The Books: “The Irrational Season” (Madeleine L’Engle)

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:

Next book in my list of Madeleine L’Engle non-fiction:

The Irrational Season (The Crosswicks Journal, Book 3), by Madeleine L’Engle.

This is Part 3 in her Crosswicks Journals series. I love this book, too. (Uhm – can you tell I’m a Madeleine fan? I would literally read ANYTHING that she writes.) The Irrational Season takes, as its theme, Advent. She talks about Advent, what it means to her, etc., but of course – Advent is just the jumping off place for her to discuss so many other things. Mainly: her multiple roles in life: as mother, wife, grandmother, writer. It’s a contemplative book, sure, but it’s also chock-full of great stories.

The following excerpt details her long marriage to actor Hugh Franklin. What I love so much about it is that – she and Hugh – both artists (and both highly successful in their chosen fields) had to create their OWN type of marriage, what would work for THEM, because they were not 9 to 5 people, they were not going to lead lives like that. So … what to do? Should they be upset, and try to fit their square pegs into round holes? It took a lot of doing, but their marriage was an organic one, something created. It’s an ideal of mine. I particularly enjoy the anecdote below where Madeleine describes the minor battle at the hospital, after giving birth, about “the 6 a.m. feeding”.

EXCERPT FROM The Irrational Season (The Crosswicks Journal, Book 3) , by Madeleine L’Engle.

I realize how fortunate I was in the terms with which I started my marriage; I had had one novel published; the second was already in galleys; I had made a good start as a professional writer. When Hugh asked me to marry him, and talked about children, I said that I, too, wanted children, but that he had to understand that I couldn ot stop writing, that he was marrying me as a writer, marrying all of me, not just the part of me which would bear his children. And I rather naively told him that writing takes a lot of time, and that I would be glad to do the cooking but he’d have to do the dishes.

The division hasn’t been that straight down the line, but we’ve always shared household chores, and we have also shared the nurture of our babies. Hugh showed a generosity and understanding as rare then as it is now when he accepted me on these terms, and never expected me to be only an appendage, an et ux. I have never had to struggle against my husband to be me. This doesn’t mean that we haven’t had struggles and conflicts in our marriage — we have — but they have been in different areas.

It is the nature of love to create, and Hugh and I did want to make babies together. In my conception of love, something always has to be created during the act of intercourse, but this something may be simply a strengthening of love, a love which is participation, not possession. Daniel Day Williams, in The Spirit and the Forms of Love, was the one to bring to my attention the idea of love which is participatory, and not long after I had read this book I was able to talk with him about it, and was taught even more. Just as our friendship was a’birthing he died, and I look forward to learning more from him in heaven.

Too often, love is seen in terms of possession, and this destroys marriage. Until Hugh and I started our first baby, our love-making was a discovery of each other, was creating this strange new creature, a marriage.

I’m glad that I’m a human mother, and not a sea horse; the sea horse might well be a symbol for the more extreme branches of women’s lib, because the female sea horse lays her eggs in the male’s pouch, and then he has to carry the eggs to term, go through labor pains, and bear the babies.

I don’t understand why some women consider childbearing a humiliation; it’s an extraordinary act of creativity, and men suffer a great deprivation in being barred by their very nature form this most creative of all experiences. But there’s a price on it, as with all good things, especially for a woman who feels called to do something as well as being wife and mother.

I actively enjoyed the whole magnificent process of having children, the amazing months of pregnancy when suddenly one becomes aware that one is carrying life, that a new human being is being created. While I was carrying Josephine, our first-born, I felt quickening while I was in an eye-and-ear hospital with a recurring eye problem; a young nurse happened to come into my room as I felt the first small flutterings, and i cried, “I think I feel the baby!” She ran to the bed and put her hand on my belly, and her joy in feeling the new life was almost as great as my own. From then on, there was a lovely procession of nurses and doctors coming to feel the baby; the quickening of life is something which doesn’t often happen in an eye-and-ear hospital.

I find the birthing of babies even more fantastic. And here I feel profoundly that the husband should be given the privilege of being with his wife during the birth, that he should not be excluded. [Ed: This book was published in 1977] This didn’t happen with Hugh and me until our son, Bion, was born in a small New England village, and delivered by an old-fashioned general practitioner. Hugh was with me to rub my back during pains, to hold my hand, suddenly to see the crowning of his son. Our first baby was born in a big New York hospital, delivered by an eminent obstetrician, and I spent hours left alone and in pain and afraid. It’s enough to make the whole process seem degrading.

And nursing: I loved nursing my babies, but when Josephine was born, nursing was not yet popular again in New York City; it’s more trouble for the nurses, and I had to fight for the right to nurse my baby: “But nobody nurses babies nowadays.” “I do.”

My husband’s theatre hours are definitely not nine to five. I had seen other young wives up at six with the baby, and unable to manage to be awake and ready to listen and talk when their husbands got home from the theatre, and I was determined that this was not going to happen with us. Our baby was a strong, healthy specimen, so while I was still in the hospital, the head nurse told me that they had decided that the baby didn’t need the 2 a.m. feeding and they were going to cut it out. “But my husband’s an actor and we’re up at 2 a.m. Let’s cut the 6 a.m. feeding.” This wasn’t hospital procedure at all, and I had my first hospital fight to be a human being and not a cog in routine. I was told in no uncertain terms that it was the 2 a.m. feeding which would be cut. I replied in equally certain terms that if my baby was brought to me at 6 a.m. I would turn my breasts to the wall. I won.

I had made a choice. Why should a man come home at all if his wife isn’t awake and available? I had seen other actors go to the local bar instead of coming home to a dark apartment. This choosing the structure of our day was not being an unliberated woman. I chose it for my own pleasure, too; I enjoyed this time with my husband; it was no sacrifice. And I profoundly disbelieve in the child-centered household. What happens to the parents when it is time for the children to leave the nest if all of life has been focused on the fledglings?