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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONThe First Cut
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I WAS RAISED in a family of four girls. When my sisters and I are together, we speak a private language composed largely of different pitches of laughter that causes our exasperated father to demand to know what’s so funny. I am most at home when I am sharing clothes, secrets, and a bathroom with other women. So when I became pregnant for the second time, I looked forward to giving my four-year-old daughter a sister. I was not expecting our ultrasound technician to hand me a small black-and-white picture of a baby with a tiny penis. I squinted at the hazy image and brought it close to my face. I turned it sideways and reexamined it in the bright light of the hospital corridor. There was no doubt about it: I was carrying a boy. Until that moment, I had felt like a babushka doll, hiding within me a smaller version of myself. I had imagined tiny ovaries growing next to my own, a tiny womb somewhere inside of mine. It was difficult for me to conceive of a little penis growing in my belly.
A few months later, my husband, Ismail, and I invited a friend to dinner who casually asked us if we intended to have our son circumcised. To me the answer was obvious. We had just prepared a detailed birth plan with our midwife, outlining a strategy to cushion our son’s transition into this world: the lights in the birthing room would be low; my baby would rest on my chest immediately after birth; he would stay with us at all times in the hospital. Why would we go to such lengths to minimize trauma and then subject him to a painful and unnecessary procedure? As I shook my head, I was astonished to see Ismail nodding affirmatively on the other side of the table. It had never occurred to me that he might have a different opinion, though it should have: he’d spent the first half of his life in Libya and been raised according to Muslim traditions.
As a young man, Ismail had left North Africa to come to the United States, where he’d reinvented himself. He’d cast off the outward signs of his background — the style of dress, the diet, the language — and transformed himself from a traditional North African Muslim into a progressive middle-class American. He relished his new freedom to openly date women, to jog down the street in running shorts, to protest the government. But some traditions can’t be discarded as easily as a wardrobe or a cuisine. Not even Ismail knew that circumcision was in his blood until he discovered he had fathered a son.
My husband had already rejected any aspects of Muslim culture that felt archaic and oppressive to him. When we visited his family in Libya, Ismail was distressed by the ways patriarchal traditions constrained his four sisters. He had explosive arguments with his father in which he defended his sisters’ right to choose their own husbands — and then, years later, he admonished those husbands to help their wives with the household duties. While the rest of the men sat waiting to be served, Ismail insisted on working side by side in the kitchen with the women in his family.
He was skeptical about the oppressive aspects of American culture as well: debt, for example, which he feared would make him an indentured servant to large financial institutions. He objected to American standards of feminine beauty, which encouraged women to develop eating disorders or have plastic surgery to conform to the culture’s unrealistic expectations. He refused to be defined by his job, and he struggled to maintain a balance among work, home, and community. Given all of this, I found his position on circumcision as nonsensical as the thought that he would demand a dowry for our daughter on her wedding day.
After our guest had left, I asked Ismail why he wanted his son to be circumcised. He was unable to provide a clear explanation. My practical husband, the scientist who trusted reason more than intuition, was still inexplicably tethered to this particular tradition from his past.
Ismail believes that the truth is verifiable and that disputes can be resolved by studying the facts. When we disagree, he often prefaces his strongest argument with the phrase “The bottom line is . . .” He says these four words with absolute confidence, as if he were standing on rock-solid ground. I find his certainty maddening, because to me the truth is not solid, but more of a liquid: it slips easily through my fingers, reflects the light in different ways, and takes the shape of the countless perspectives that try to contain it. Because he likes to back up his arguments with data, Ismail will often conclude with “I’ll send you some links.” The next day he’ll e-mail me his online sources, which are, to his mind, indisputable.
In my efforts to protect our unborn son’s penis, I borrowed his strategy and made Internet research my first line of defense. I printed stacks of articles about the drawbacks of circumcision for Ismail to read, confident that once I’d educated him, he would change his mind. He piled these articles by his bedside and read them one by one, his brow furrowed. Still he insisted that his son be circumcised. In his native language, circumcision is called tahara, which means “purification.” Muslims view the procedure as a way to follow in the footsteps of the Prophet Mohammed; it is both an honor and a rite of passage. No scientific study or public-health message could change Ismail’s mind. Neither could my argument that he was no longer a traditional Muslim, having discarded many other customs from his past. The best explanation he could provide was that circumcision is what men in his family did, and that he needed his son to be a part of that lineage. He made me feel that if I prevented the procedure, I would be breaking one of his last and most important connections to his heritage.
Part of me wanted to honor my husband’s wishes. Over the course of our marriage, Ismail had accepted many of my idiosyncrasies: my difficulty with apologies, my desire to sit down and write rather than clean house, my need to disappear alone into the woods to clear my head. He didn’t ask me to back up these behaviors with data. Instead he watched our daughter when I disappeared. He cleaned while I wrote. And when I returned, rather than waiting for the apologies he deserved, he broke the tension by reaching for my hand. He honored my most urgent and inexplicable desires, the ones I couldn’t dress up in tidy intellectual arguments. He accepted me in spite of the fact that I confounded him. I felt I should be able to do the same for him. But I also wanted to protect our son.
Ismail and I were in couple’s therapy at the time. One day, as we were walking out the door after a session in which we hadn’t discussed this topic, I offhandedly asked our secular Jewish therapist if he’d had his own sons circumcised. “Of course,” he said without hesitation. Like my husband, he could not provide a clear explanation for why he had done so, though he did offer that the circumcised penis was more “attractive.” He and my husband nodded knowingly at each other. Ismail and I had spent many hours in this therapist’s office trying to reduce the unnecessary suffering we brought on ourselves and those we loved. Now this man, so adept at analyzing the subtle ways in which we caused each other pain — our tone of voice, our choice of words, our avoidance — spoke as if cutting away the most sensitive part of a baby’s body made perfect sense and required no further consideration.
At the end of one of my last prenatal visits, just after my midwife had finished measuring my mountainous belly, I asked if she knew where I could get my son circumcised. I may as well have asked her for a cigarette. She stared at me long and hard, as if she suddenly didn’t recognize me. Then she began to tell me in slow, measured tones that the procedure was not medically necessary. She pointed out that it was no longer covered by some insurance policies, and that by the time my son was in high school, more than half of his peers would be uncut. She talked about hygiene and sexual satisfaction. She even told me about support groups for men who mourned the loss of their foreskins, and about kits men purchased on the Internet to help regrow them. She asked me to consider this decision very carefully.
