Inside the Whale

I wanted to be wild and allowed to roam. Four months pregnant, I thought that motherhood could not change that instinct for exploration. Then I smelled the bear.

Shit-smell filled my nostrils, rich and sour: the third scat we’d seen in 20 minutes and by far the freshest.

“Should we turn back?” I asked Hank.

“Let’s sing.”

We were in Kachemak Bay State Park, Alaska. We had hired a water taxi from Homer, a spit of a town sticking out into the Pacific, known for halibut fishing and its proximity to huge, hulking mountains. The taxi-boat crossed an expanse of open water and dropped us on a pebbled beach. Mist dragged in the fir-tops, making the sky a cracked-ice pattern of grey and branch. Our taxi would be back in 7-8 hours. Until then, we were alone.

Second trimester had been great. No longer nauseous, I insisted on adventure. I climbed thousands of feet to the Harding Ice Field, slept in the camper top of a rented Jeep Cherokee, demanded this hike through bear country with no guide and no boat and only our voices to protect us.

I had seen black bears in the wild, but never a grizzly. I knew they sometimes attacked humans. I knew one was within feet of us, perhaps in those bushes right there, or there, or behind us now. I wondered if the fetus inside me could feel the adrenaline sizzling in my fingertips.

We never saw the grizzly. I assume it saw us. We looked out over miles of heathered, mist-clung mountains and we hiked back down still singing. That was the first time I’d considered how to keep the thing inside me safe. I wondered how many parents had had that thought, since apes first became conscious and morphed into modern moms. I wondered if parenthood would always be like this, a series of calculations about risk and reward, danger and protection. I wondered how, when my son emerged as his own body, I would ever let him run full-force into the world, which was filled with worse things than bears.

 

 

*

 

 

I let him run full-force into kindergarten on the first day, which was filled with nothing worse than screamy, excited kids. He loved the class and his new teacher. Our five years together, until that point, had been sheltered: he stayed home for a year during quarantine, weaving imaginary castles out of laurel branch and cyclone fence, roaring through monster truck rallies with toy Tonkas. But even without the COVID years, that time together had a still, held quality, as if it were a pause before life really started thrumming. He’d been proximate to me, and even when he went to Pre-K for hours at a time, he was still a little body who needed my body and who constantly asked for play, for buttoning buttons, putting on mittens, for cuddling on the couch. We had been given the boon of time, a protective chamber before peers and school and media would sweep him into the world and away from me.

One day that fall the kindergarteners picked a book from the school library and brought it back to their classroom. My son picked a book on werewolves.

“What is a werewolf?” I asked him, pretty sure he had no idea.

“It’s sort of silly,” he explained. “It comes into your room and tries on your clothes and rips them all up!”

He was misunderstanding a classic werewolf image: the human grown hairy and immense, sprouting claws. Suddenly too small for the civilizing clothes of its human form, it rips a tiny shirt from its great wolf-chest, shedding the last vestiges of humanity.

“So werewolves are really silly,” my son continued, chuckling. “What if it ripped up all my clothes and I had nothing to wear and I couldn’t go to school?”

I paused. “Do you want to stay home from school?”

The chuckles dissolved. “I’m just really tired.”

I explained that school happens every day. I told him if he needed a day off once in a while, he could stay home. Otherwise, he would now spend his time away until the last bell.

He nodded. He understood, if not consciously, that this year was another stepping-away, a stretching-out of the tether between us. We were still bonded, but I was no longer always physically there. Sometimes the line stretched long and taut. For a good part of a day, he had to deal with what came. I would drop him off, and I would turn away.

 

 

*

 

 

I turn away from Finding Nemo only once, to wipe my tears when my kid isn’t looking. We’re at the part where Marlin and Dory, the dad fish and the forgetful friend fish, get swallowed by a whale. They’re in the gullet, sloshing around in a smushy, tissue-lined cave. It’s dark and enclosed. My son wants to know if they’re going to die.

“No honey, just keep watching.” I pull his body against mine.

Inside the whale, Marlin must make the metaphorical choice: let go. Bad things have happened to his mate and child. Bad things may continue to happen. Accepting this loss is offered as a kind of liberation.

Marlin’s revelation is possible only in the whale’s belly, the landscape of metaphor. “For the sea wrought, and was tempestuous…the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head…” says Jonah in the Bible, crying out to the Lord. In that story—and in Nemo—the protagonist doesn’t get digested. He waits in the belly of that great fish, not munched or crunched, not bitten nor acidified. Separated from the tempestuous seas, sheltered from pirates and sharks and the drowning waves. A place of rest, a pause in the narrative: contained and confined and safe. A place for possibility.

George Orwell noticed our cultural affinity for the whale’s belly and wrote about it in his 1940 essay “Inside the Whale,” where he argues that the metaphorical whale offers insulation from the real world. He writes,
The whale’s belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what happens. A storm that would sink all the battleships in the world would hardly reach you as an echo. Even the whale’s own movements would probably be imperceptible to you. He might be wallowing among the surface waves or shooting down into the blackness of the middle seas (a mile deep, according to Herman Melville), but you would never notice the difference. Short of being dead, it is the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility.

In Orwell’s analysis, the “yards of blubber between yourself and reality” are not only insulating but comforting. Whale as womb positions us as infants, cradled safely in the body of someone who loves us without condition: our mothers. We are swallowed but not in a violent or visceral way. Instead, we revert to childhood, to infancy, and to the “irresponsibility” of being cared for by another being.

I remember how, pregnant with my son, I would sit with my fingers on my belly, awaiting his fish-like squirms. My skin would pucker and writhe where he moved. Inside me, he was safe; I could control what hurt him because I could control my own body. I ate healthy and went on walks and took vitamins.

Then I learned that microplastics invade the placental walls, that breast milk often contains heavy metals and forever chemicals, that the world would invade and try to harm him even within me. I realized I had already lost control.

 

 

*

 

 

I realize I have lost control when I have a text exchange with friends about one of our kids’ schools going into lockdown. Melissa’s oldest girl, a spunky eight-year-old, wanted to know why her teachers locked the doors. Lessons kept going but someone in the neighborhood had a weapon and was threatening to use it. Police dealt with the threat before it reached the school. Her teachers hadn’t mentioned the weapon. They had carried on with multiplication, an act so heroic it staggers me. Melissa’s girl came home chatting about a new Taylor Swift song and her friend’s birthday party and also, mom, why did they have to close the school? Was it true that someone had a gun?

I hate this, we write to each other on text, an acknowledgement of our helplessness: we swim in gelatinous fluid, lungs choked with jelly, gasping for breath. Each day when they reappear at the bell, we sputter out gummed worry and choke down air. This sounds dramatic but it looks like a smile, like how was your day, like a ruffle of hair. Releasing anxiety feels like letting go of a Kegel: something clenched inside softens, loosens. Wants to grab again.

I am not saying I spend all day worrying. I go to work, teaching college composition, and school shootings are only a trickle in the back of my mind, a slow leak from a faucet. They leak at about the same rate as a major earthquake, which could flatten the unreinforced masonry of my son’s school with shudders, the bricks collapsing onto their heads as they hide under desks. Desks are useless shelter. Semiautomatic weapons are for hunting people, not deer. 2 x 3 = 6. The leak is ignorable. I meet with colleagues and microwave my lunch. I teach rhetoric and genre, I grade papers, I converse with students. I have a small baseball bat in my briefcase which I plan to use if a gunman ever comes to my college. I will stand on a desk by the door and wait. When the door opens, I will tell my students I love them. I will swing.

 

 

*

 

 

Swinging from a branch, the ghost rotated slowly, a macabre wind sock. Monsters started to appear in the neighborhood, mummies and zombies and witches, their long noses and warty fingers reaching for errant children to snatch up and devour. Skeletons unearthed themselves from patches of lawn. We shivered opulently as we walked to school in the morning, hand in hand. It felt delicious to be scared like this, terrified but not anxious. Terror felt like ice water over the body, instinct and thrill. Anxiety was a duller gnaw, and I tried to hide its bite marks, even as I felt the worry gumming my ankles.

Anxiety was the belly of the whale, a sheltered spot to hide inside, a familiar beast of what-if and how-not. I had made a sanctuary of maybe and unknown. In this false animal, I crouched. I controlled the space. I knew all the walls, examined them over and over: earthquake, shooting, stranger, sickness. I ran my fingers over my confines until I knew every potential outcome, and that speculation felt safe.

Some children faced dangers my kid never had, monsters like hunger, neglect, and violence in their homes. Some children walked to school alone. I knew we were lucky and I still stayed stuck in that belly, burning with foreknowledge, with yards of blubber between myself and reality.

My therapist told me I was stuck in the past, that the fear I’d felt when my son was born sick and nearly died had found its way into my neural pathways. He’s healthy now, she said, but you’re reliving that fear somatically, projecting it onto other scenarios. Do you feel a sense of dread?

Dread had become a great hall, a cathedral-space buttressed with rib bones, transept inlaid with gleaming mother-of-pearl. Yes, I said, since we took him home from the hospital, I’d been expecting something to show up and take him back. We’d cheated death, on some level, and we owed a debt. Death would come to claim its due, like a man owed money at a high-stakes poker game. He was coming to collect.

I acknowledged my own motherhood had begun in uncertainty and fear. But parenthood was inevitably a risky venture. No matter how well you built the cave, the real world came knocking. 346 school shootings in 2023, more than one for each day of the school year. Climate change-induced floods, fires and hurricanes. Drunk drivers, flu season, online bullying. Once their little bodies were in the world, it felt like a constant assault.

I promised him I’d never let anything happen to him, Marlin the dad-fish cries out in the belly of the whale. As parents, it’s a promise we all make and none of us can keep. Like the panicked father in Finding Nemo, I had become obsessed with controlling as many of the variables as I could, with anticipating and preventing harm. My anxiety was the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility: I could control everything in my mind, even as I took no steps to change the real world.

In the morning, we packed a lunch: bagel and cream cheese, apple slices, healthy foods to ward off disease. We filled his water bottle, lead and PFAS filtered out with activated charcoal. I tucked his thin arms into a jacket for warmth. As we walked to school, the Grim Reaper pointed its bony fingers at us from beneath a ragged cloak.

 

 

*

 

 

Bony fingers reached from dark’s ragged cloak. He climbed into my bed: I had a bad dream.

The ecology of a dream mimics and warps the real landscape. Like sun on cellophane, a dream prickles and distorts what scares us in real life. My son’s dream was a monster, or a wolf, or a bear. The dream was a simulacrum, an effigy of being a small body in the real world, of being thin-limbed and tasty.

The next morning, a brief search of dream websites suggested that my son was “feeling overwhelmed by a problem or situation in [his] life, such as difficulties in a relationship, financial concerns, or work-related stress.” I laughed out loud. My son did not have “work-related stress.”

The helplessness of being five, though, hassled him. There were always people ordering him around; the world was not built for his body. Everything was giant, even monstrous, in scope.

Perhaps he watched me trying to control all the risks around him, trying to mitigate falling down the stairs (no backwards somersaults on the landing) and getting hit by cars (look both ways) and getting in a car with a stranger (yell and run, no matter what kind of candy they have). I had not yet mentioned what to do if a young man entered his school with a gun. I knew, given who my son was, that he would jump out and try to throw a magic spell at the shooter with his hands.

He understood little of these risks, I hoped, this swaggering, goofy kid, confident enough to engage friends’ parents in conversation and take on 3rd graders in wall-ball. However, according to one website, “dreams of being eaten alive may also be indicative of a lack of confidence in yourself.” I knew dreams were a gruesome, gory processing through the surreal lens of fantasy, but explaining his limb-shaking terror as “he’s nervous about kindergarten” felt dumb.

Still: when I was his age, I too dreamed of being chased and consumed. A large, hairy creature chased me through city streets. The landscape seemed drawn from superhero comics, a vague Gotham of concrete, de-peopled and sheer-walled. After a long chase, the monster would corner me in an alley, then lift me up and bite down. I’d wake screaming, feeling its teeth in my torso, the rending of my flesh as it ate me alive.
When I was older, perhaps seven or eight, I’d had enough of this recurring nightmare. I turned to the creature in my dream, shook my finger and screamed, “Go away!” I stood my ground. My child-body was shaking, knowing that it might at any moment reach for me and begin its feast.

Instead, it turned and left. I haven’t dreamed of being eaten since.

I taught him to say no to monsters, to turn and raise a shaking finger and refuse. In a calm and confident voice, I told him bad guys would always slink away from a person who says no. I didn’t tell him that this strategy only worked on imaginary monsters.

 

 

*

 

 

Monsters take the form of heat waves, great invisible beasts whose lumbering wilts our plans and scalds our skies bruise-yellow. Heat and wildfire smoke drag out summer and make November seem distant. My son starts first grade. No longer intimidated by school, he greets everyone we pass with a cheerful wave. When confronted with scary stories, he shakes his finger: Go away, monsters! By the time we’re ready to shop for Halloween costumes, lawn signs supporting presidential candidates begin to appear beside the black cats and coffins.

I have tried, in the last year, to deconstruct the womb of anxiety I had built around my son. I have breathed into the everyday loss of saying goodbye in the mornings. This election season, I have decided I need to get out of the whale.

I reread Orwell’s essay and remember that it is a book review of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, contextualized by the rise of Nazi Germany. “Inside the Whale” explores widespread complaints that Miller’s sexy, hedonistic book is apolitical. Published in 1934, the book had been accused of ignoring fascism in Europe, ignoring Nazism, and crafting an oblivious literary pleasure-space where pretty people fuck and drink and have absolutely no idea that really bad stuff is happening all around them. While Orwell doesn’t absolve Miller of hiding out from the real world, he does like the book. For him, losing yourself in pleasure is like getting eaten by a whale; it’s a temporary refuge, a place of irresponsibility, a childlike reversion.

Because we can’t stay inside the whale. Being consumed by a creature, even sea-monster-as-analog-for-mother, is merely a stage on a longer journey. Contained, we transform. The cave, haven and cauldron, compels change. The muscles of the beast flex around us. We must choose something new, something that will propel us out of this womb and into the world.

It’s not that the mother-brain has stopped its worrying, but that I no longer want to live inside worry’s paralyzing, insulating den. During the election, I listened to Tim Walz tell the Democratic National Convention he was a hunter, but he wanted to keep kids safe. I read that Kamala Harris wanted to strengthen red flag laws. I heard that Donald Trump promised the NRA that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms.” I let these stances slosh around with other things, like that my husband owns a hunting rifle, which we keep locked up at a childless friends’ house; that the best way I know to protect my son and his classmates is to enact vigorous gun control. I know our newly elected president will not restrict forever chemicals in our water supply or incentivize green energy sources so my kids don’t grow up with extreme heat and extreme storms. He will not restrict guns or provide better mental health resources. When I feel worried about the future, it can be tempting to stay oblivious, with “no impulse to alter or control the process,” as Orwell describes it. “Allowing [ourselves] to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting” in the face of overwhelming despair, whether that be economic or political, appeals to the part of me that wants to give up control and hide.

But I’ve spent my season in the belly of the whale, and I’m coming out swinging. Catharsis happens in this space, where having surrendered to the inevitability of loss, we commit to doing what we can to prevent and protect not only our own, but each other’s beloveds.

Catharsis comes for the dad-fish in Finding Nemo, too. Marlin lets go. He lets himself get swallowed by the possibility of loss, its gaping black throat, its jiggling uvula, its cascade of water falling into darkness:

DORY
He says it’s time to let go! Everything’s gonna be all right!

MARLIN
How do you know!? How do you know something bad isn’t gonna happen!?

DORY
I don’t!

And they let go. And they fall. And they get spat out into Sydney harbor, to safety. My son squeezes my hand and cries, “Are they safe?”

We huddle together on the couch and smile-cry as father and son fish reunite and begin their journey back to their reef through dangerous waters. I might lose him on any given day. I might get in an accident on the way to work and he might lose me. Despair slaps in waves against the hull of my body, reminding me of the impossibility of loving without risk, without danger, without loss.

Outside the whale, wind scrapes the concrete, tunneled from the Columbia River Gorge and sluiced down my street. Outside the whale I stretch, limbs long as alder branches. Outside the whale, marigolds are blooming in unseasonable heat. A mile or so away, I hear a train lowing in alto tones: oil being shipped to and from the river docks, energy for our busy lives, poison for our air and earth. Gourds gape their pitted teeth and triangle eyes. I can see my son’s school, three stories of brick on brick, the wide pavement schoolyard bereft of green. Today they are doing a lockdown drill. The first graders are supposed to pretend that they are small forest creatures, otters hiding from scary monsters in the woods. They crouch under their desks and stay very still and quiet so the monsters won’t see them.

Outside the whale, I donate blood and teach my students how to craft sentences that sing. I cook a dinner for a sick neighbor. I wonder how to get out there and fight Nazis. After all, as Orwell insists, “We only have the chance of choosing the lesser evil and of working for the establishment of a new kind of society in which common decency will again be possible.” I want to work for that kind of world. I notice the webs of care in my neighborhood, the way we show up for each other, the ways we hold each other up when one of us starts to sag. I wonder how to feel both this fear for my child and awe at the orb spiders, whose delicate nets shake but don’t shatter in the gusts. I wonder how to protect him, but also how to let him live.

Sometimes when I wear a big dress he climbs up underneath the hem and pretends to be a baby in the womb, punching at the fabric the way he used to punch at my skin. Sometimes I want him to stay there. Sometimes I have nightmares about losing him in a crowd. Every morning, I say goodbye to my son before school. I kiss his forehead. I always kiss him, just in case. “Have a good day baby,” I tell him. He hugs me and gallops up the hill to join his neighbor friend: wild and allowed to roam, a bit further each year.