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corvidcall · 8 months

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So, I didn't like the book "Abolish the Family" by Sophie Lewis very much

(Or, "wow, Corv, how did you manage to write over 5k words about a book that's got less than 100 pages?")

I read Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation by Sophie Lewis and I.... well, to be gentle, I did not much care for it. And to be less gentle, I thought it was hot nonsense, and I kind of wanted to just put my thoughts down about it somewhere.

I picked up the book because I was curious about family abolition. I actually heard Sophie Lewis on a podcast ages ago, and I've seen some posts on Tumblr from people talking about family abolition, but I hadn't really heard it argued in full. I had some immediate concerns when I heard about! I mean, I agree that it's pretty fucked up to offload all the responsibility of caring for people who cannot care for themselves onto their families, which both enables abuse and also leaves people who don't have families shit out of luck. But what's the alternative? I assume it's not advocating for just letting all children run loose in the streets, but I don't know what it IS advocating for. If all children are to be raised collectively by the community, how will unique cultures and heritages be passed down? The way I see it, either we have diverse communities, and nobody gets to pass down history and culture and religious practices that are applicable to them but not to everyone (so either the white children in this community have as much claim to participating in the practices of, say, Native American tribes as any Native child, OR these practices are just dissolved entirely), or all these communities must be racially segregated. And isn't "abolishing families" what colonizing governments did to their native populations, when they forced their children to attend state-run residential schools? Are you just advocating that but for all children?

But these are concerns raised by someone who has only heard the name, really, and it's silly to get very mad trying to argue against what you imagine something to be without ever investigating what it actually is. That's not the kind of person I want to be! And surely someone who spends a lot of time thinking about and writing about this concept would have been able to anticipate my incredibly obvious and uninformed complaints about it. (In the same way that anyone advocating for police abolition MUST have an answer for the obvious "but then who will stop all the murderers?" question that people immediately respond with). I picked up this book in particular because, hey, it's a MANIFESTO! That must be the most distilled version of the idea, so surely it will answer my questions and tell me what I wanted to know!

I, uh. I was wrong.

Before I get started with a lot of my thoughts about the actual book, I do want to say that this is not really a refutation of the idea of family abolition, so much as a complaint that this one book is incredibly poorly argued. I have heard compelling arguments for family abolition, and I am, at the very least, sympathetic to the idea. I was honestly coming into this hoping to be convinced by it, so I think it's kind of shocking how unconvincing this book was!

OKAY with all my scenes set and my disclaimers made, let's get into the good stuff.

Abolish the Family is a very short book (122 pages, the last 30 pages of which are footnotes), and is broken up into 4 chapters. I'm just going to go chapter by chapter chronologically, although I could probably go in any order, as I don't feel like they really build on each other well.

1. But I Love My Family!

Lewis opens the book by arguing why families are bad: they are the means by which society privatizes care (as I said earlier!), they perpetuate capitalist hegemony, they foster environments under which abuse can flourish. I don't really have any refutations to these points, but I feel like me trying to summarize them here makes them come across as better argued than they are. Lewis makes a lot of assumptions about the readers immediate willingness to agree with her, in my opinion. She imagines we will try to argue that we love our families, which is, admittedly, one of my first arguments. "But loving one's family in spite of a 'hard childhood' is pretty typical of the would-be family abolitionist," Lewis insists, "She may, for instance, sense in her gut that she and her family members aren't good for each other, while also loving them."

I suppose that is true, but when I object to the idea by saying that I love my family, I mean that I enjoy being around them and I think my life is frequently better for them being in it. My mom is one of my best friends, and one of the only adults in my life who cared about and tried to accommodate my disabilities. It's weird to me that the only real response to this objection is for Lewis to go “sure, you love your family, but you can admit they're bad people!” I could admit that, but I don't think it's true! And if I did think that was true, you wouldn't really have to be arguing to convince me, would you? I would already be agreeing with you.

Personally, I always struggle a little with the idea that you can “love” someone but not “like” them, or that you can “like” being around someone but not really “love” them. A lot of that, of course, is that there is no consistent definition of what love means, and I'm autistic, so these things that seem very instinctual to others are occasionally a little inscrutable to me. Lewis attempts to define loving another person as ”[struggling] for their autonomy as well as their immersion in care, insofar such abundance is possible in a world choked by capital.“ Using this definition, she suggests that a mother who REALLY loved their children would not seek to have any particularly special relationship with their child on the basis of being their ”real“ mother, and that you, as a child (”assuming you grew up in a nuclear household“, which is a parenthetical that's doing a LOT of heavy lifting, if you ask me), surely noticed how lonely and isolated your mother was, being confined to the home, so you should all understand that family abolition is truly the more ”loving“ option, as opposed to perpetuating the family structure.

My problem with this argument is that... well, none of these things were true about my mom? She did not ”restrict the number of mothers (of any gender) to which [I] had access.“ When my father got remarried, she was delighted there would be more people in my life to love and care for me. And I most certainly did not sense her loneliness and isolation, because she was neither lonely nor isolated. And I very much did not grow up in a nuclear family, as my parents divorced when I was still in preschool. All of the things Lewis is suggesting as reasons for abolishing the family are things that were achieved for me within the family, and without any special effort on the part of anyone. So why should I support abolition, as opposed to, say, better social safety nets or something? If you were arguing that we need to eliminate mosquitoes to stop the spread of malaria, the fact that you can get vaccinated against malaria WITHOUT eliminating all mosquitoes kind of undercuts your argument, doesn't it? Even if I agree the problems you've pointed out are bad, you haven't convinced me that yours is the best solution.

I also found that the way that Lewis brings up the issue of abuse comes across as kind of... callous, I guess? It's brought up as more of a gotcha towards people who think that families aren't inherently evil, as opposed to a real concern that she actually has compassion towards and is seeking to solve. Lewis writes, "The family is where most of the rape happens on this earth, and most of the murder. No one is likelier to rob, bully, blackmail, manipulate, or hit you, or inflict unwanted touch, than family. Logically, announcing an intention to “treat you like family” ... ought to register as a horrible threat." And that's about all she has to say on the subject of abuse, beyond one name drop of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, an English 6-year-old who was murdered by his parents during the COVID lockdowns (which, frankly, I found both a little inappropriate to mention, and not even a good example of the thing Lewis is complaining about. The abuse this child was experiencing at the hands of his father and his father's girlfriend was reported by both his grandmother and his uncle, but social services chose not to investigate. While he was abused and subsequently killed by his family, his family also attempted to save him. So it's a little weird to use this as an argument for family abolition and for having some sort of government/non-family body be in charge of the safety and well-being of children, if you ask me.) It just strikes me as weirdly uncaring, to bring up the subject of abuse only in response to a common piece of advertising copy. "Oh, Olive Garden says 'when you're here, you're family'? Well, sometimes families rape each other. Betcha didn't think about that!" Like, yeah, Sophie, I guess I didn't. You owned me, with facts and logic. Congrats.

2. Abolish Which Family?

I'm gonna be honest, it's very possible that this chapter went a little over my head. I like to think I'm decently smart and whatnot, but I really couldn't parse some of the points of this chapter.

Lewis states that her purpose in this chapter is to argue why families must be ABOLISHED, and not reformed or expanded, and why THE FAMILY needs to be abolished, and not just "the white family" or "the bourgeois family". She starts off by bringing up what she imagines some of the criticisms to family abolition might be: do you really want to talk about families the same way we talk about things like prisons or police? How can we talk about "abolishing the family" for colonized people, like Palestine, when the occupying genocidal power has already pre-abolished the indigenous family? Isn't this just asking queer people to surrender their hard-won family rights to hospital visitation? "As you can see, I’m semi-fluent—almost impassioned— when it comes to reeling out points against becoming a partisan of “family abolition.”" Lewis writes, "They are compelling, these counterarguments, even to me."

But she doesn't really refute any of these points? At least, not directly, which seems odd, given that she introduced the chapter by bringing them up. Most of this chapter is a lot of Lewis quoting other writers, who were writing about how Black motherhood is "as radical and revolutionary, as spiritual and transformative" (Jennifer Nash), and "Black mothering is queer" (Alexis Pauline Gumbs). I have no problems with Black writers exploring the ways in which the Black family is fundamentally different from the White family, or in finding power and beauty in that. But I do think it's a little odd for Lewis, a White woman writing about how families ought to be abolished, to spend so much of this book talking about how Black mothers are so important and wonderful? I thought families were bad? I think the point she's trying to make, both with this section and her later transition back into talking about how families should not be, is that Black families are already inherently aligned with family abolition, as they exist outside of the societal ideal of "the family", which is White. But it still strikes me as odd, to take a long diversion to deify the figure of a Black matriarch before going back to talking about how it's bad that women feel like they must be mothers. Do we want them to be mothers or don't we?

Anyway, if anyone else has read this book and can come up with a more coherent thesis for this chapter in particular, let me know. It's definitely the one I struggled with the most.

3. A Potted History of Family Abolitionism

In this chapter, Lewis lists every prominent writer that has written in support of family abolition (by her own metrics, as some of them did not identify themselves or their political pursuits to be attempting to abolish the family). This was honestly my favorite chapter of the book! A lot of the people she listed sounded very cool, and I will be reading more from some of them. I'm not going to talk about everyone Lewis mentions in this chapter, but I will go through a few of the ones I had the most to say about:

Charles Fourier

A French philosopher from the late 18th/early 19th century, he is the man who coined the word "feminism" and wrote about utopias (including insisting that, in his imagined utopia, the seas would lose their salinity and turn to lemonade. So I'm gonna put his ideas of utopias in the "maybe" pile). He imagined a world in which people lived in "phalanxes" of 1600 people, with universal basic income, covered walkways to protect from bad whether, a guaranteed sexual pleasure minimum, and communal kitchens, where all cooking and eating would be done by everyone. Lewis refers to some of these ideas as "unquestionable sensible" (particularly the removal of private kitchens in favor of communal cooking), and I, personally, DO question how sensible the idea is, actually! This is an incredibly common talking point amongst my fellow radical leftists of all stripes, to which I always want to respond with: have you ever known anyone with a severe allergy, or dietary restrictions, or an eating disorder, or or or or? I have ARFID, and there are very few things I can eat. Are we going to require the entire community change their diets to match mine, or, under this utopian society where I am not allowed access to a kitchen for only my food, am I simply not allowed to eat? Given how hostile people are to those with peanut allergies, even when it does not impact them in the slightest, I find it hard to believe that everyone would be happy never using peanuts in their cooking ever again when someone with an allergy joins the community. Maybe it makes me an unforgivable lib or something, but I don't believe capitalism is the sole reason behind man's unkindness to man, and I don't believe it will disappear after we build communism.

I also have some concerns about this supposed "guaranteed sexual pleasure minimum", but it doesn't seem like Lewis is going out of her way to defend that part, so I suppose I will have to let it slide in service of brevity. Which I know is funny to say, considering how long the rest of this post is. But, well, you decided to read it, so this is at least partially on you.

The Queer Indigenous and Maroon Nineteenth Century

This part's good! Lewis talks a lot about how, pre-colonization, Indigenous tribes did not organize property along the lines of the biological family, and the idea of "the family" was something that was imposed upon them by colonization. Taking property ownership out of the hands of the collective and putting it under the control of the heads of households - which is to say, men in general and husbands/fathers in specific - was a way for colonizing governments to dissolve the tribal identity. In this way, family abolition is actually a protection AGAINST colonialism, because it would be allowing people to return to ways of structuring communities that were not imposed by the colonizers.

Lewis goes on to talk about the similar experience of the people newly emancipated from chattel slavery in the U.S. Given the circumstances under which slaves were forced to live, the structure that we recognize as "the family" was not available to them, and once slavery was abolished, former slaves did not immediately organize themselves along family lines, and retained “diversity of relationship and family structures greater than their white contemporaries on farms or in factories" (Lewis quoting M.E. O'Brien). Lewis adds, "But the American state’s policing of the post-Reconstruction Black marital bed laid the basis for twentieth-century welfare officers’ “man-in-the-house” rule, which denied benefits to any mother caught “living” (even just for a couple of hours) with a member of the opposite sex. If you, a Black woman, had a “man in the house” of any kind, the law declared, then that man, not the state, ought to be the one paying your child support."

Overall, I thought this section was great! Very informative. Wish the whole book was like this.

Wages for Housework and the National Welfare Rights Organization

This is my favorite section in the whole book. While I don't think that Lewis herself adds much to the discussion, I do think that everything mentioned and quoted in this section is incredibly good and compelling. She first discusses the Wages for Housework movement in Italy which was, as the name would suggest, demanding financial compensation for the household labor traditionally expected of women. “They say it is love,“ Wages for Housework said, ”We say it is unwaged work.“ To quote Lewis:

”Pointedly, they did not deny that unwaged childcare, eldercare, housekeeping, sex, emotional labor, wifehood, might be a manifestation of love. Rather, the militants argued that “nothing so effectively stifles our lives as the transformation into work of the activities and relations that satisfy our desires.” Put differently: the fact that caring for a private home under capitalism often is an expression of loving desire, while at the same time being life-choking work, is precisely the problem. That the “they” of the dictum—bosses, husbands, dads—are not wrong about this illustrates the insidiousness of the violence care-workers encounter (and mete out) in the family-form. It’s the reason paid and unpaid domestics, and paid and unpaid mothers, still have to fight just to be seen as workers."

Meanwhile, in America, and frequently in collaboration with Wages for Housework, the late 1960's saw the formation of the National Welfare Rights Organization, which at its peak represented as many as one hundred thousand people, the majority of which were Black women, agitating for reforming America's welfare infrastructure. One of its founding members was Johnnie Tillmon, a self-described "middle-aged, poor, fat, Black woman on welfare," who said, in an article for Ms. magazine in 1972:

"For a lot of middle-class women in this country, Women’s Liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare, it’s a matter of survival. ... [Welfare] is the most prejudiced institution in this country, even more than marriage, which it tries to imitate…. A.F.D.C. (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) says if there is an “able-bodied” man around, then you can’t be on welfare. If the kids are going to eat, and the man can’t get a job, then he’s got to go. Welfare is like a super-sexist marriage. You trade in a man for the man. But you can’t divorce him if he treats you bad. He can divorce you, of course, cut you off anytime he wants. But in that case, he keeps the kids, not you. The man runs everything. In ordinary marriage, sex is supposed to be for your husband. On AFDC, you’re not supposed to have any sex at all. You give up control of your own body. It’s a condition of aid. You may even have to agree to get your tubes tied so you can never have more children just to avoid being cut off welfare."

At a time when most feminists were focusing on getting more women into the workplace, Tillmon and her comrades were demanding the freedom to NOT work, “the aspiration that women’s lives would no longer be dictated by husbands, employers, government bureaucrats, and clerks,” in the words of Wilson Sherwin and Frances Fox Piven.

Lewis argues that the work of the NWRO and Wages for Housework were works of family abolition "on the basis of their simultaneously (or combined) non-maternal and non-workerist accounts of what it is that a poor single mom needs and wants." I'm not really sure I agree, or I think that, were I to agree, then I once again have no idea what does and does not constitute "family abolition." If acknowledging that some single mothers would rather not work is an implicit endorsement of family abolition, that isn't all leftism inherently family abolitionist? I imagine that Lewis would argue that, yes, true leftism IS inextricable from family abolition, but she sure spends a good amount of this book talking about how many leftists DON'T support family abolition. If wanting universal basic income, for example, is wanting family abolition even if I don't say I'm advocating for family abolition, then how can you lament that I don't support family abolition? Am I overthinking this? Probably.

As I said, there were other sections in this chapter that I skipped over, because they were less interesting to me, or I had less to say about them: some arguments that Marx and Engels supported family abolition, some writings from a Soviet family abolitionist (who later, it seems, sacrificed a lot of her own ideals to support Stalin), dismay that Gay Liberation movements had been advocating for family abolition and the expanded rights of children but backed away from it to focus on surviving AIDS, and discussion of second-wave feminist Shulamith Firestone, whose utopian vision in her magnum opus, The Dialectic of Sex, involved mechanical uteruses in which all human fetuses would be gestated, resulting in no one even knowing who they were biologically related to any longer (and, by Lewis's own admission, segments of this book were pretty racist, and featured absolutely no mention of queerness. Ain't that just the way).

4. Comrades Against Kinship

We're almost done! In this chapter, Lewis finally answers the question I've had since I first heard the words "family abolition": but what does that look like? As you can imagine from my frustrations overall with this book, she does not have a coherent response. I would say she gives three answers to this question:

First, quoting Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, she says, "Any critique of the family is usually greeted with, ‘but what would you put in its place?’ We hope that by now it will be clear that we would put nothing in the place of the family." Which is frustratingly dismissive, in my opinion. Obviously, there would be SOMETHING to replace the family. We're not very well going to just let all infants roam free in the streets!

Her second answer is, she doesn't know.

“It is very, very difficult,” wrote Linda Gordon, “to conceive of a society in which children do not belong to someone or ones. To make children the property of the state would be no improvement. Mass, state-run day care centers are not the answer.” Do we have answers? Do we know yet which kinds of relation are outside capitalist accumulation? Lou Cornum: “If the answer today is none, let us devise some by tomorrow.”

And her final, most concrete answer is: Camp Maroon, the months-long 2020 tent encampment in Philadelphia. Just copying from the book directly once again:

What was Camp Maroon? An occupation, complete with a kitchen, distribution center, medical tent, substance use supply store, and even a jerry-rigged standing shower—a militant village led by unhoused Philadelphians and working-class rebels like the indomitable, one-in-a-million Jennifer Bennetch (rest in power). The encampment was composed of hundreds of people willing to live together side by side, in tents, to struggle for free housing, migrant freedoms, the right to the city, and more. Even I, standing on the periphery, felt transformed. It was that summer that taught me this: all beings exploited by capital and by empire are basically homeless. All of us have been driven from the commons. Everywhere, humans have woven enclaves and cradles of possibility, relief, and reciprocity in the desert. But the thing that would make our houses home —in a new, true, common sense of the word—is a practice of planetary revolution.

It might seem a bit vertiginous to draw such huge conclusions from a localized camp-out in the middle of Pennsylvania’s capital city. But if you have experienced, even just for a few days, the alternate social world that brews in the utopian squatting of a city boulevard, you probably know. It’s trippy: people acquire a tiny taste of collective self-governance, of mutual protection and care, and suddenly, the list of demands, objectives, targets and desires becomes much longer and more ambitious than simply “affordable housing.” That’s why M. E. O’Brien thinks “the best starting point to abolish the family” is the protest kitchen: “Form self-organized, shared sleeping areas for safety. Set up cooperative childcare to support the full involvement of parents. Establish syringe exchanges and other harm reduction practices to welcome active drug users.” Expand from there, and never stop expanding.

There's also a lot of waffle about Aufhebung, a concept popularized by Hegal (which Lewis refers to as "the word abolition’s weighty original German form", even though the word "abolition" did not at all originate from Aufhebung, but instead from the Latin abolitionem. But now I'm nitpicking, I suppose), and a strange implication that actually, unhoused people in 2020 were better off than people who had to move back with their families, which I'm not sure really holds up to scrutiny overall. The final paragraphs of this alleged manifesto bring up a heretofore unmentioned point about how family abolition does NOT support the policy of separating families of "illegal aliens" at the border; family separation is actually another way of enforcing the importance of the family unit, as it uses the removal of family as a punishment and the (alleged) respect for the integrity of the family as a reward. Personally, I was always taught that the conclusion of a book or paper isn't really the right time to bring up new points, but I guess I'm just not as smart as Sophie Lewis.

Conclusion:

Let's see how many of my initial questions and concerns were addressed in this book!

If all children are to be raised collectively by the community, how will unique cultures and heritages be passed down? - Kind of answered, but not really. In the first chapter of the book, Lewis states "Like a microcosm of the nation-state, the family incubates chauvinism and competition. Like a factory with a billion branches, it manufacturers "individuals" with a cultural, ethnic, and binary gender identity; a class; and a racial consciousness. Like an infinitely renewable energy source, it performs free labor for the market. ... For all these reasons, the family functions as capitalism's base unit." (Emphasis mine) So, I guess, unique cultures and heritages won't be passed down, and she thinks that's good? She doesn't address this specifically, but I don't think you can put "imbues people with a cultural and ethnic identity" on a list between "incubating chauvinism" and "performing free labor for the market" and say that you weren't trying to imply that it's bad and the world will be better without it.

And isn't "abolishing families" what colonizing governments did to their native populations, when they forced their children to attend state-run residential schools? - Answered, genuinely! No, it's different, because it would be abolishing the idea of what a family is/ought to be that was imposed upon native populations, and would allow them to go back to doing whatever they want.

What's the alternative? - Answered, but the answer was "nothing. why would we abolish families if were were just gonna do families again?" so. Not really answered, if you ask me. And by reading this, you are implicitly asking me. There is no clear answer to what the world would look like if Lewis got her way, beyond, I guess, something like the tent city she visited in 2020. But that doesn't really answer my question of: in Lewis's ideal world, what happens to a baby after it's born? If I give birth to a baby, do I get to keep it? If I want to have children, do I get to have them at all, or is this work entirely offloaded to mechanical wombs (that I guess will have been invented by then)? Is it someone's entire job in this society to just gestate and birth children? Do I get to fuck freely and then give birth, but my baby is raised in some sort of state-run nursery or community-owned crèche? I don't know. I didn't know before I started this book, and, if anything, I somehow know even less now.

I looked at the GoodReads reviews for this book, and saw several people saying that they were generally fans of Lewis' work, but that this one was unusually bad, so I might try checking out her other book. If any family abolitionists read this post and have any recommendations, please let me know. I assume this can't possibly be the best articulation of the idea, because it is honestly borderline inept. For her self-described manifesto, Lewis sure doesn't ever make clear what she's hoping to manifest!

If this IS the best articulation of family abolition, then I think it's probably poorly thought out, at the very least. I don't want to veer into any naturalistic fallacies here, but it seems like this entire perspective hinges on the idea that humans are somehow not animals. That pregnancy and child-rearing are labor, and only labor, interchangeable with my data entry job. If a person gets pregnant, gives birth, and then feels a special bond with the child they birthed that they would like to maintain, it is a result of societal brainwashing at best and active selfishness at worst. A true leftist would surrender their baby to the nearest community government official, so it can be cared for by someone more capable, and then said leftist should get back to their life, same as it was before. Now, I've never had any children, but neither has Lewis, so we're both just talking about what we reckon and what we've heard. And from everything I've heard from friends and loved ones of mine who have borne children, this perspective is entirely out of touch with reality, or, at the very least, is an experience of pregnancy that is very much not universal. And, personally, I find it kind of disgusting.

So, uh, no. I guess this book didn't convince me to embrace family abolition. Which, again, is notable, because I went into it with the explicit purpose of being convinced to embrace family abolition. Ah, well. They can't all be winners.

#my writing #effortposting #family abolition #Sophie Lewis #ok now i have to throw this book away from me so i can stop saying more #if theres any point i make here that isnt clear please let me know i would be happy to clarify or rephrase #sometimes i fear that my leaps in logic dont always make sense to the outside #anyway. uh. ive been threatening this post for a while. so here it is.

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slippinmickeys · 1 year

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The Mesas of Deuteronilus Mensae (32/?)

TW: discussion of miscarriage

Mulder moved quickly to her side.

“What is it?” he asked, reaching for her.

She exhaled as if in pain. “Cramping,” she said. “And there was—” she sucked in a breath. “A little bit of blood.”

“Come and lie down,” he said.

For a moment, it seemed like she would fight him, but then she grabbed his hand and let him direct her to the nearest cot. She lowered herself down gingerly and closed her eyes, breathing deeply.

“What do you think is happening?” Mulder asked very softly.

Scully kept her eyes closed and licked her lips, cocking her head as though she were listening for a sound.

“I don’t know,” she finally said. “There’s a couple of things it could be. But with the low gravity… I don’t know. It changes things. My first thought is miscarriage.” With this, she swallowed thickly and finally opened her eyes to look at him. “We need to check.”

Mulder licked his lips, nervy and approaching overwrought. “I’m a little out of my depth, here.”

“It’s okay,” she said, shoring him up when it was she who should be reassured. “I’ll walk you through it.”

“What do we need to do?”

“Cervical exam and another sonogram.”

Something hard coalesced in his stomach, like he’d swallowed a peach pit. He wasn’t sure he could stand another sonogram. Keeping the thought of the child as an abstract was helpful, didn’t let him get too attached to the idea. Seeing it, though…

“I’ll need you to do the cervical exam,” she said, and he shook himself, steered himself back in the moment.

“Whatever you need.”

Scully nodded. “The pain is already better,” she said, looking more alert. She tried to sit up, but Mulder stopped her. Propped up on one elbow, she gestured. “Bring me the laptop,” she said. “I’m going to show you what to look and um, feel for.”

Mulder studied the pictures she showed him like he was preparing for a final, and then she showed him the technique, using her closed fist to give him a feel for it.

“If I’m dilated,” she said, when he told her he was confident he could do it, making sure to meet his eye, “we’ll need to… prepare ourselves.”

Mulder nodded silently.

“Help me to the exam table?”

Mulder ignored the hand she held out, and instead slid his arms under her knees and behind her back and lifted her up completely, turning and laying her as gently as he could onto the lab table. He fetched her a pillow, protracted the extenders, made himself busy. Finally, when it was time, Scully lay a gentle hand over his.

“Let’s look,” she said.

Mulder pulled on a pair of latex gloves and followed her instructions to the letter.

“It’s um,” he finally said, leaning back. “It feels fully closed, Scully.”

“Okay,” she said, and he could see her fighting relief. Fighting hope.

God, he thought, he needed her to talk to him.

“Let’s do the sonogram. That should give us some definitive answers.”

Mulder retrieved the small device and he couldn’t help but notice, as she lay back on the table in the harsh light above her, the small protrusion of her stomach. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he didn’t already know her body by heart, and the sight made his heart pound.

Scully grabbed for the wand, but he put a stilling hand over hers.

“Listen—” he said, and she interrupted him.

“Not yet,” she said, taking a deep breath, and he felt some of this strength leave him. “I know what you’re going to… After, okay?” Her words were beseeching. “We’ll talk about it after?”

Mulder nodded dumbly, and pulled his hand back. He positioned the screen so that she could see it and he couldn’t, and flicked the on switch with his thumb.

He looked anywhere but her stomach; at her compact legs, the brassy sheen of her hair, the perfect outline of her nose and her hands, which moved with an assured grace.

Before her, the women he’d been with before her, had been leggy brunettes, lean and coltish, willowy and long. The kind you met on a Saturday night at a bar that was too loud and too dark. The kind impressed with his NASA credentials, his Right Stuff Corvette. He closed his eyes. He had changed since meeting her, or she had changed him, in all the ways that counted.

The static of the little device startled him out of his reverie.

“Mulder, can you turn it a little?” she asked, and he marveled at her bravery, the way she faced everything head-on. And Jesus, if she could, he could, too. He moved so that he could get a look at the screen as well.

It didn’t take as long to find the baby. In the small pocket of her womb, its arms and legs fully formed with fingers and toes, drifted their child.

But it didn’t sound right. Mulder listened for the telltale wah-wah-wah of the baby’s heartbeat, but they were met with silence. He watched as Scully pulled her lips into her mouth, her eyes focused completely on the small screen, her hand moving the wand around her stomach, gradually more jerky and desperate. Mulder felt a small trickle of sweat descend from his hairline down his temple. The hand not holding the small sonogram machine was clenched so hard, he could feel it start to shake. And then—

Scully inhaled and shifted the wand slightly and there it was, the quick drumbeat of the baby’s heart filling the rover. Mulder felt as though his own heart might burst.

“Okay, that’s good,” Scully said breathily. “It looks… It looks good.”

They weren’t supposed to be relieved, but they both nearly crumpled with it.

Mulder couldn’t tear his eyes away, and he reached out with his free hand and gripped her arm. He was soft in the heart. Trashed. Utterly laid to waste.

XxXxXxXxXxX

It was the kind of pain you could breathe through, she told herself. And it was. What had gotten her—what had made her slump to the table and grip its sides with white knuckles—was the emotion of it. The longer she went, day by day, the more she thought of the child growing within her as a person rather than a fetus. And the thought of losing it naturally, (miscarriage, she had to remind herself, was nature’s way of getting rid of imperfection), while tidily doing the decision making for them, made her ache in a way she hadn’t expected.

And then, oh God, she saw it. And it was perfect.

When she didn’t hear the heartbeat right away, she nearly burst into tears and had to clench her lips in between her teeth to keep from crying, the ozone-like flavor of oncoming tears creeping up the back of her nose.

Then, when she finally did hear the quick round beat of its heart, she mumbled something ridiculous on a too-long-held breath. She looked at the placenta, at all the details she could gather.

“It looks… It looks good,” she said to Mulder.

Keeping the wand on the baby, she thought for a few more minutes, remembering the long days of her OB rotation. “It’s um…” She started. “It was likely small cervical changes. Maybe brought on by low gravity. If I was my patient, I’d probably tell myself to take it kind of easy and keep an eye on things.”

Mulder’s eyes flicked from her back to the screen, then back to her, then back to the screen. A tennis match of emotion.

It was time to talk. “Mulder, what are you thinking?” His eyes came to hers and stayed on them, and she reached out and flicked off the sonogram machine.

“I’m relieved that you’re okay,” he started and then narrowed his eyes. “You are okay?”

She nodded, and he went on. He was still gripping her arm.

“I don’t want to keep living in this rover, Scully,” he said. “It’s cramped and it’s noisy and it smells like farts. But I also don’t want you in the HAB. I don’t want you anywhere near it. Something bad has happened there, I’m sure of it. From what I could glean from Robo-3, he was sent to intercept us, but I can’t figure out who sent him or why.”

There was sweat on his brow, and Scully had to stop herself from reaching up to wipe it off.

“But Scully, we’re running out of supplies, and we’re duty-bound to report to our commander and our base and do what we can to help them.” He squeezed her arm. “And, Dana… I don’t know how to reconcile those things. We need to return to the base. But I want to keep you safe. And… And…” With this, he let go of her. Stood up and took a deep breath, his next words rolling off his tongue as fast and unchecked as a runaway train. “I also don’t know how to reconcile the fact that I know we shouldn’t have this baby because it’s the only thing that makes scientific and logical sense, and the fact that I want that child more than I’ve wanted anything in my entire life. I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do.”

With his words, Scully felt something rise up inside of her. A strength of purpose. A willingness to fight for herself, for Mulder. For the life they’d created together, out of need and love and craving for connection in the cold expanse of outer space. It was foolish, and headstrong, and wholly unlike her, but she felt its rightness with a scaturient sense of determination and grit.

“We have to keep it, Mulder,” she finally said, overcome, and she watched as a look of profound relief and joy washed over his face. “We find a way to do it safely, to not put the mission or the crew at risk, but we have to keep the baby, Mulder. I’m going to fight for it. I’m going to fight for all of us.”

Mulder leaned down and gently pressed his lips to hers. “Then so will I, Scully,” he said. “So will I.”

XxXxXxXxXxX

Mulder reached for the salt and gave it a gentle shake over his dinner. There wasn’t much left in the bottle.

“I’m worried about the crew,” he said quietly, flitting his eyes to hers.

She looked back at him and nodded slowly, her face grim. “Me too.”

“But I’m worried for you more,” he went on, keeping his eyes fixed on hers. “So what if we don’t go back at all?” He watched her for a reaction.

She lowered her eyes from his and he could tell just by looking at her that the same thought had crossed her mind and she felt a fair amount of shame over it.

“What if they need our help?” she asked him quietly.

He leaned back in his seat, ran a hand over his tired face. Sighed. “What if they order you to take the medicine?”

Scully blinked then leaned forward, rested her face in her hands in a gesture of prayer.

“They could court martial you if you refuse, Scully,” he went on. “And they’ll certainly court martial me when I tell them what they can do with their orders.”

If she appreciated his support, she didn’t show it, she merely sighed dejectedly. “Mulder, it’s a lovely fantasy, but that’s what it is. And we both know we don't have the supplies to stay out here much longer.”

“We could raid the strategic cache,” he suggested. The cache was just what it sounded like. Emergency supplies set aside in case of some kind of calamity.

“And tell our superiors what, when they find out?”

Mulder didn’t have an answer for that.

“Mulder, we have to go back. We have to make every effort. We owe it to our crew. We’ll face the music when we hear it, but we have to go back.”

He sighed again, and for a moment wished they weren’t such noble, virtuous people.

“Can I drive slow?” he finally said.

A small smile slowly blossomed on her face. “I won’t tell anyone if you don’t,” she said.

#the x-files #fanfic #my fic #msr #au #wip #mars au

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