The Janitor's Daughter

http://www.rigorous-mag.com/v1i1/nicole-quinn.html

        "My father's a janitor." I said. " My tuition is covered by a welfare scholarship. My mother takes in laundry for a rich white family who bought my clothes and loaned me the Benz."
        That's what I told the blonde social queens of our convent school in response to their question,
        "How much money does your father make that you can afford to be here?"
        It was 1970, we were sophomores at a girl's finishing school, the Benz was an old 1959 190SL, and it was a 16th birthday present from my father. I thought I'd said too much, gone too far with a narrative whose details didn't seem plausible. They'd know I was making it up, mocking them as they mocked me.
        On the contrary, they loved my frank humility, and for a few weeks I became a favored pet.
        We were never to ask questions about money, and everyone at school knew it. It was considered incredibly rude. The story about my father being a janitor came out as a knee-jerk reaction. I was a kid at boarding school, sometimes forgetting that my skin color made me different, because there were other girls who had accents and customs that identified them as more foreign than me in the school of 300 girls.
        The social queens came upon me in a courtyard during lunch. I remember it clearly, the wall of blonde varsity volleyball team that stepped in front of me, blocking my way. It wasn't aggressive, it wasn't overtly hostile, but it was a challenge. Prove yourself to us. They were trapping a wild animal for observation, and for their own protection, as my behavior in captivity was still an unknown, they did it as a group.
        They'd grown up together, gone to parochial elementary and junior high in segregated, though it was called exclusive, neighborhoods before coming to the convent for high school. They were a gang of we don't think we're mean girls, we just think we're better than you. They were determined to take down, or absorb into their pack, any lone wolves who appeared to threaten their dominion over the realm of smart, pretty, and going places.
        I was a boarding student. They were day-dogs. I don't know why we called them that, but we did. They'd started at the convent as freshmen. I'd been living there since I was eight. It was more home to me by then than home. I knew secret places to escape. I knew the old nuns and the cook and the pastry chef. I knew how to live in community, how to get along with different cultures.
        By high school I had already met this particular beast untethered, white privilege that assumes its superiority, in the guise of nuns bending over backward to accentuate our differences with blatant attempts to cull us from the herd. You could usually see them coming, the ones with veils flying and heels tapping, hurrying with offers of extra-help because of course you people always need it. Some openly treated my sister and me as if we were charity cases, though our parents paid the same tuition as everyone else.             Early accusations of plagiarism, or the times I had to take repeat tests alone to be certain I could replicate my answers, negated the fact that my sister and I had taken an arduous day long test to skip grade three when we first came to the convent. But these were things of the past. Surely my credibility and bona fides at this institution had already been firmly established after a seven years tenure? But now, here it was again, prove yourself worthy.
        My father wasn't a janitor, he was an aerospace engineer and he had helped to put man on the moon. The only janitor I knew personally worked at the special education school where my mother was a speech pathologist. Mr. Quimby was his name, and he was right off the boat from Ireland, where he said his people were considered niggers too. He sold Mama Irish Sweepstakes tickets once a year. He told wonderful stories and bawdy jokes. I could almost smell the peat smoke and hear the flutes and concertinas in his brogue. He had apple cheeks and a big belly laugh and a closet full of cleaning supplies. He was lovely, and I learned from him that lovely people do many things for a living, but it's not what measures their worth.
        For weeks the social queens gathered at lunchtime to hear stories of my Janitor's daughter's life, so foreign from our own. It was a colorful saga - of many people living together crammed into a one room shack, with no running water, and an outhouse. I shared the secrets of washing clothes in river water slapped against big rocks, and introduced the notion of foraging for food. I embellished Mr. Quimby's colorful history of poverty and pretended it was my own.

        Sister Kathryn was my favorite nun. She was our movie star beautiful, virtuoso violin playing, dean of students. She stopped by my room one night, several weeks after the janitor's daughter was born, and invited me to meet in her office the next morning. There she confronted me with my stories, and was incredibly knowledgeable about the details of same.
        "A janitor's daughter? How would your parents feel about the way you've described them? They've worked very hard to achieve what they have." She admonished.
        "I think they'd laugh. They'd know why I did it." I said.
        "Why did you do it?" She asked sincerely.
        "I just told them what they wanted to hear. They don't want the truth, that I'm just like them, or that heaven forfend, I might even be smarter, prettier, and happier then they're supposed to be. They want stories that make the world make sense to them. So that's what I gave them. It's what they want to believe, that they're better than me. What do I care if they believe that my father's a janitor? What difference does it make, especially if I'm the architect of that belief?"
        We were silent for a while. I could see she'd understood. I was hopeful.
        "You'll have to apologize." Sister Kathryn said at last.
        "WHAT?! But they're just stories!" I cried, desperate not to be humiliated in front of that pack of she-wolves.
        "You lied." she said.
        I wrinkled a brow and pouted,
        "White lies." I offered. "Who was hurt by them?"
        Here her face clouded and she looked down at her hands and at the wood floor.
        "Your stories first came to our attention when we noticed a large uptick in scholarship donations. Many were given in your name." She confessed.
        We stared at each other, and then we burst out laughing, then I started to cry.
        "That's why I have to apologize?"
        She nodded sympathetically.
        "Will you get to keep the money if I do, for someone else?" I asked.
        She shrugged.
        "I suppose so, no one will take back a donation."
   
        The time and place were fixed for my apology. An informal tea in the French parlor at the convent, with Sister Kathryn, the four social queens and their mothers on a Sunday afternoon. I was to host them all.
        I spent the entire weekend writing and trashing hundreds of apologies. But I couldn't figure out how to serve the brief and still win. I was spitting angry and tearfully frustrated at my hopeless situation when Sister Kathryn paid me a visit in my room, now a landscape of wadded paper balls. She looked at the tears rolling down my cheeks.
        "Having a hard time with it?" She asked of the obvious.
        I nodded and snorted.
        "I might be able to help you." She said.
        I looked at her, surprised and hopeful that there might be rescue.
        "I think you've lost sight of where this all started. It's always best to go back to the beginning." She smiled reassuringly. She handed me a handkerchief plucked from her sweater sleeve and left my room.
        Back to the beginning? How was that helpful? Where it all started? Back to the beginning? Then it hit me. Absolutely true and simple and to the point.
        I took a clean sheet of paper and wrote one sentence on it. Then I cleaned up my room.

        The French parlor was so called for the Louis quinze style gilt and brocade furnishings, the ornate portraiture on papered walls edged in mahogany wood, and Aubusson rugs. The room had an over done opulence that said money, once upon a time.
        The social niceties were observed that day, it was a finishing school after all, where we were taught how to ice our enemies in the nicest ways. Chit-chat, observations on the weather, it was southern California, so almost always nice, and the traffic, almost always bad. The mothers wore mink coats against the chill of their air conditioned Cadillacs. The furs were now laid on a settee with shapely legs in the corner, the fur turned in to monogrammed silk linings. Large carat weight diamonds winked on well manicured hands, like headlights, blinding when caught in the sunlight through tall windows.
        Suddenly I was on. The clink of sterling against china hushed, and I could feel hungry expectant eyes urging me on to the main attraction, my own humiliation. Maybe I imagined it, or in the reinvention of memory it's become more dramatic than it was, but it seemed like the moment in an epic battle where the hero must prove her metal to move on, or fall away to nothing. The many headed mother-daughter monster salivated in unseemly triumph before me. They saw me already smacked me down, the lying outlier who dared to take them on as equal, while they fed at my neck. Or maybe they just wanted to watch someone grovel, to make themselves feel superior. I'll never know.
        I smiled. I remember doing it because it made me feel less afraid once I had. I took the room in, this tribe of blonde women who hated me on general principal, and Sister Kathryn who I knew had my back, but wasn't allowed to show it lest it appear as favoritism, or, god forbid, pity.
        "I'm sorry for misleading my peers," I began, reading my prepared sentence. "But I didn't know how to respond when they asked me how much money my father made."
        It took a moment for it to sink in, for the diamonds to dim, for the mother's smiles of triumph to become forced and social, for the girls to begin imagining their own punishments for this compounded social comeuppance. It took everything I had not to be smug. They'd been hoist on their own petard. They'd assumed I didn't know how to play the game. But Sister Kathryn saved me. She showed me all the game pieces I had to play, and I didn't want to blow her rescue. I didn't want to be lessened in her esteem.
        It's funny to me now and rather charming that my revenge was so inventive. I see now that even in losing there was victory.  Story is a powerful tool. But the ability to shape narrative should never be taken lightly, nor fiction and feeling be allowed to supplant the truth. I know now that I was always worthy and need not have passed anyone's test, but then if none of that had happened, I wouldn't have had this story.




       
       

UPDATE: The Gold Stone Girl

Nine years ago I sat down to write a film script about women, our dreams and nightmares. It became three books, and then three audio-books, and now at last book one, It's a Nightmare, is a script. It's a cinematic story, a new world built on our own, that lends itself well to the visual medium.

I love this journey with Mina. She's hard and feisty, she does what it takes to make her dreams come true in an action adventure story with a female of color in the lead, without a gun!  Many lessons  have been learned and earned along this path. Mostly about honoring my own dreams and purging my nightmares

The script is a semi-finalist in the Series Fest/Rose McGowan Featuring Women Initiative 
Script Competition




and a quarter finalist in the Screen Craft China-Hollywood Screenwriting Fellowship



 It's a Nightmare is entered in a few other film/media competitions in the hope of  bringing Mina to the attention of potential partners. May this cautionary tale spread its roots into deep rich healthy loam.

Featured Novel: 'It's A Nightmare' by Nicole Quinn

http://www.fantascize.com/content.php?827-Featured-Novel-It-s-A-Nightmare-by-Nicole-Quinn

by 

Jake Vyper

Nicole Quinn's dystopian weird fantasy novel It's A Nightmare (Book 1 of The Gold Stone Girl series) tells the story of Mina, a rogue DreamWeaver who's born in the Off-grid of the Night Mare's Winkin City, a world, where human females are kept as cattle, and licensed as domestic pets. She's found inside a willow tree, alongside lygaeidae hibernating as larva. Mina lives the life of a human-breeder, who discovers that in order to survive, she must change everything.
Quinn believes that women need empowered role models; Mina's story was born at the Women's International Film Festival in Miami, Floida, 2008, where her group's film Racing Daylight won Best USA Feature.The trailer for the winning international documentary featured hundreds of colorful cloth bundles clogging a two river swirl, somewhere in India. The crawl on the screen informed the audience that the bundles weret he bodies of castoff baby girls. That was the moment that made her wonder how she might tell the story, so when the mother throws her bundled baby girl into the water, it's to save her life. Quinn wondered how she might use this story to begin a deeper conversation about the gender war escalating in the world everyday. 

Interview with Nicole Quinn

What do you think is the most powerful message you're sending through your works? And how do you portray it in "It's a Nightmare"?

That apathy is complicit. That women have better things to do than fight for their rights to be human, but if you drag us into this fray, expect a battle like you've never imagined. Ecology has been feminized and legislated, reproduction has been feminized and legislated, women's labor has been trivialized, and everyday advertising, which turns women's bodies into products, has set us on a dangerous path to dehumanization. I want humans to know that we're walking it. 


Mina is a reluctant hero, but she also cannot believe herself worthless, no matter how much society tells her otherwise. Mina has a strong female role model in Dee-Dee, who, like Mina, had a non-traditional way of finding home.

Why do you describe your novel as "Feminist"?

The dictionary definition of "feminism" is: the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic quality to men.

But I think I've become more of a humanist, as it seems to be the ultimate goal of feminism, by definition. No, maybe a planet-ist, that might be the more accurate aspiration. As Earth's mega-fauna of the moment, we humans, collectively, are heedless of the rights of the planet's other species, living, and maybe living in a way that we cannot yet quantify.

My work is inherently feminist, a female protagonist on a hero's journey. All of my writing passes the Bechdel test, more than two women who talk to each other, about something other than a man.The Gold Stone Girl series is a cautionary tale about how easy it has become to trivialize women, asbitches and whores, as commodities in popular culture. A slippery slope to reclassification as abominations, as witches, as happened in the witch atrocities 1484-1750 a.d., an era which codified the rape culture in which we currently live. How small a step it is to breeder, no longer human, but 3/5 human, as the American slaves were classified, in an effort to rationalize that horror.


How do you portray the "gender war" in your story? 

Human females are owned by the Night Mare's government-church. They are leased and licensed as domestic pets, or as sex workers in the Public Herd, or as bait for the Night Mare's monster shows. Throughout the series the Night Mare explains why she chose to demean her own gender, and exactly how she accomplished this subjugation, all of it just a whisper away from our present day.

Here's the trailer of the documentary film that inspired Quinn's book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISme5-9orR0

cover of book 2

Were you influenced by Jane Austen's works in some way? 

Absolutely. She wrote about women confined by the parameters of a restrictive world,and its laws. She understood that she was not property, and that she was. All of her heroines marry in the end, but with the radical notion thatthey did it on their own terms. She was dreaming a different world, aworld of partnerships, between acknowledged equals, radical, feminist.

It sounds like the world you developed is surreal, and you said that you've established rules that we might consider "outlandish". Could you tell us some of those rules? 

All fantasy is outlandish, and yet if we make a world where the rules make sense inside that world, anything is possible.

In Winkin City everyone travels by screen, portals of energy that deliver information, and act as teleportation units. The screen feed is gathered by Paps, named for the ancient paparazzi, originally a character in a Fellini film. The Night Mare's Paps are random boy babies selected at birth to have camera lenses implanted where their eyes once were. Their tongues are removed to improve their focus.

In Blinkin all girls are circumcised and branded, rules that may seem outlandish, until Boko Haram kidnaps 200 girls and gets away with, until they kidnap 100 more women and children and no body cares. Outlandish, is really in-landish, just nudged slightly to the extreme.

What exactly are Dreamweavers and Dream Drifters? And how are they significant to the plot of your novel? 
In the 27th century the rulers, an oil baron and the pharma kings, blow a hole in the side of the planet which precipitates the Great Collapse of Earth's seven continents. When the waters ebbed the half planet continent of Blinkin was what remained, and with it came a new polarity, the Night Mare and the Dream Weaver. The Night Mare co-opted her opposite and she now rules the day and the night.

A Dream Weaver has the ability to make her dreams come true, to travel into them, and to dream for others. A dream is possibility free floating, anyone might catch them, which is why they are outlawed in the Night Mare's Blinkin.

Dream Drifters are heron headed thugs, imported from off-planet to rid the Night Mare's Winkin City of dreams. They're as tall as three men standing on each other's shoulders. Drifters have four foot splintered beaks, scrawny arms, and bird claw hands. They wear sunshades to hide their dream addict eyes, and smelly wool overcoats that drag on the ground. Dream Drifters smell like wet towels left to mildew in the dank and dark. Drifters are the personal guard of the Night Mare herself. Allergic to the the fruit of the planet, Dream Drifters are outlawed from its consumption, to prevent them from growing to ginormous size and rampaging, but that doesn't stop it from happening, because most things in Blinkin are a nightmare. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Get 'It's A Nightmare on Amazon now

Almost delivered!

Editing and proofing audio files, the last slog to the finish.  

Lewy Body dementia - It's a Nightmare

My papa has Lewy Body dementia.  Hallucinations, Rem sleep disorder, Parkinsons disease symptoms, and vascular blindness.  This is what Robin Williams had to look forward to, and he may have already been experiencing some of the indicators.

Maybe he'd already injured someone, a loved one, while acting out dramatic and/or violent dreams while asleep.  Maybe his hallucinations were occupying more and more of his waking life.  Many with Lewy Body are drug intolerant, experiencing every side effect on the label, and those drugs that normally help with psychotic behavior can push someone with Lewy Body even further into psychosis.

I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that my father put a hospital nurse in the e.r. He's punched, bitten, and hurled himself out of his wheel chair, crept along the floor on all fours to escape a war zone, climbed onto night tables to signal incoming planes, all to escape and/or combat the villains in his dreams, who are in reality caregivers and family members.  What I envisioned as shepherding my father to the end of days has become a daily prayer for release.

Knowing what I know now about Lewy Body dementia and its impact on the entire family, I think that Robin Williams may have taken the graceful way out, for more than just himself.

*Lewy body dementia, Parkinsons dementia, and Vascular dementia are cousins.  The difference is in the way they present -  physical first then dementia, dementia and physical onset simultaneously, etc.

About 20% of all diagnosed dementias are Lewy Body.

Autopsy: Robin Williams had Lewy body dementia

The hallucination-causing disease may have contributed to his decision to commit suicide

http://www.salon.com/2014/11/13/autopsy_robin_williams_had_lewy_body_dementia/

Robin Williams (Credit: AP/Dan Steinberg)

According to his official autopsy, actor and comedian Robin Williams had a disease calledLewy body dementia (LBD), which may have contributed to his decision to kill himself.

People with LBD have dementia and often appear disoriented. According to ABC News, Williams had displayed odd behavior in his final days — notably, he kept several watches in a sock and was “concerned about keeping the watches safe.”

“The dementia usually leads to significant cognitive impairment that interferes with everyday life,” said Angela Taylor, programming director of the Lewy Body Dementia Association in an interview with ABC News. Still, symptoms are hard to spot. “If you didn’t know them you may not realize anything is wrong.”

LBD is fairly common, with 1.3 million people suffering from the illness in the United States, although it largely remains undiagnosed since it shares symptoms with better-known diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Biologically, the disease stems from abnormal protein deposits in the brain stem where they stop the production of dopamine. In LBD, the deposits spread throughout the brain, including to the cerebral cortex (responsible for problem solving and perception). The main symptom is progressive dementia, although people with the disease may also experience complicated visual hallucinations that could include smells and sounds, trouble sleeping, changes in attention and symptoms generally associated with Parkinson’s disease (which Williams also had).

Typically, patients are diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease first, and then LBD symptoms begin to appear. An examination of Williams’ brain revealed that it had undergone changes associated with Alzheimer’s, in addition to Parkinson’s and LBD.

“Though his death is terribly sad,” Taylor said, “it’s a good opportunity to inform people about this disease and the importance of early diagnosis.”

Joanna Rothkopf is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on science, health and society. Follow @JoannaRothkopf or email jrothkopf@salon.com.

Seeds of Suffrage

It makes sense

Love this Amazon customer review!

Thanks so much for it, Merrick Hansen!

 breath-stealing masterpiece, October 26, 2014

By 

Merrick Hansen - See all my reviews

This review is from: It's a Nightmare (The Gold Stone Girl) (Volume 1) (Paperback)

This novel has me hooked. Quinn manages to take science fiction and fantasy, familiar post-apocalyptic themes, and blend them into something indescribably breathtaking. It's like a trip down the rabbit hole. The very first scene had my heart pounding, and I don't think that feeling subsided. I read this all in one day and I feel like I'm still lingering in the world Quinn so masterfully created. Honestly more fantastic than the more popular YA series I have read and seen turned into movies, I hope Quinn's series garners so much more attention and soon. I feel honored to have read this novel and I'll be spreading it like wildfire! This world of dreams and nightmares is absolutely unforgettable.

Think about it...

Every day women and girls are taught to hate themselves.  How many corporations would fail if we didn't believe the advertising?

The power to dream it a new way is yours.

Ever wonder about the seeds of Suffrage?

http://www.sallyroeschwagner.com/lectures/sisters-in-spirit/



photo credit: http://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/clanmothers.html

DISBELIEF

Thanks to Caitlin Quinn and Laurie Giardino for their artistry and photo shop skills.

Melissa Leo's Review - It's a Nightmare

What a journey I have gone on!....swallowing in great greedy gulps like one of your demon types all your long hard work!....wow!....fun fascinating and informative!......really well done ...like things that have big play in the world ...and yet deeper and better....and what happens beyond plunging into disbelief?.???......I know you are headed there now!....so very proud to know you!....thank you..and I indeed adore deedee....what a chance to teach the lessons she teaches...I will hope for the day!

Why They Kill Their Newborns

New York Times

November 2, 1997, Sunday 

Section: Magazine Desk

Why They Kill Their Newborns
By Steven Pinker

Killing your baby. what could be more depraved? For a woman to destroy the fruit of her womb would seem like an ultimate violation of the natural order. But every year, hundreds of women commit neonaticide: they kill their newborns or let them die. Most neonaticides remain undiscovered, but every once in a while a janitor follows a trail of blood to a tiny body in a trash bin, or a woman faints and doctors find the remains of a placenta inside her.

Two cases have recently riveted the American public. Last November, Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson, 18-year-old college sweethearts, delivered their baby in a motel room and, according to prosecutors, killed him and left his body in a Dumpster. They will go on trial for murder next year and, if convicted, could be sentenced to death. In June, another 18-year-old, Melissa Drexler, arrived at her high-school prom, locked herself in a bathroom stall, gave birth to a boy and left him dead in a garbage can. Everyone knows what happened next: she touched herself up and returned to the dance floor. In September, a grand jury indicted her for murder.

How could they do it? Nothing melts the heart like a helpless baby. Even a biologist's cold calculations tell us that nurturing an offspring that carries our genes is the whole point of our existence. Neonaticide, many think, could be only a product of pathology. The psychiatrists uncover childhood trauma. The defense lawyers argue temporary psychosis. The pundits blame a throwaway society, permissive sex education and, of course, rock lyrics.

But it's hard to maintain that neonaticide is an illness when we learn that it has been practiced and accepted in most cultures throughout history. And that neonaticidal women do not commonly show signs of psychopathology. In a classic 1970 study of statistics of child killing, a psychiatrist, Phillip Resnick, found that mothers who kill their older children are frequently psychotic, depressed or suicidal, but mothers who kill their newborns are usually not. (It was this difference that led Resnick to argue that the category infanticide be split into neonaticide, the killing of a baby on the day of its birth, and filicide, the killing of a child older than one day. )

Killing a baby is an immoral act, and we often express our outrage at the immoral by calling it a sickness. But normal human motives are not always moral, and neonaticide does not have to be a product of malfunctioning neural circuitry or a dysfunctional upbringing. We can try to understand what would lead a mother to kill her newborn, remembering that to understand is not necessarily to forgive.

Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, both psychologists, argue that a capacity for neonaticide is built into the biological design of our parental emotions. Mammals are extreme among animals in the amount of time, energy and food they invest in their young, and humans are extreme among mammals. Parental investment is a limited resource, and mammalian mothers must ''decide'' whether to allot it to their newborn or to their current and future offspring. If a newborn is sickly, or if its survival is not promising, they may cut their losses and favor the healthiest in the litter or try again later on.

In most cultures, neonaticide is a form of this triage. Until very recently in human evolutionary history, mothers nursed their children for two to four years before becoming fertile again. Many children died, especially in the perilous first year. Most women saw no more than two or three of their children survive to adulthood, and many did not see any survive. To become a grandmother, a woman had to make hard choices. In most societies documented by anthropologists, including those of hunter-gatherers (our best glimpse into our ancestors' way of life), a woman lets a newborn die when its prospects for survival to adulthood are poor. The forecast might be based on abnormal signs in the infant, or on bad circumstances for successful motherhood at the time -- she might be burdened with older children, beset by war or famine or without a husband or social support. Moreover, she might be young enough to try again.

We are all descendants of women who made the difficult decisions that allowed them to become grandmothers in that unforgiving world, and we inherited that brain circuitry that led to those decisions. Daly and Wilson have shown that the statistics on neonaticide in contemporary North America parallel those in the anthropological literature. The women who sacrifice their offspring tend to be young, poor, unmarried and socially isolated.

Natural selection cannot push the buttons of behavior directly; it affects our behavior by endowing us with emotions that coax us toward adaptive choices. New mothers have always faced a choice between a definite tragedy now and the possibility of an even greater tragedy months or years later, and that choice is not to be taken lightly. Even today, the typical rumination of a depressed new mother -- how will I cope with this burden? -- is a legitimate concern. The emotional response called bonding is also far more complex than the popular view, in which a woman is imprinted with a lifelong attachment to her baby if they interact in a critical period immediately following the baby's birth. A new mother will first coolly assess the infant and her current situation and only in the next few days begin to see it as a unique and wonderful individual. Her love will gradually deepen in ensuing years, in a trajectory that tracks the increasing biological value of a child (the chance that it will live to produce grandchildren) as the child proceeds through the mine field of early development.

Even when a mother in a hunter-gatherer society hardens her heart to sacrifice a newborn, her heart has not turned to stone. Anthropologists who interview these women (or their relatives, since the event is often too painful for the woman to discuss) discover that the women see the death as an unavoidable tragedy, grieve at the time and remember the child with pain all their lives. Even the supposedly callous Melissa Drexler agonized over a name for her dead son and wept at his funeral. (Initial reports that, after giving birth, she requested a Metallica song from the deejay and danced with her boyfriend turned out to be false.)

Many cultural practices are designed to distance people's emotions from a newborn until its survival seems probable. Full personhood is often not automatically granted at birth, as we see in our rituals of christening and the Jewish bris. And yet the recent neonaticides still seem puzzling. These are middle-class girls whose babies would have been kept far from starvation by the girls' parents or by any of thousands of eager adoptive couples. But our emotions, fashioned by the slow hand of natural selection, respond to the signals of the long-vanished tribal environment in which we spent 99 percent of our evolutionary history. Being young and single are two bad omens for successful motherhood, and the girl who conceals her pregnancy and procrastinates over its consequences will soon be disquieted by a third omen. She will give birth in circumstances that are particularly unpromising for a human mother: alone.

In hunter-gatherer societies, births are virtually always assisted because human anatomy makes birth (especially the first one) long, difficult and risky. Older women act as midwives, emotional supports and experienced appraisers who help decide whether the infant should live. Wenda Trevathan, an anthropologist and trained midwife, has studied pelvises of human fossils and concluded that childbirth has been physically tortuous, and therefore probably assisted, for millions of years. Maternal feelings may be adapted to a world in which a promising newborn is heralded with waves of cooing and clucking and congratulating. Those reassuring signals are absent from a secret birth in a motel room or a bathroom stall.

So what is the mental state of a teen-age mother who has kept her pregnancy secret? She is immature enough to have hoped that her pregnancy would go away by itself, her maternal feelings have been set at zero and she suddenly realizes she is in big trouble. Sometimes she continues to procrastinate. In September, 17-year-old Shanta Clark gave birth to a premature boy and kept him hidden in her bedroom closet, as if he were E.T., for 17 days. She fed him before and after she went to school until her mother discovered him. The weak cry of the preemie kept him from being discovered earlier. (In other cases, girls have panicked over the crying and, in stifling the cry, killed the baby.)

Most observers sense the desperation that drives a woman to neonaticide. Prosecutors sometimes don't prosecute; juries rarely convict; those found guilty almost never go to jail. Barbara Kirwin, a forensic psychologist, reports that in nearly 300 cases of women charged with neonaticide in the United States and Britain, no woman spent more than a night in jail. In Europe, the laws of several countries prescribed less-severe penalties for neonaticide than for adult homicides. The fascination with the Grossberg-Peterson case comes from the unusual threat of the death penalty. Even those in favor of capital punishment might shudder at the thought of two reportedly nice kids being strapped to gurneys and put to death.

But our compassion hinges on the child, not just on the mother. Killers of older children, no matter how desperate, evoke little mercy. Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who sent her two sons, 14 months and 3 years old, to watery deaths, is in jail, unmourned, serving a life sentence. The leniency shown to neonaticidal mothers forces us to think the unthinkable and ask if we, like many societies and like the mothers themselves, are not completely sure whether a neonate is a full person.

It seems obvious that we need a clear boundary to confer personhood on a human being and grant it a right to life. Otherwise, we approach a slippery slope that ends in the disposal of inconvenient people or in grotesque deliberations on the value of individual lives. But the endless abortion debate shows how hard it is to locate the boundary. Anti-abortionists draw the line at conception, but that implies we should shed tears every time an invisible conceptus fails to implant in the uterus -- and, to carry the argument to its logical conclusion, that we should prosecute for murder anyone who uses an IUD. Those in favor of abortion draw the line at viability, but viability is a fuzzy gradient that depends on how great a risk of an impaired child the parents are willing to tolerate. The only thing both sides agree on is that the line must be drawn at some point before birth.

Neonaticide forces us to examine even that boundary. To a biologist, birth is as arbitrary a milestone as any other. Many mammals bear offspring that see and walk as soon as they hit the ground. But the incomplete 9-month-old human fetus must be evicted from the womb before its outsize head gets too big to fit through its mother's pelvis. The usual primate assembly process spills into the first years in the world. And that complicates our definition of personhood.

What makes a living being a person with a right not to be killed? Animal-rights extremists would seem to have the easiest argument to make: that all sentient beings have a right to life. But champions of that argument must conclude that delousing a child is akin to mass murder; the rest of us must look for an argument that draws a smaller circle. Perhaps only the members of our own species, Homo sapiens, have a right to life? But that is simply chauvinism; a person of one race could just as easily say that people of another race have no right to life.

No, the right to life must come, the moral philosophers say, from morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess. One such trait is having a unique sequence of experiences that defines us as individuals and connects us to other people. Other traits include an ability to reflect upon ourselves as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death and to express the choice not to die. And there's the rub: our immature neonates don't possess these traits any more than mice do.

Several moral philosophers have concluded that neonates are not persons, and thus neonaticide should not be classified as murder. Michael Tooley has gone so far as to say that neonaticide ought to be permitted during an interval after birth. Most philosophers (to say nothing of nonphilosophers) recoil from that last step, but the very fact that there can be a debate about the personhood of neonates, but no debate about the personhood of older children, makes it clearer why we feel more sympathy for an Amy Grossberg than for a Susan Smith.

So how do you provide grounds for outlawing neonaticide? The facts don't make it easy. Some philosophers suggest that people intuitively see neonates as so similar to older babies that you couldn't allow neonaticide without coarsening the way people treat children and other people in general. Again, the facts say otherwise. Studies in both modern and hunter-gatherer societies have found that neonaticidal women don't kill anyone but their newborns, and when they give birth later under better conditions, they can be devoted, loving mothers.

The laws of biology were not kind to Amy Grossberg and Melissa Drexler, and they are not kind to us as we struggle to make moral sense of the teen-agers' actions. One predicament is that our moral system needs a crisp inauguration of personhood, but the assembly process for Homo sapiens is gradual, piecemeal and uncertain. Another problem is that the emotional circuitry of mothers has evolved to cope with this uncertain process, so the baby killers turn out to be not moral monsters but nice, normal (and sometimes religious) young women. These are dilemmas we will probably never resolve, and any policy will leave us with uncomfortable cases. We will most likely muddle through, keeping birth as a conspicuous legal boundary but showing mercy to the anguished girls who feel they had no choice but to run afoul of it.

This article was published in the New York Times - I did not write it, and and I am not making a profit off of the article. - Nicole -

The Stone Ridge Library welcomes Nicole Quinn

The Stone Ridge Library welcomes Nicole Quinn who will read from her newest work, It's a Nightmare, on Monday, Nov. 3 at 6:30 p.m. in the Reference Room. It's a Nightmare is the first in the Gold Stone Trilogy set a million years in the future. Quinn will introduce her characters – polar opposites Dream Weaver and Night Mare, as they battle to prevail in their one-continent world of Blinkin. All are welcome. For information, contact the Library Program Office at 687-8726.


Merrick of Literature Typeface Review!

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Now let me say that my roommate is a YA fantasy fanatic.  This girl cannot pick up a book in Barnes & Noble without it inadvertently being a YA fantasy series.  Nicole Quinn’s It’s a Nightmare (The Gold Stone Girl 1)is far better than any of those books I have seen my roommate pick up and I have heard far less about it.  How crazy is that?  So in my effort to let people know how frakking fantastic this one was, I’m going to start this out by saying: you have to read this book.  It is the epitome of a page turner.  From the first scene (which literally had my heart pounding), I couldn’t stop reading.  I finished the book in a single day and I don’t regret a moment of it.

It’s a Nightmare follows young Mina through a world where women are categorized as “breeders,” inhuman creatures, cattle.  Although they are women as we know them, they are the victims of a tyrannical society where rape culture has become a monstrosity I can’t even begin to explain.  Women, and the multi-species society in general are taught lessons that I cannot even begin to understand, but sadly enough is not far from modern rape culture (think aliens, tentacle monsters, bird people, and the Night Mare herself, who is actually a demon and just so happens to be the tyrant in charge).  Women are considered breeding stock, men are their masters, and ironically enough a demon woman runs the whole show, suppressing individuals ability to dream, think, even look people in the eye.  It is actually a nightmare, a completely twisted, dystopian, frightening version of all the worst scenarios you can imagine humanity spinning into.

However, as bleak as this sounds, Mina is hope.  She is hope personified, born not of this strange and horrific world.  Mina is Born of Tree, found born within a willow tree by Dee-Dee, who raises her as her own and tries to shelter her from the horrifying truths of city life not far outside their doorstep.  Dee-Dee and Bubba raise Mina “Off-grid,” outside the city of Winkin where individuals are compartmentalized and categorized and indoctrinated into the Night Mare’s twisted version of society.

Mina is a mystery — she thinks for herself, and has the uncanny ability to teleport through space in times of stress, to “dream” herself elsewhere, to invade other dreams, and she doesn’t know why.  She knows she was born of a tree, found wrapped in a mossy cocoon and rescued from her cocoon by Dee-Dee and Bubba, but she doesn’t understand why she is different.

This novel follows Mina through Girl School, where girls are indoctrinated and taught to submit, and when she is evicted from Girl School after a supernaturally charged incident (with butterflies — nothing says magical wood nymph like butterflies), she is taken headlong into a fate-driven journey.  She is chosen, later on, to serve the Night Mare herself, to mate with the Night Mare’s only son, and then empowered in the realization that she is the Night Mare’s only equal, her enemy, fated to change the world they live in.

This is fantasy, destiny, and a headlong trip into a world that’s strangely different but not at all different from our own.  This is quite honestly a breathtaking novel, an amazing start to a series that’s sure to turn heads and produce films and become a powerhouse of its own.

It is an absolute must read for all YA fantasy enthusiasts.  If I could I’d hand out copies of it to all those I see browsing the YA sections of Barnes & Noble.  It’s honestly just that good — and this is coming from a guy who really doesn’t ever read YA.

Nicole Quinn, I’m rooting for this novel so, so hard!