Misplacement
Updated: 6 hours ago
Rachel Whalen
When I tell my doctor that my husband and I are interested in getting pregnant, she begins to talk me through the process of what she calls “buscando un bebé”—or, in English, searching for a baby.
I now repeat these words in my head constantly. I think, I’m searching for my child. I think, Where is she? I think, Is she in this jacaranda tree, that heather patch, the fibers of my hair? This turn of phrase suggests that it’s just a matter of finding her—as if the fact that I exist means that she does, as if all I have to do is reach my outstretched hand a little farther into a cloudy future.
I begin perseverating on this maternal searching in early springtime, when the cardinals are already using my mother’s stray hair to make their nest. My own parents struggled to find their children; after many miscarriages and several rounds of IVF, my brother and I were born 11 weeks early. We had a complicated birth, for which my mother had to be admitted to the hospital four months before our due date. We talk about our own mythology often—it’s etched into our family lore—but my mom shrugs it off, as though gifting us her entire body and soul wasn’t really a big deal.
The most recent inhabitant of my mother’s body has been cancer. This one is a big deal. The morning of her lumpectomy, I’m sitting in the waiting room as they put pins around her tumor. My hands tingle. She finally comes out. She seems smaller to me, as though we somehow switched places. She swings her feet in her chair as she waits for the surgeon to call her in. I smile so that I don’t cry. “This feels pretty weird,” she says, and I’m not sure if she’s referring to the situation at large or the needles in her chest. I say yes, yes, all of it is weird.
I cannot give her this body back, the one she made for me. I can not lend her myself as she once did. Perhaps this guilt, this feeling of incompetency, is part of the reason why, in the months during and after her surgery, I begin to think incessantly about getting pregnant. I cannot be my mother’s mother, but I could be someone’s mother. I could loan myself forward, I think—at least I can do that.
A lesson that I always cover in my tutoring sessions with high school students is that of misplaced modifiers. One of our practice question reads as follows:
In 1453, English King Henry VI became unfit to rule
after falling gravely ill. As a result, Parliament
appointed Richard, Third Duke of York, who had a
strong claim to the English throne, to rule as Lord
Protector. Upon recovering two years later, _______
forcing an angered Richard from the royal court and
precipitating a series of battles later known as the
Wars of the Roses.
Which choice completes the text so that it conforms
to the conventions of Standard English?
A) Henry resumed his reign,
B) the reign of Henry resumed,
C) Henry’s reign resumed,
D) it was Henry who resumed his reign,
The answer is A, though many students struggle to understand why it is not C. It’s the possessive that throws them: C suggests that Henry’s reign recovered from illness, not Henry himself.
Possession, misplacement, agency: I’ve always struggled with these questions when it comes to my mother, who I admire unquestionably. Am I my mother, or am I my mother’s, or none of the above? Am I the subject, or the object of possession? And now, in “searching” for my future child, can I find myself as a mother and therefore find my mother too?
I’ve been asking myself questions about misplacement since my brother and I were little, since we were small enough to crawl into our parents’ bed when we were sick. It was the best part of having a fever or a stomach bug: My dad would graciously migrate to the couch while the sick one would take his place next to Mom. We could watch Disney Channel on the tiny TV or have popsicles in that massive bed. And, in a rare vulnerable view of the woman who encompassed my entire world, I would see her sleep. I would do my best to mirror her breathing for as long as I could, inhaling deeply in an attempt to exhale in sync with her, as though matching my body’s pace to hers could somehow make me grow up into her. When I inevitably failed to keep up, I would try to breathe exactly twice in the span of her single breath, folding my rhythm into her own, aspiring to one day emulate her perfectly.
In the months after her surgery, I achieve this: I am her. This is not true. I misplace us. I study photos of her in her late 20s and see myself. I study photos of myself and see her. I am increasingly conscious that I am approaching the age she was when she had me, when I knew her. Our dual focus on her body due to her illness seems to provoke an increased focus on mine as well. Even as I write this, I am looking down and seeing not my hands typing, but hers.
King Henry VI’s “grave illness” mentioned in our SAT question on misplaced modifiers refers to a serious mental crisis that rendered him unable to walk or talk for over a year. It was theorized at the time that his humors were out of balance, or perhaps he was possessed, or perhaps he was already partly dead. Living in the shadow of a much more successful Henry, he became king at eight months old and had to grow into his name for the rest of his life. When he himself became a father, he wouldn’t even see his newborn son due to his mental state. The political strife that ensued, the so-called Wars of the Roses, is often referred to as one of the bloodiest conflicts on English soil, with over 100,000 dead across years of battles—among them Henry VI and his son.
Although it’s perhaps unkind to use poor Henry VI’s misfortunes as a metaphor, I can’t help but think of him removed from his family, suffering alone. Looking for himself in the complex psychological terrain that bore an outline of his father; looking for himself in the complex external terrain that was his.
Mom’s done some research about the cardinals who use her hair for their beds: Cardinals mate for life. After raising one group of offspring, they build a new nest, often in the vicinity of the first. They do it so methodically in the same fashion and in the same place that one could easily confuse this new nest for the exact one that was there before—it’s just slightly misplaced, several inches to the right.
After a few months of treatment, my mom went into remission. She is cancer-free and continues to undauntingly fill our lives with herself. And I am increasingly aware that some day soon, like Henry, I will strive to live up to the name of my predecessor. I will take the title Mom; I will think even more about mothering like my mother did. I will search for my future children in order to find her; I will keep trying to be her in order to be me.
Perhaps that’s wrong. Yet many things, I’ve learned, are not actually wrong, but misplaced—like a tumor, or an abandoned nest just a few branches away from a full one, or a king who started a beautiful-sounding war.
Rob Goebel : Adobe Stock
Rachel Whalen is a writer and translator from Buffalo, New York. Her work and translations have been published or are forthcoming in Vogue, Lunch Ticket, Pangyrus, and Copper Nickel, among others, and she has been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. She has an MFA from NYU and currently lives in Mexico City.