Ayun, Milo & friend

My family has a highly complex relationship to amputation.

First there was the impending baby, my first child, known to be a boy because my ballooning body resembled an apple more than a pear. When not pregnant I resemble a pear. Since every hard luck nutcase on the streets of the East Village agreed definitively and without solicitation that I was carrying a male, there was no need for a sonogram.

I forget where or when the circumcision argument began, but I can pinpoint the moment it blazed beyond our control. We were at the Odessa diner with Little MoMo and her short-lived new boyfriend. He, it’s fair to say, was asking for it. "So," he inquired with the smirk people seldom employ when discussing the amputation of an arm or leg, "Are you going to chop off his weenie?"

That’s what passes for adult cocktail conversation these days, and, believe me, my banter is a lot less witty when I’m tanked up on plain tomato juice, no ice. After about a minute’s worth of unamusing repartee, Greg and I were at each other’s throats. Things escalated rapidly, as intimate high-stakes fights in front of someone you’ve just met do, and before you could say "snip-snip ha-ha," I was blinking back tears, aghast that Greg would so blithely mutilate our son. Greg, a third generation Jewish atheist whose great-grandfather was a rabbi, was dismayed to learn he’d married an anti-Semite whose hippie-dippy ideas would break a tradition dating back to Abraham and Isaac, if not further. We made a real scene. It’s amazing we didn’t tip over the table.

The fight continued for two days, until my red, swollen eyes trumped every argument in Greg’s arsenal. I had stood firm and weeping when presented with such pearls as "his penis should look like his father’s penis," "what if the other kids laugh at him in the locker room," and "it’s unsanitary." I did research on the Internet and enlisted the support of Karen, who rallied her uncircumcised Scottish fiancé to email Greg, whom he had never met. CJ is a good egg, as they say. He is so soft-spoken and discreet that you would never guess that he’d email American strangers about his penis. The testimony of a satisfied, uncut Glaswegian notwithstanding, Greg held his ground. "You know how the Nazis identified the Jews, don’t you?" he said. "He has relatives who died in the camps. I want him to be connected to that."

He almost had me there. At least I stopped thinking of him as the would-be baby butcher. A little more research on the Internet, and I returned to Greg with a Talmudic riddle. "If you can tell me why the Jews circumcise their male children, I’ll do it."

It was my turn to have him. Greg’s childhood religious instruction weighed in at zilch. I, however, had participated in a Seder in my Episcopal Sunday school. Greg wasn’t bar mitzvahed until his late twenties when he was pulled off a Lower East Side street into a Lubovitcher van. I had attended many bar mitzvahs back in Indiana. They were my first boy-girl parties. "Do you give?" I asked.

"Well, it’s to show, it’s because of, when you become a man…" he stammered.

"No, it’s a covenant with God," I told him. "Who you don’t believe in. We can take him to the Holocaust Museum. He will know about his relatives who died in the camps." The non-atheist Jews’ covenant with God sealed the deal my red, swollen eyes had brokered.

We still had the problem of the cat. I have known Jambo longer than I have known Greg, and he has never once behaved like anything other than a foul-tempered, ungrateful, violent little murderer. I saw the jigsaw remains of many mice trapped by his swift and steely claws. God only knew what he could do to a baby’s finger. "It’s an amputation! It’s like cutting off their fingers!" rang the words of a strident, hulking veterinarian I once knew. She had favored harsh penalties for barbaric pet owners who prioritized their upholstery. An eye for an eye, a finger for every declawed paw. I didn’t like her much, but I couldn’t shake her low opinion of people who whacked off their cats’ extremities as mindlessly as cutting crusts off a sandwich. It wasn’t that far removed from my anti-circumcision platform.

Greg and I know where we stand with Jambo. We love him, but he doesn’t love us back. The only thing he loves is that mangy rag doll he has humped at least three times a day since adolescence. I didn’t buy into that old wives’ tale about cats sucking the breath from a slumbering infant, but I know from experience that Jambo never "uses his words" when he can swipe and bite. We couldn’t give him away because his reputation preceded him. Some friends claimed allergies or asthma. Others laughed in our faces. Even our mothers refused. A friend of Greg’s had babysat Jambo for six months while we were traveling in Asia, but we hadn’t seen him since our wedding, he lived halfway across the country and there was the matter of the hammer. When we got back from Asia, Josh had returned Jambo with one of those little rubber and steel hammers doctors use to test reflexes. "He likes to play with this," Josh told us. I’ll bet.

With my due date looming, Jambo was going to lose either way. Your fingers or your life. The vet who performed the amputation had no problem with declawing, though he did take me to task for neglecting to schedule the operation during Jambo’s infancy. "If you knew you wanted children, you should have had the procedure done at the same time you had him neutered." (Oh yeah, before we took his fingers, we took his jewels which didn’t put a damper on his relationship with the rag doll.) I felt sufficiently chastised that I didn’t tell the doctor that the few motherly fantasies I’d entertained seven years earlier rarely strayed beyond adorable baby clothes.

Anyone who tells you that declawing is not painful has not seen her pet hobbling about, long stitches trailing from his foreshortened paws like busted guitar wires. His confusion upon finding his litter box filled with shredded newspaper nearly broke our hearts. If nothing else, Jambo’s suffering convinced Greg that his reluctant decision to leave our son’s foreskin as is was a good one. We spent our final childless days following Jambo around the apartment, apologizing to him and putting his doll in easy reach.

Imagine our surprise when I gave birth to a three-thumbed baby girl who required a spinal tap within forty-eight hours of delivery. "Don’t worry, she won’t feel it," a young resident assured me. Yeah, right, that’s what they tell the anxious mothers of boy babies right before circumcision. I was sitting beside Inky in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit when a little boy was circumcised one bassinet over. He arched his back nearly double and screamed as if someone were cutting a piece of his penis off, which indeed someone was. Sharp things applied to soft tissue cause pain. I’m sure if Doberman pinschers could speak a language humans understood, they wouldn’t hesitate to lobby for the aesthetic merits of unbobbed ears.

As Inky underwent all sorts of medical intervention in those first two weeks, the extra thumb became a rallying point. When told of our baby’s minor abnormality, a friend getting her master’s in gender studies at NYU rasped, "Wonderful! She’ll be a feminist and a witch!" The third thumb came to represent an extra resource, proof that our baby had strength in reserve. The nurses wisely treated it as a nifty surprise, like an antique ring that flips open to dispense a pinch of arsenic. Toward the end of our hospital stay, the pediatric cardiologist offered to refer us to a hand man to have the thumb removed in an easy procedure. I would imagine that it’s a refreshing change of pace for a pediatric cardiologist to discuss something so elective and unimportant with parents. But by that point, all three of Inky’s thumbs were as precious to me as my own. The miracle of birth still fresh in his mind, Greg conceded to the mother’s etched-in-stone wishes.

The family was less convinced. No doubt relieved that the circumcision decision would remain hypothetical, Greg’s mother began to play that old song, "Children Can Be So Cruel." I happen to think adults can be much crueler. The jury’s still out as to whether a certain three-thumbed teenager will give the finger to her freakshow-loving mother for ruining her chances for a normal life. For all we know, she’s going to be the cruelest kid in class, hectoring the kid with the hearing aid, the fat kid or the kid whose father died. I hope not. I think I’m raising her to be pretty compassionate, to stick it to the twerps who jeer at differences that elicit curiosity. Children invent ways to be cruel without the prop of physical abnormalities.

I came home from first grade crying because some bad boy had called me "pantyhose."

"Baby thumb" came in handy when Inky and every other child at a party noticed that one young guest had a large purple mass on his neck. Our hostess had told me that the little boy’s mother was sensitive about her son’s appearance. It must make every children’s party a nightmare for her, as one piping voice after another demands to know what that thing is and why he has that thing and look at that thing, mama! When the little piping voice was one I recognized, I was ready, maybe a little too ready. I deftly reminded Inky of how her baby thumb was something special she had been born with and her new friend had something special he had been born with, yak yak yak. My explanation exceeded the term limits of her interest. It hit home that our position is one of luxury. A cute little thumb-bud will in no way inhibit my pretty child’s career as a surgeon or a concert pianist. I doubt the mother at the party would use the eggplant-like sack growing from his neck to satisfy his questions about my kid’s dinky thumb. She might draw his attention to it when he notices a kid born with just one eye. In the grand scheme, I can’t imagine that Inky’s deformity will cause her much more grief than her brother’s foreskin will bring him.

"It looks like an aardvark’s nose," Greg commented while changing Milo’s diaper. The circumcision decision of 1997 held for the child born in 2000. The old name was dusted off too.

The cat is still declawed, his temper just as foul.

Of our children’s male cronies, I would say about half are circumcised. If a diaper change is in progress, we look, just as curious as little boys in a locker room. Nobody accuses anyone else of barbarism, though we all have our thoughts.

No one outside the family has told me that I’m crazy to leave my daughter’s baby thumb in peace. Actually, a French mother on the playground did, but she thinks all Americans are crazy, particularly the ones who circumcise their sons. I like her. I bet she was a cruel child. She gets a lot of mileage from how I dress my baby boy, in hand-me-down leopard-print bonnets and loopy crocheted sweaters. "Are you trying to turn zees child into a fairy?" she laughs.

"I wouldn’t mind it," I tell her as we watch her son charge the length of the playground gripping a fallen tree branch like a battering ram. "But I think it has to be something you’re born with."

The Big Rumpus (Seal Press, 2002)
ISBN # 1580050719
Distributed by Ingrams and Publishers Group West

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