The nesting urge is poorly named. I don’t mind the association of women with birds—they always did seem to fly off when I approached a flock of them. But I object to calling it an “urge.” Like “instinct” or “itch,” “urge” suggests that the one with it will satisfy it. But what is true of robin and sparrow—that the female builds the nest—is not usually true of the husband and his pregnant wife, who says, wide-eyed and insomniac: “We have to clean out the garage tomorrow.”
The “royal we” means “I.” This is a rare instance of “the unroyal we”—which means “you.” Women have nesting urges, but mainly in the sense that their men are urged, by them, to make a nest. “Nesting orders” would be more to the point.
Not to mention the euphemism “nest,” which is misleading at best. It belongs to that category of conceits surrounding sex without which the cowardly never would have copulated. St. Paul, who looked at things straight on, called birth a woman’s way of salvation: probably because it is like being crucified. We might call birth “a delivery” for the same reason: that a woman is delivered of her baby through blood as sinners are of sin. But really, we say “delivery” with some vague association of receiving a package in the mail.
I mean that a “nest” is far too restrained. It makes it sound like a woman wants a well-made bed. What she may well want is a retaining wall and a wrought-iron fence. She may also want you to phone her mother and apologize for your behavior last Christmas even though you were technically in the right. She may want you to cash out your 401(k) and purchase a house in which you can all really breathe.
In any case, she wants something so big, so profound, that any paint or purchases can only serve as a symbol of her desire and never as its satisfaction: what she wants is a world prepared for a child.
Parrots can succeed at such preparations, for their babies have finite purposes—like eating nuts. Parents, however, can only fail, for their babies have infinite purposes—like meeting God. It requires no explicit Christianity to know that what is due to the newborn is a world newly born. What does a mother wish for her child, except every good? And what else is so obviously denied to her by this world of banks and war and sin? Yet—we will at least clean out that garage. And, whether we know it or not, the clean garage will take part in and so signify the nesting urge of Mary, the Mother of God—to build that perfect world which Christians call the Kingdom.
If it weren’t unflattering to women already worried about their shape, I’d offer the beaver’s urge to build a dam as a more realistic metaphor, one that would ready the male soul for the amount of labor-time her approaching labor may well demand. (Plus, “the damming urge” would allow men to grumble, while they rip the old cabinets off the wall, about being “dammed if I don’t.”)
The nesting urge is not born in the months before birth. It does not arrive from out of the blue. It gets more intense, sure, but “nesting” comes concomitant with female existence. The desire to better the world into a home develops alongside the fact that one can be a home—that one’s ribcage is a roof, womb a door, blood a kitchen, breasts a table. All of this physical power to become room and board to another person is the incarnation of the spiritual reality of women, of all that is said and left unsaid by the title: “homemaker.”
Consider the sentimental scene, repeated in many movies I have seen and forgotten, in which some well-lit starlet sweeps her bright eyes over a moldy bachelor’s pad and declares—with a jut of the hip—“well this place needs a woman’s touch.” It’s trite, but there is no equivalent triteness involving “a man’s touch”—though I can imagine several satires on the idea. There are no stories of some fresh young male arriving into a near-animal femaledom and cleaning it up; ruining its smug sense of completion; opening its mildewed windows and letting a breeze from a better world intoxicate some otherwise content woman-child into growing up and moving out. Even if this is all stuff and nonsense, it is only believable as female stuff. If it is cliche, it is a cliche about women.
“The woman’s touch” is often a prod, sometimes a slap, and it is always aimed at men. Women effect what they envision in and through effecting the men to whom they are such a vision. Men, in their environments as in their personal appearance and aspirations, are stirred to better the world for women long before this becomes explicit in the nesting urge, when one particularly wild-eyed exemplar of the sex demands that you “finish the basement” and “get a real job so we can buy a car that works.”
Feminism denies such an obvious pattern and suppresses such an awesome power, because its ideal is individualistic. It is humiliated to find, in the brooding, sexless, heroes of its imagination, any trace of a primordial society, of an original relationship. It is ashamed to admit the truth of its own adage, that “the sexual is political”—for what else is the nesting urge but the force within human nature by which men are used to build homes, and then to extend homes, and then to move the in-laws near the extended homes, and so on, the family transcending itself towards the polis at the regular pace of sex and pregnancy?
The command given by God to man and woman is twofold: “be fruitful and multiply” and “subdue the earth and have dominion.” These two are connected, for men would worry to fill an unsubdued earth when what they fill it with is—death-prone babies and the exhausted mothers who nurse them. Being fruitful demands dominion. And if it is typical that men, from time to time, must encourage women to “be fruitful” (engaging in something that looks an awful lot like pleading in this regard), it is typical of women to remind men to subdue the earth. Indeed, it is still the case, this far east of Eden, that women would prefer to be fruitful and multiply with a man who could provide some recent evidence of having subdued the earth; could exhibit some respectable modicum of dominion, if not over the birds of the air, exactly, at least over the state of the house and the future of his paycheck.
If men and women really were individuals involved in negotiations for the sake of fundamentally selfish ends, then all of this is horrifying: each sex manipulating the other in an exchange of security for sex, of “subduing” for “multiplying.” But if they are a team from the beginning, fulfilled by belonging to each other, then sexual love is what it so obviously is—a world-building power. In the nesting urge we see in nature what St. Paul sees as a gift of grace, that “when I am weak, then I am strong.” In love, women risk an utmost of weakness which motivates an utmost of male strength to better the world into a home where such weakness can live.