Columns | Scaring Children

I Didn’t Want to Miss Baby Night

Children appear in horror all the time because to parent one is naturally terrifying.

My mother often feared I would push her out a window. Or at least, that is what I recall: “I used to try to see the back of your head without you noticing, to make sure you weren’t gonna push me out a window or anything. To make sure you weren’t Rosemary’s baby.”

I had a stork bite—the name for a red birthmark on the back of a child’s head.

“I wanted to make sure it didn’t say 666,” she’d exclaim. “The mark of the beast!”

And I was a bit spooky, would shoot dirty looks at my mother, crack creepy smiles. To this day, I have small, sensitive eyes that I can’t help squinting, and a weird, witchy laugh. And to this day, I haven’t seen Rosemary’s Baby. I have decided to rectify this. So here I sit, watching Rosemary’s Baby. In broad daylight. Because I am a weenie.

Rosemary’s Baby isn’t children’s horror, far from it. I am learning from watching it, presently, that it is a terrifying movie for adults, and also gorgeously shot in a way that makes it high art—something reliant on an understanding far beyond the capabilities of most ’90s five-year-olds, as I was during its oft-referenced era in my life. But because of my birthmark and my mother, it was a massive part of my childhood, referenced so often that I felt like I had already seen it. And it is horror centered on children, family-making as a concept; children appear in horror all the time because to parent one is naturally terrifying.

Mia Farrow is Rosemary. She is waifish and angelic and everything a cis white woman who’s trying to be a mother in 1968 New York City should be. Her husband is bland, is an actor, and is literally named “Guy.” And that is what he is: a guy. A near about nonentity. They’ve got neighbors, the Castevets, who at first glance seem to be very annoying and very eccentric older neighbors: Minnie Castevet asks how much everything costs, which in wealthy Upper West Side Manhattan is a horror, and Roman Castevet boasts of having been everywhere—name a city and he’s been there, he swears.

But when an actor who got a role that Guy was up for goes blind, and Guy is then awarded the part, he starts spending a lot of time with the Castevets. He’s kind of a butt about his new role which, according to him, is very challenging because it involves crutches (something at which, tonally, it appears we’re supposed to laugh). In focusing on all his other duties, duties such as making meaningful faces while using crutches loudly and inefficiently, he ignores Rosemary. So he says, “Let’s have a baby.” Because that is the way to solve problems.

Last year, 2020, was a big year for me and babies. Before then, I’d been abstractly on board for having children, someday. But still feeling very childlike myself, even at the age of thirty, that day seemed quite a ways off. And one thing was absolutely certain: I did not want to produce a baby with my body. Ever. I’d been clear on that even in my adolescence, when I was convinced I was a girl growing into a woman. Even then, when it is such an emphasized part of womanhood, I didn’t want it.

When I dreamed of being pregnant, it was always a nightmare. I’d wake sweating, feeling like I was being colonized by an alien. When I came out as trans, it made more sense, this abject fear of ever having a child this way. And when I started taking testosterone, the provoking of dysphoria took on a new significance, a new language. As I began to look more masculine, I of course would not want to be the pregnant man, as far as internally I was and remain from being a man.

But raising a kid? Sure. Like anyone else, I feared I wouldn’t be good at it. Specifically, I feared I would raise a serial killer. I was never sure why. Someone callous and unfeeling and capriciously cruel. But that’s something everyone is anxious about—isn’t it?

And then, the pandemic. In April 2020, within the space of a week, my feelings changed from being abstractly into the idea of parenting a small human to a hard no. Absolutely never. My reasoning: I could never make the world safe. The world itself—that was the callous, the unfeeling, the capriciously cruel entity.

“That sounds like trauma,” my then therapist said. “You should sit with it until after the pandemic. Then reassess.”

And I tried to. But patience has never been my virtue. And so I decided: No kids. Not ever.

Months went by. I swore up and down I didn’t want kids. My life slowly imploded, then more quickly exploded. I was not alone; so did everyone’s. It was nice to be un-special. And through it all, I swore up and down that I did not want any children. That ship had sailed when the pandemic locked us all down, made school a viral minefield.

Which brought me to the autumn of 2020, when I lay in a mostly dark basement, save for a light to read by, ingesting Helen Phillips’s The Need. It’s a horror novel about parenthood in which the protagonist begins to believe there is someone in the house with her and her children. (She turns out to be correct, but not in the way she originally expects.) I turned off the light and proceeded to, predictably, have a dream about being pregnant.

I don’t remember at all what the dream was about. But I remember the roundness, the weight of me, as though I developed a new and intense gravity. I remember the movement of it. And most of all, I remember when I woke, thinking that the dream had not been a nightmare. That I’d actually enjoyed myself. Felt grounded. Centered. Lush and expansive and every kind of feeling I love to feel.

Huh, I thought. That’s interesting.

*

I have to stop here and acknowledge that Rosemary’s Baby is a Roman Polanski film. Polanski is the perpetrator of real horrors, not just a purveyor of imagined ones. He raped a child and has not faced justice for it, whatever that means (what can be done to anyone who rapes a child that feels like actual justice?). It makes it weirder, that the underlying messages of the film seem so feminist.

Time for the spoilers. If you’ve not seen the movie and you care about spoilers, stop and rent it.

When Guy and Rosemary start trying to have a child, the Castevets and the whole apartment building’s Satanist cult put drugs in Rosemary’s chocolate pudding. They get her high enough that she can be raped by the devil; all her neighbors watch and her husband participates. The next morning, she is surprised and a bit horrified that her husband raped her while she slept.

In turn, Guy says, in a way that is barely sheepish and mostly proud, “I didn’t want to miss baby night” of her ovulation window.

“It didn’t need to be right then,” she replies, meek.

When she turns out to be pregnant, she does the thing: the forgetting and the not forgetting. The tightrope walk of excitement (this is what she wanted, after all!) balanced well with the remembrance of betrayal. Rosemary experiences an absurd amount of pain. It’ll go away, the doctor (also a Satanist) says. She begins eating raw meat. She is isolated from her friends and becomes someone she doesn’t recognize. All this while Guy skyrockets to fame, having made a deal with the devil. His success in exchange for his wife’s body, his firstborn child. The devil is brought to life on earth through an act of rape and then prolonged domestic violence, emotional and psychological, which an entire neighborhood of well-respected people witness, condone, and collude.

The crux of the horror, the reason this film is scary, isn’t that Rosemary’s body is growing something painful and terrifying (the viewer understands that something isn’t right long before Rosemary begins to figure it out). Or rather, it isn’t only that (it is also that). It’s that Rosemary has no agency and no protector. It’s that everyone around her is trying to convince her that reality is something other than it is. She is being gaslit at every turn.

Her whole world looks at her, looks at her body, and says one thing, when they know very well whatever they just said isn’t true.

*

The dreams come every night now. Every single night, I am pregnant when I sleep, and when I wake, before I open my eyes, the sensation of it remains. I want a baby yesterday. But moreover: I want to make that baby with my own body, to use the preinstalled 3D printing equipment and bring forth a queerspawn. Before, when I was sure I was a woman, I couldn’t have done it.

Because it would have been putting my hand up to be a Rosemary. To have everyone look at my body and, whether they understood what they were about like the Upper West Side Satanic cult or not, to say so many things about my body that weren’t, aren’t, true. But the cat’s out of the bag, as they say, and there is no way for anyone to pretend I am what I am not.

I wonder if my desire is born from the simple fact that, with the effects of testosterone plain upon my body, the confusion itself would be a compass toward some larger truth: that were I pregnant, I would not be a mother.

And now, constantly, I think, consciously, the sentence If I do this, if I decide to, if I’m able to, it will be provoking dysphoria. It will be provoking dysphoria on purpose. Trading one kind of horror for another. Am I strong enough to do that? To opt into the horror of being pregnant? To say yes to pain and to give up control over my body?

But it is only for nine months—isn’t it?

Am I strong enough to do that? To opt into the horror of being pregnant? To say yes to pain and to give up control over my body?

*

I get the entire way through Rosemary’s Baby. There is no scene where anyone is pushed out a window. I call my mother, confused: “I’m writing this essay. You always used to say you would try to check to make sure it wasn’t the number 666 without my noticing in case I was Rosemary’s baby or some—”

“The Omen!” Both my mother and I have one phone volume: shouting. This has always been true, even before my father started to lose his hearing. “It’s Damien! From The Omen! Not Rosemary’s Baby!”

I do not hold the phone away from my ear. I don’t need to. The shouting doesn’t bother me.

“I always thought it was stupid, the birthmark-on-the-head thing, before I had you, because I always thought, well, wouldn’t they have seen the birthmark when he was born? But when I had you I realized that some babies are born with full heads of hair—you were. You looked like you were wearing a cheap toupee. You should watch Rosemary’s Baby, though, for Mia Farrow eating chicken liver in a toaster reflection.”

I have the clearest memory of my mother saying “Rosemary’s baby” about the back of my head. I would have sworn up and down. But I had it wrong.

So now, I am watching The Omen, and this makes a lot more sense. It is the story of an American diplomat named Robert, played by Gregory Peck, and his wife, Kathy, played by Lee Remick, whose child dies in childbirth. A very questionable priest and an equally questionable nun offer this dude a replacement baby because the diplomat doesn’t want to tell his wife what happened when she wakes. So he takes this other baby! With no paperwork or follow-up questions!

And of course, this kid of unknown origin (a problematic horror trope all in itself) is the Antichrist. They don’t know until Damien’s fifth birthday, when Damien’s latent mind-powers cause a nanny to hang herself in front of his entire posh birthday party. And that nanny crashes, dangling from a noose, through a plate glass window.

Ah, I think to myself. There it is.

It makes even more sense when Damien uses a tricycle to push his mother over the balcony in their expensive mansion. Here is the movie that actually mythologized the back of my head.

“For everything holy, there is something unholy,” the priest says, as he tries to right wrongs on the screen. I know that my fundamental disagreement with his statement is why I don’t find the devil aspect of The Omen scary. I don’t believe in demons, devils, entities of pure evil. I don’t believe in pure evil. What strikes me about The Omen, though, is that it isn’t about the horror of pregnancy. It’s about the horror of parenthood. While I don’t believe in an Antichrist, I do believe that parenthood is as scary as pregnancy. Because isn’t this the supernatural expression of the fear of raising a serial killer? Accidentally raising the devil?

“She fantasizes that your child is alien, that your child is evil,” Kathy’s doctor says to Robert, intimating that the mother is, once again, insane when she is not (a trope of cursed parenthood if there ever was one).

I reflect on April 2020, when, in the span of a week, I went from wanting a child to never wanting a child. And here is the thing I am ashamed to admit: one of the reasons I changed my mind was that, absent the world, I wouldn’t have had meaningful help. I would have dissolved into a child, lost myself, lost my work and my art and become a nurturer only. And I am terrified of that.

“Don’t let him kill me,” Kathy says from the hospital bed in The Omen. And that is why parenthood is scary, too, why it extends past all the body horror of being pregnant. That to be a parent is a kind of death, to no longer be wholly oneself for oneself.

That to be a parent is a kind of death, to no longer be wholly oneself for oneself.

*

A few days ago, I asked Jude Ellison Doyle, author of Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers and the new horror comic Maw, if I could quote him in my Scaring Children column when I got to the part about babies, a part I knew I was going to get to eventually. We hadn’t meant to talk about parenthood, but he has a four-year-old, and I think about babies so much it might as well be a song stuck in my head.

So, naturally, we did talk about parenthood. And I’m not going to quote him, not really, because I didn’t record the conversation, didn’t write it down, because it wasn’t for an essay. It was just two trans people talking about being pregnant, raising children. So imagine: me with a seltzer sitting at my dining room table. Behind me, tarot cards and a Malaysian orchid. Behind Jude: books, as befitting an author. Both of us wearing flannel, but mercifully not the same flannel. We are laughing and cringing because he just told me that there is not a germ a four-year-old cannot access; just the other day, the kid got underneath a grocery store shopping cart and bit it. I picture tiny pearl kid teeth and a hopped-up expression like a cartoon shark. It is funny and also, these days, it can’t be.

And then imagine Jude saying something like this, adjacent to this, though not exactly this, because I am the same person who remembered clearly my mother saying “Rosemary’s Baby” when she in fact said “The Omen” and my word on exact lines of dialogue means nothing: What they do not tell you is that, for a while, you do not know, exactly, where you end and your kid begins. That your rhythms are so synced that when you both wake, you open your eyes at the same time.

I hold my breath. I want it and I don’t. Both.

A text, to my mother: Can I ask—did I behave such that you were ever sincerely worried I might be the Antichrist? Or was it more of a joke/bit?

Two texts, from my mother, in reply: A couple of things 1. The stork bite, 2. You would look over my shoulder like there was someone behind me, 3. You would give me a dirty look.

But you never pushed a nanny through a plate glass window or anything. 🙂