“There is a mama snake,..a daddy snake…a brother snake…a sister snake….a baby snake….and all snakes bite.” – Children’s game
My children loved me to trace these snakes, one at a time, up and down their bare backs, ending with a pinch on the back of the neck which sent a shiver up and down their spines ending with their delighted shrieks.
I don’t remember learning this sensual game when I was a child. In my memories, my mother was too busy with new babies one after another to play with us. I asked my siblings if they remember playing ‘All Snakes Bite’. One sister recently played it with her grandchild but like me, does not remember how she knew it. Another sister does remember playing it as a child and thinks our mother taught it to us. She even remembered kisses and tickles after the bite. I don’t remember many kisses and tickles ever. My body can imagine that it felt intimate, pleasurable. One of my brothers joked, “It was a game? I thought it was real.” Now that I think about it, it taught me some very real lessons. Those life lessons were traced viscerally on to our bodies with the most loving of touches. Such lessons delivered through touch are difficult to examine because they require holding that desperately needed love and touch at a slight distance.
The snakes bite game showed me that pain and pleasure were intrinsically entwined. Some of the ways I experienced that lesson appear to be true only in the narrow context of my WASP cultural upbringing, while others appear true in more expansively human ways. But like all categories, they are fuzzy. For instance, being born can cause both infant and mother both pain and pleasure, but my mother and I gave birth under very different cultural contexts. The norm when I was born in a hospital was to drug the mother so she would not feel any pain during intense contractions. 25 years later, I was undrugged and felt the intensity of contractions as being swept up by a dangerous but thrilling storm. I can generalize a few human experiences were pain and pleasure are intrinsically entwined, however. Loving others offers us pleasurable intimacy, and losing loved ones brings us the pain of loss and grief. Maybe less obvious to those of us who live far from wilderness of farms is the fact that we can’t maintain our own lives without killing plants and/or animals to eat. Even as I feel pain when I face that reality, I find great pleasure in eating. I am grateful that I was given a visceral pathway of soothing touch and simple words to frame these realities.
Culturally I have learned some strange things about pleasure and pain playing games in the lap of a beloved caretaker. I was nursed for only a few days when my mother developed a painful abscess on her breast and stopped nursing. I must have had no boundaries yet between her and my infant self, for my body remembered feeling both the intense pleasure my nursing and her intense feelings of pain at the same time. My body remembered this 20 years later by grinding my teeth so hard when I slept that I broke them. The surprising cure? Sucking my thumb whenever no one was looking for a couple of years. I also longed for touch of my father, but that only happened in his role as a doctor. For instance, he gave me needed shots at home which hurt like a snake biting my butt. I became frighted of him and hid under the bed when he came home for dinner. My father and mother never talked to me about this until I told them 60 years later how sad it was that I had been afraid of my father. They told me proudly that they had solved the problem of my fear by giving me shots when I was asleep. I suspect this had something to do with the low level of distrust and anxiety I felt at home night and day.
Even as I learned to be anxious about the pain of intimacy, I became terrified of causing pain to others. I don’t know if I accidently smothered a kitten to death when I was a toddler or not, but the incident was a reoccurring nightmare in my early childhood. Whether dream or real, I was terrified when my grandfather discovered the dead kitten and screamed at me. I was profoundly sad when he took the cuddly kitten away. But the whole family remembers that when I was about eight, and my 3 younger siblings and I were wrestling like playful kittens, I rolled over the youngest’s arm and it broke. My mother was out so panicked, I ran to my father’s den for help. The door was closed. We had been taught never to bother him when the door was closed, so I was afraid to knock but even more afraid not to. No answer – so doubly panicked I opened the door a crack and said – “M’s arm is broken”. My father said, “Wrap it in newspaper and tell Mom to take him to the emergency room when she comes home.” He turned back to the papers on his desk. I shut the door. Not daring to wrap my brother’s arm in newspaper, we all waited from Mom to return and take care of it. My parents never spoke to me about this. My siblings started calling me Gail-the-whale for being so big that I was dangerous. If I even scratched someone by accident after that my stomach tied up in knots.
No one talked to me about pain, panic, anxiety or fear, so I had no words for the stomach tied up in knots. I had no idea why I was terrified to drive, for instance. When I took my driver’s test the teacher told me that he would pass me because I was so cautious, he didn’t have to worry about me causing an accident. With new driver’s license in hand my father told me I could drive home, but I refused. I did not go near the driver’s seat of a car for 3 years. I knew that big and powerful cars caused terrible, even fatal accidents, but did not relate that to my terror.
Basically, I learned that intimacy and pain were interrelated and that you did not talk about either. Somehow the two simply tied themselves up into hard tangled knots inside one’s guts and heart. If someone else felt pain it was all my fault. If I felt pain it was deserved, probably a just punishment. I learned to harden the muscles around all of these tangles into an inflexible armor.
My life-long search for words to talk about that tangle has taught me that some dimensions of pleasure/intimacy and pain was culturally structured. It allowed for me as a child and then as woman, to take responsibility for the cruelty of others. It numbed me to personal violence which also numbed me to societal violence which, in the words of ethicist Mary D. Pellauer, made me morally callous.
In the last 60 years, I have learned a vocabulary for these tied up knots. Being able to name and then speak of feelings such as pleasure and anxiety, has allowed me to relax the body armor and be more present to my own pain and the pain of others. This has moved me towards becoming more morally sensitive, motivated me to both reach inward for personal transformation and outwards for cultural transformation. But it’s a process. Last night I lay in bed chanting: “There is a mommy snake…a daddy snake…a baby snake…. “ and could feel that tight tangle in my gut. I had to relax the knot, pick at it, separate threads of pain and anxiety from the pleasures of sensual intimacy that knit me into fabrics of life, love and beauty. I loved my mother who taught me that intimacy and pain were tied up in knots because that is how vulnerable human bodies work. I grieve her death still. But I also continue to unravel the ways that intimacy is not necessarily tied up with pain. I am still learning that not all snakes bite.