BY FELICITY MARSH
Copyright is held by the author.
TODAY PAPPA is celebrating Mama’s anniversary. There is bunting everywhere and it’s all I’ve heard about for days.
It doesn’t matter to Pappa, of course, what I think. I’m not expected to be part of the festivities, there’s no role in them for me or any of us Mama has pushed aside except to smile. Pappa has changed everything, and all I wonder is, what did we ever do wrong?
I know I don’t have to justify myself according to what Pappa says is right or wrong, not morally at least, but it’s what you do when someone takes everything from you, isn’t it? You ask, why? Why did you do this to me? I suppose that is a different question, now I come to think of it, and it has a very different answer.
Anyway, I’m not celebrating Mama’s anniversary.
What I think is interesting is why Mama? Why not Ma or Eve? Mama is the first that Pappa’s ever done this for, and I think there must be a reason for that because although I haven’t always realised it, looking back, I’ve never known Pappa not to have Pappa’s best interests at heart.
Of course, Pappa did move on pretty quickly from Eve. We’d hardly even got used to the new way of doing things before that era was over. I feel stupid saying it now, but I think most of us only saw Eve as good, even if not for any personal reason. I didn’t think of there being any real impact on me, and so perhaps I didn’t give enough thought to it at all. It was a busy time back then. Joe and I had so much going on, the boys were quite young still . . . Eve wasn’t really part of my world.
I remember the big introduction, of course.
Eve was going to make everyone’s life better. Pappa gave the world Eve for the sake of women who couldn’t carry full term, to answer all the legal and emotional problems around surrogacy, to obviate concern around conditions such preeclampsia and more obscure complications that the press suddenly started writing about and you’d never heard of before. When I say “gave”, that’s not quite how it worked, of course, and there were lots of questions about the cost and whether this was something that should be paid for privately or subsidized.
I would say, it didn’t feel quite . . . I don’t know “right” isn’t the word I’m looking for, but I don’t know how to put it. It seemed slightly uncomfortably mechanical, I suppose. But Pappa spent a lot of air time and no doubt a lot of money winning people around to an understanding of Eve as just the next stage along from in vitro fertilization.
We saw lots of old footage of the early days of IV in the news back then intended to convince us that we were a better generation than that one. We were more progressive and enlightened, unafraid of new technology. EVETM (the Enhanced Viviprotective Environment, brainchild of new kid on the AI block, Pregnancy & Para-parental Ancillaries (Pappaplc)) was so much a product of our age that we should pretty much all take credit for it. And what’s to be frightened of in your own creation? Also, by the way, how could those of us who had all the natural advantages of safe and satisfied parenthood stand in the way of others?
“Pappa”: surely one of the worst and most contrived corporate names ever. I heard my inner cynic retching, but I didn’t properly understand then the reach of big business or that people really will do anything for and with power.
But as I say, Eve gave way very quickly to Ma, because by using Ma (Pappa’s “Maternal Alternative”) to take on Eve’s role with added post-partum nurturing benefits we were told we need never fear post-natal depression, problems with breastfeeding, broken nights, colic – well, you name it. We’d scarcely grown used to seeing Eves sitting in people’s houses, their soft lights quietly pulsing through nine months until the precisely programmed moment of birth, when it became the ultra-fashionable thing to say you were having your children by Ma. And where the influencers and rich go, others want to follow, and few people ask about the rewards of influencing, as if it were just some kind of charitable enterprise.
Ma made the journey from decadence to democracy really fast, riding the wave of government backing for the overall economic benefits of having a Ma in the home leaving parents fit and able to return to the workplace much sooner.
Encouraged by state-sponsored research, Mama was just Pappa’s next, inevitable step. The all-in-one answer, goodbye ticking body clocks, changed body shape, and anxiety about conception; no more discomfort, pain, stress or mess, no breastfeeding problems, broken nights, potty-training, social isolation, or early-years teaching, school runs or years of juggling work and school holidays.
Pressure began to grow not to be the woman holding society back by actively choosing to bear and rear children “the old way”, making her employers and tax payers carry the burden for her unnatural self-indulgence.
Why did children even need women when the job could be done so much more consistently and objectively to a state-approved standard by a Mama? Other questions soon followed, starting in the angry minds of those for whom expectation and achievement had failed to match and spreading germ-like through social media: Why are women taking all the jobs? What do we need women for when we’ve got Mamas?
Mamas hardly ever bear girl children. What we used to call women are now officially RGTs (Redundant Gender Types). Girls born of women, the progeny of defiant non-conformists, don’t have an official designation. Officially they don’t exist.
Unofficially, they are known as Liliths, after the predecessor of Eden’s Eve, who refused to be subject to Adam. There’s been some debate over the years about whether they really exist, of course, of how and where they could have been raised in secret.
They used just to be a whisper between women, but whispers have a way of twining round your heart, of taking root and growing, of spreading their branches and letting their seeds blow in the wind. Old men have been heard saying you never know what you’ve got till it’s gone and young men have started calling themselves the Incompletes.
So Pappa’s celebration of Mama? Rearguard action maybe, bolstering the brand.
Other banners have been unfurling beneath my window. Beautiful, strong, long flags casting shadows over the bunting. My third child has come home. The Liliths, dear Pappa, are rising.
***
Felicity Marsh is a writer of short stories, from flash fiction to novellas, published in traditional print media and online. Print titles include If “I Had Only One Story to Read” in the anthology Same Same But Different and “The January House” in The Simple Things, and, online, “Caracalla” (Shady Grove Literary blog) and “In the Swing of the Sea” (Very Rascals spotlight). Although she doesn’t like to be tied down to any one genre, her work often tends towards the speculative and frequently includes fantastical and gothic elements.
