{"id":4513,"date":"2017-10-10T11:01:01","date_gmt":"2017-10-10T11:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/what-i-dont-tell-my-students-about-the-husband-stitch\/"},"modified":"2020-12-08T16:47:59","modified_gmt":"2020-12-08T21:47:59","slug":"what-i-dont-tell-my-students-about-the-husband-stitch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/what-i-dont-tell-my-students-about-the-husband-stitch\/","title":{"rendered":"What I Don\u2019t Tell My Students About “The Husband Stitch”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When I teach Carmen Maria Machado\u2019s story \u201cThe Husband Stitch<\/a>,\u201d the first in her collection Her Body and Other Parties<\/a>, <\/em>to my fiction workshops, it\u2019s unlike teaching any other story. For one thing, the men in class don\u2019t speak. I\u2019m not sure if, like me, they don\u2019t know what to say, something I admit before we begin. \u201cI don\u2019t quite know how to discuss this story,\u201d I say. \u201cI\u2019m really having us read it because I love it.\u201d Or maybe they feel like they shouldn\u2019t because it is, among other things, a story about being a woman. The conversation limps along, uncharacteristically weighted with all the things the students are thinking and not saying. Often, one woman admits she cried when she read it, and when I nod and ask why, she says she doesn\u2019t know. Always, a student says that she sent it to all of her friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have that impulse, too, to share it, which is why I have my classes read it. There is a truth in the tales that I recognize viscerally but have never been taught. Machado\u2019s narrator tells the story of meeting the young man she knew she would marry, their mutually desirous marriage, the birth and raising of their son, and an inevitable betrayal by her husband whom she loves. \u201cHe is not a bad man, and that, I realize suddenly, is the root of my hurt,\u201d the narrator says. \u201cHe is not a bad man at all. To describe him as evil or wicked or corrupted would be a deep disservice to him. And yet\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201d The title refers to the extra stitch sometimes given to a woman after the area between her vagina and anus is either torn or cut during childbirth. The purpose of the extra stitch is to make the vagina tighter than it was before childbirth in order to increase the husband\u2019s pleasure during sex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Often, one woman admits she cried when she read it, and when I nod and ask why, she says she doesn\u2019t know.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I was first introduced to the husband stitch in 2014, when a friend in medical school told me about a birth her classmate observed. After the baby was delivered, the doctor said to the woman\u2019s husband, \u201cDon\u2019t worry, I\u2019ll sew her up nice and tight for you,\u201d and the two men laughed while the woman lay between them, covered in her own and her baby\u2019s blood and feces. The story terrified me, the laughter in particular, signaling some understanding of wrongdoing, some sheepishness in doing it anyway. The helplessness of the woman, her body being altered without her consent by two people she has to trust: her partner, her doctor. The details of the third-hand account imprinted into my memory so vividly that the memory of the story feels now almost like my own memory. Later that year, Machado\u2019s \u201cThe Husband Stitch\u201d was published, and sometime after that, I read it, and the details of Machado\u2019s scene were so similar, down to the laughter, down to the words \u201cdon\u2019t worry\u201d (though in Machado\u2019s story they\u2019re directed at the woman), that I\u2019m not sure now what I remember and what I read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reliable information about, or even an official definition of, the husband stitch is conspicuously missing from the internet. No entry in Wikipedia, nothing in WebMD. Instead there are pages and pages of message board entries and forum discussions on pregnancy websites, and a pretty good definition<\/a> on Urban Dictionary. In James Baldwin\u2019s 1979 New York Times<\/em> piece, \u201cIf Black English Isn\u2019t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?<\/a>\u201d he writes, \u201cPeople evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.\u201d How can a practice like the husband stitch be warned against if there\u2019s no official discussion of it, no record of it, no language around it, nothing to point at, to teach? Every time a woman received a husband stitch, is it in her medical file? Does it say, \u201c2nd degree perineal laceration repaired + husband stitch\u201d? Or might the record leave off the extra stitch, whether it happened or not? I asked three male friends in medical residencies in different areas around the country if they\u2019d heard of the husband stitch and only one had, but not from medical school; he knew it from Machado\u2019s story. And yet it happens, based on the chatter on message boards, women\u2019s<\/em> chatter, which I have been conditioned to approach with skepticism, a category of information I might dismiss as an \u201cold wives\u2019 tale\u201d (a term with its own troubling connotations). It happens even now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

But this is not an essay about the husband stitch. It\u2019s an essay about believing and being believed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My mother has always had a flexible relationship with facts. She is constantly solving mysteries, including (often incorrectly) the mystery of what you\u2019re about to say next, or the mystery of someone\u2019s motivations. Sometimes in recalling these instances, she\u2019ll substitute in her solutions for the truth, her prediction for what I actually said. \u201cI thought you said you weren\u2019t taking the baby to Portugal because of Zika,\u201d she\u2019ll say, and I am exhausted by the prospect of unraveling all of the inaccuracies. \u201cNo, that\u2019s what you<\/em> said,\u201d I say, like a child. \u201cI said I am taking the baby to Portugal and there\u2019s no Zika in Portugal and the reason people worry about Zika in the first place is if you\u2019re pregnant and neither I nor the baby are pregnant.\u201d But of course she\u2019s not confused, though there are times when she is; in this case she\u2019s knowingly using incorrect facts to tell me her emotional truth, that she doesn\u2019t want me to take the baby to Portugal because, like me, she\u2019s afraid of everything. The truth that she is afraid of everything is as real as the truth that there\u2019s no risk of Zika in Portugal. Both are true. By working backwards from her emotional truth I can understand why her facts are wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Machado\u2019s narrator tells a story from her own youth, when she\u2019s certain she has seen and felt toes among the potatoes at the grocery store. Her mother thinks she\u2019s misunderstood the word. Potatoes, not toes, she tells her, but the narrator remembers the detail of the way the toe felt when she touched it. Her father lays out the logical case against the existence of toes among the potatoes, a clean, five-point position: she knew the grocer, why would he sell toes, where would he get them, what would be gained from selling them, and finally, why did no one see them but her? She reflects on this, \u201cAs a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world observed only by a single set of eyes. As a girl, I consented to his account of the story, and laughed when he scooped me from the chair to kiss me and send me on my way.\u201d Machado is teaching us that truth and logic only occasionally overlap. When you start poking at the idea of an absolute truth, a truth unfiltered through someone\u2019s perception, it can fall apart entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you start poking at the idea of an absolute truth, a truth unfiltered through someone\u2019s perception, it can fall apart entirely.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOf all the stories I know about mothers, this is the most real,\u201d Machado\u2019s narrator begins, and goes on to tell a story of a mother and daughter traveling to Paris. The mother falls ill and the doctor sends the daughter to get medicine, a task which takes so long, a meandering cab ride, the doctor\u2019s wife making pills out of powder, that when the daughter returns to the hotel she finds her mother gone, the walls of their room a different color, a hotel clerk who doesn\u2019t remember them. Then the narrator says there are many endings to this story, one in which the daughter persists, stakes out the hotel and starts an affair with a laundryman in order to finally discover the truth: that her mother died from a highly contagious disease and in order to prevent widespread panic, the doctor, cab driver, his wife, and the hotel employees conspired to erase any trace of the mother and daughter\u2019s existence there. Another ending to the story is that the daughter lives the rest of her life believing she\u2019s crazy, \u201cthat she invented her mother and her life with her mother in her own diseased mind. The daughter stumbles from hotel to hotel, confused and grieving, though for whom she cannot say.\u201d I would tell you the moral, the narrator says, but I think you already know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are taught to value simple, elegant truths. In science, philosophy, theology, and politics, we apply Occam\u2019s razor, the idea that between competing hypotheses, the simplest one is the right one. That the daughter is crazy is a much simpler explanation than that a whole cast of characters conspired to hide her mother\u2019s death and erase their existence, simpler than the introduction of a contagious disease, simpler than the construction and remodeling done to the room. And yet \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In class, I don\u2019t say to my students, \u201cDo you feel it, too? Or can you imagine it? The perils of living in a world made by a different gender? The justified and unjustified mistrust? The near-constant experience of being disbelieved, of learning to question your own sanity? How much more it hurts to be let down by \u2018one of the good ones?\u2019\u201d Instead I say, \u201cWhat effect do the horror tales have, placed associatively where they are in the story? What effect do the stage directions have? What would be lost without them? Do you see how they\u2019re braided together? These are tools you can use in your own stories.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In class, I don\u2019t say to my students, ‘Do you feel it, too? Or can you imagine it? The near-constant experience of being disbelieved, of learning to question your own sanity?’<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

One night we had a thrilling summer storm, bright and crashing, wind and rain blowing into the house from every direction. I wanted to open all the doors and windows wider and run around, but it was better for the house, the wood, to close them tight. We hadn\u2019t been in the house long, and it was the first time in this house we\u2019d had to close all the windows. In the morning I smelled gas, strong, unmistakable. \u201cI smell gas,\u201d I said to my husband. \u201cI don\u2019t smell it,\u201d he said. He had a friend come over. \u201cWhy are you having a friend come over,\u201d I asked, \u201cwhen it doesn\u2019t matter if he can smell it or not, and none of us can fix it?\u201d His friend didn\u2019t smell it, either. I called the gas company. The gas company employee didn\u2019t smell it, either. He waved his reader around and it blasted off in three places, substantial leaks behind the stove and in the basement. \u201cAlways trust a woman\u2019s nose,\u201d the gas company employee said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, I thought, believe us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, No, I thought, I\u2019m not a fucking witch. Believe anyone who smells gas. If someone smells gas, believe them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what if this story had a different ending? What if his reader hadn\u2019t picked anything up? What if there had been no gas? I was so relieved there was gas, so afraid I was crazy. If I smell gas and there is no gas, am I different than if I smell gas and there is? Am I crazy, then, and does my value come from not being crazy? Does my value come from being right? If there is no gas, am I not right? Does it mean I didn\u2019t smell gas or does my experience of smelling gas still remain?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why are we disbelieved? Why am I skeptical of women\u2019s chatter? Why does my husband think I don\u2019t smell gas? Later, in the same piece, Baldwin writes, \u201cThere was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today. He cannot afford to understand it. This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself, and smash that mirror before which he has been frozen for so long.\u201d Maybe this is why we don\u2019t believe women. If their experience is true, we can\u2019t stand to see our role in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once, after class, a student approached me urgently. \u201cThat happened to my mother,\u201d she said. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to say it in class, but they did that to her. The husband stitch.\u201d Her eyes were wet, unblinking. \u201cIt\u2019s real,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, I said. It\u2019s real.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I teach Carmen Maria Machado\u2019s story \u201cThe Husband Stitch,\u201d the first in her collection Her Body and Other Parties, to my fiction workshops, it\u2019s unlike teaching any other story. For one thing, the men in class don\u2019t speak. I\u2019m not sure if, like me, they don\u2019t know what to say, something I admit before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2569,"featured_media":26656,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,85],"tags":[92,294,1263],"class_list":["post-4513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-essay","tag-feminism","tag-gender","tag-parenthood"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat I Don\u2019t Tell My Students About "The Husband Stitch" - Electric Literature<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The first story in Carmen Maria Machado\u2019s "Her Body and Other Parties" brings up big questions about who we believe and\u00a0why\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/what-i-dont-tell-my-students-about-the-husband-stitch\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What I Don\u2019t Tell My Students About "The Husband Stitch" - 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