the perception of patriarchal power hits pretty hard just now.
Judith Merril, daughter of a suffragette, a teenage Marxist-Zionist who certainly had an interesting start to life, had a decades-long career and many accolades to crown a life that seems to have stayed as wild as it began. It’s tempting to compare her to a Clare Winger Harris (and my jump forward in time effects this read, too), wondering what could have become of some of the earliest women to leap into the genre and how often they leaped out again. As editor, reviewer, novelist, short story writer, collaborator, club member, she clearly shone. She made it into that rarefied light of recognition from Great Literature (meaningless as that seems when you understand how genre works, it’s hard not to take some satisfaction in it, too). She was on the radio and a member of impressive societies. Living the dream by today’s standards, and no doubt her own.
Also? Married to Frederick Pohl for a while. After Dorothy Louise Les Tina, though. This was perhaps less rarefied company than being included in Best American Short Stories as a 1950s sci-fi writer.
But while Merril was very New Wavey and just staggeringly accomplished, this early story of hers would fit neatly with the others I’ve examined. It has the form of domestic fiction, is occasionally epistolary, and modestly near-future. The story is a direct descendant of its occasionally jankier predecessors, and ties in neatly for that. (And I definitely didn’t just want to loop back to a creepy story about reproductive and environmental justice and sorta sneak it into the pile with the others to relieve my current feelings.)
“That Only A Mother” begins with reasonably skillful worldbuilding, just enough that it doesn’t feel like an infodump as we learn that WWIII is happening, radiation poisoning is causing issues with births, and our heroine, Margaret, is expecting while her nonentity husband is off at war. She bustles about being pregnant and industrious, peppering the narrative with technical marvels and news about these tragically mutated babies. Thus we learn about a rash of infanticides perpetrated by fathers. I did warn at the beginning that the ableist language is there in this one, and in a generous reading those attitudes are criticized, but it is still there for the reader to be wary of.
Margaret has the flexible relationship with truth and self that comes of inescapable fear. She jokes with her absent husband about the threat he poses to their child. She delivers perfect, perky, home-front housewifery to update him about the baby. She drenches herself in cheer and in denial, retreating from a reality that will take what she loves from her. Infanticides by fathers, we learn, are almost never punished in this world suffering the consequences of nuclear war.
Baby Henrietta is great. The “reveal” at the end (only a reveal if you’ve rather missed the point) that she has congenital disabilities and her mother is trying to pretend them away can only be juxtaposed with all the evidence that she’s the coolest and best baby. The story unfolding from the dweeb of a husband’s POV (his name is Hank, fuck Hank) is a generic tale of a wife gone mad, straight from the gothic, and a betrayal of his own awesomeness. The horror of the story comes from knowing this is a world where Hank gets to decide what the narrative will be.
And yet people react in time with Hank. Full disclosure: The quickest way to put my hands on the text of this story to check a few things was to find a copy uploaded to a Creepypasta wiki, and most of the edgy teen commentators are harping on about how the wife had gone crazy and missed that her baby was actually a horrible disappointing monster. The story holds onto its horror, despite its very of its time prose, because the threats of war and destruction and devaluing lives and snatching away basic autonomy are no less with us today than in 1948.
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