'I'm in there somewhere' Part 2: The hole where the thing used to be
holding a little body and thinking
This is the second part of a two-part look at what it is to find yourself moving from body to body throughout life. In Part 1, I spoke to UK artist Sally Hewett about alteration through the lens of an embroidery hoop — it was a fab interview, do give it a read! This time, I spoke to artist, author, corporate leader and amputee advocate Harleen Chhabra Gupt.
The hole where the thing used to be
When a baby starts to kick in the womb, you have to learn to perceive it. As you fiddle with the tuner, there it is: bubbles and flutters rippling out from the center. Later on, your belly can leap about, yanked this way and that by a fish flopping on the end of a line. It’s fun just to stop and pay attention to it.
When a baby is born, you know they are the self-same being as the fetus made those movements, but there is an inevitable loss of continuity: they begin again as your baby, and the cave is left dark. As you tend to their body in the weeks afterward, you sometimes forget that your belly is empty, and feel twinges from deep within, splashes on the surface. Phantom kicks.
In psychology, scientists have long been aware of phantom limb pain, which occurs after a limb is amputated and the neural pathways grapple with the lack of sensory input. A person’s missing arm may itch, hurt, or cramp, and relief is difficult, since there is no limb to treat. Often the brain remaps these areas onto a smaller patch of tissue, so that a person can “feel” their missing arm by touching a part of their face, for example, something called “referred sensation.” The loss of a body part changes the cortical mapping for other parts of the body, you see.
I don’t think that pregnancy and birth are near as profoundly challenging as limb loss, and I’m not trying to equate them, but I do think that understanding the changes taking place at the physical and neurological levels can be useful as you adjust to parenthood,* and other physical challenges — surgery, illness, aging, etc. — that, for me, have brought with them a heap of health anxiety.** I’ve been focused on how alterations to our own bodies, and the act of tending to someone else’s tiny body, changes what our brains pay attention to. To borrow Maggie Nelson, “We develop, even in utero, in response to a flow of projections and reflections ricocheting off us. Eventually, we call that snowball a self (Argo).”
Someone with a more useful philosophical perspective on this than me is Harleen Chhabra Gupt, a culture and strategy leader in a multinational corporation, as well as an artist, author and volunteer with Amputee Coalition. Harleen was in a traffic accident as a child in her home country, India, and lost her upper left arm.
Getting down to brass tacks, “permanent physical alteration is a loss, right?” she says. “That's what it is. It is a permanent loss of who you were, you who you want to be. Everything changes.”
Harleen was too young to remember the accident, and she says that while mental health support was not a piece of the recovery back then, her mother told her there was no timeline for figuring out how to live without a limb; that it would be a lifelong task. She says this remains a really helpful way to view her condition.
I figured out everything that I could with one hand and [was] very comfortable with that. And suddenly there is this whole new aspect that I'd never thought of on how to deal with and how to care for a little one who I'm responsible for the rest of my life.
Harleen lives in the U.S. now, and says that becoming a parent was the single-most significant experience of her adult life. “It was physical and mental, and I still remember [it] very clearly,” she says. It’s something she has footage of, and will often rewatch: “I often just go back to the moment my son was born and he was laid on top of me, and [the] emotions that I experienced at that moment are just phenomenal.”
It forced her to reckon with her abilities. The image of a mother and child holding hands is a “foundational part of parenting,” says Harleen. If her hand is busy, her son will sometimes clasp her sleeve as they walk along together.
“I really connect with [relating] parenthood to something like an amputation, because in my experience, that was a pivotal moment,” she says. “I figured out everything that I could with one hand and [was] very comfortable with that. And suddenly there is this whole new aspect that I'd never thought of on how to deal with and how to care for a little one who I'm responsible for the rest of my life.”
Think: changing diapers, feeding, and carrying baby with one arm. Upper limb loss affects only about 3% of the U.S. amputee population, and can affect quality of life. In her own case, Harleen figured out ways to use adaptive tools and manage overuse of her arm, and created how-to videos on one-armed parenting.
Her son recognized that she had a limb difference when he was still young. Once, sliding down the stairs in their house, he asked her to play alongside him, and explained how: “Put one hand here and the other here—oh,” he said, adjusting in the moment, “put all your body weight on one hand and you can do it.”
The second big revelation from parenting with limb loss was that there is very little dialogue occurring around that experience, something Harleen realized when trying to explain her body to her son. “We need more stories,” she says, currently at work on the manuscript for a children’s book herself.
Of the scant media that explores her story, she likes Finding Nemo. “I would go and talk to my son's class and say, you know I'm just like Nemo. I have a little fin, I have a small hand, then I have a normal hand, which like a normal fin and I can still swim fast. Sometimes it's harder. Sometimes I need help and you guys can be my help. You can be my hands, my fins.”
While it was common in India for people to ask “what happened,” in the U.S., she has found people will skirt the question. “When I came here, it was really nothing, no conversation, nothing at the university, nothing when I joined work, and I could tell when people's eyes would wander and notice my difference, but then they literally had no words to talk about it because the culture was different.”
She wants children, adults, and healthcare workers to understand what the experience is like. Harleen volunteers as a peer visitor for people new to limb loss at Amputee Coalition. Prosthetists in the program are also trained to consider what it means to touch and manage someone’s body.
Having lived with limb loss for years, you can get to a phase but then go back to a different one. Flip-flopping in that sense is normal.
Accepting help can be hard when you are living with limb loss, says Harleen, and someone’s well-intentioned involvement with your body can be stressful. At the same time, having a child taught her that she needed to get comfortable with asking for and accepting help at the same time as she prioritized independence. “If you have some other temporary disability, it's easier for people to think of asking for help,” she says. It also helps to tell yourself that “this is a temporary phase of our journey, even though the loss is permanent; that we will find one way of becoming independent.”
This way of thinking is typical of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, used to help people adjust to the bumps as they carom through life. “Having lived with limb loss for years, you can get to a phase but then go back to a different one,” says Harleen. “Flip-flopping in that sense is normal, and knowing that it might happen [can help] when you have these feelings to just accept that this is how I'm feeling, and it'll pass too.”
Harleen sees her experience becoming a parent as a tool other people can use. “I would not have reached that phase if I had not had my son, “she says. “Knowing that this is a need not just as a mother to experience how to take care of a little one, but teaching him how to take care of me, or people like me, I think that was the biggest gift that I feel if I connect my journey of being an amputee and being a mother.”
Postscript
Lauren Downing Peters, author of the forthcoming Fashion Before Plus-Size: Bodies, Bias and the Birth of an Industry, previously introduced the concept of us each inhabiting a “temporary” body thanks to constant shifts from aging, illness, trauma, etc., as noted in by the curators of MassArt Art Museum’s Designing Motherhood exhibition, which is currently open!
The pieces collected in the exhibition explore different facets of the reproductive experience, and present a compelling argument that we’ve always had to use tools to adapt to parenthood, and to make it fit us — see: ideas of gender expression explored in Ari Fitz’s My Mama Wears Timbs; the lead and glass nipple shields above, which date from the 19th century; and the use of a digital camera to capture the temporal reality of parenting in Tabitha Soren’s work below.
To support Amputee Coalition, go here. To follow Harleen on Instagram, go here. Thank you Harleen for speaking with me <3
*Traumatic birth is an important experience to unpack, but here I’m aiming not to get into pathology.
**By way of example, at 41, I have permanent pins in my ankle, have had MOHS surgery and gum surgery, and peed a bucket-load of blood after dragging my floppy pelvic girdle through a marathon too soon after birth.
***It’s worth noting how rapid a child’s physical growth is — some of the earliest memories I have are of finding I was too big to fit somewhere I had liked to nestle, or being told I was too big to be carried. Children are constantly losing themselves as they go through leaps, but clearly remember the bodies they used to have; my son climbed into my lap one day and began gently head-butting my arm just like he had when he used to nurse.
****All hail Joan Semmel’s ‘Secret Spaces’
*****Lastly, I wanted to give a nod to Harleen’s insistence that financial independence is as important as physical independence, but a lack of inclusion in corporate America means this is difficult to obtain.
How it happened
Scout: My Tamagotchi turned into an adult!
Me: Let me see— 😬
Goodies
Jessica Grose’s new parenting book Screaming On The Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood drops this Tuesday, Dec. 6 — weeeee!!!! — and there is so much to dig into, but I liked the way she got at America’s unique brand of performative parenting nonsense (which I still look at as though it’s not the stew I’m swimming in):
not to pick on the Pioneer Woman specifically—I love her roasted Greek salad recipe! But this particular vision of combining work and caretaking, which is repeated by a number of sub-Pioneer Woman influencers on social media over the past two decades, making pesto eggs inside an enormous spotless kitchen, is so beyond the wildest fantasies of the average American parent as to be absurd.
I’m still reeling from the second-hand report of a husband who plans the month around his wife’s cycle — via this ep of The Deep Dive (“mama’s in her luteal phase right now”)
Useful to consider the concept of the ghost ship in terms of your body — here’s Cheryl Strayed rerunning an oldie:
Every life, Tranströmer writes, “has a sister ship,” one that follows “quite another route” than the one we ended up taking. We want it to be otherwise, but it cannot be: the people we might have been live a different, phantom life than the people we are.
David Sax on the soulfulness of going outside:
Lakes and rivers filled with paddleboarders. Slackliners and spike ballers congregated on every field. Parks and beaches and campgrounds swelled with the sudden discovery by humanity that we needed to go beyond our screens if we were going to survive this. Hiking trails felt like rush hour on a downtown sidewalk. Our bodies wanted out.
Loving you and leaving you happy:
Thank you for reading KAFKA’S BABY <3 <3 <3 I’d be thrilled if you want to share it or want to send an “ahoy” my way.
If you thought this was a bit of alright, you might like some previous KAFKA’S on: