Alice Braun is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Paris Nanterre, author of the book Motherhood and Creativity in Contemporary Self-Life Writing, and host of the Mothers and Writers blog.
One summer, my one-year-old son was having a nap, and I was just finishing Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: on Becoming a Mother. I was jittery and anxious, constantly monitoring my son’s health, worrying over diseases real and imaginary, wondering if he was getting enough sleep, or too much of it, fretting constantly over him. Later that day, some family came to visit, the Brittany sun was mild, the shade cool under the apple trees. I’d lain my son down on a blanket and I was trying to enjoy the conversation, yet my mind was elsewhere, I was looking at the older children playing in the garden, the other babies who were tentatively trying their new legs, painfully aware that my son was only barely sitting up. I was not free, shackled to him by an invisible bond. The other mothers seemed so happy amongst their children, and I just had to admit that I was not doing well. I was failing. I thought about sharing those thoughts with the other mothers present but remained silent instead. I’m sure they were struggling just as much as I was, but no one dared say anything.
I thought back to Rachel Cusk’s memoir of early motherhood, the alienation and the guilt that permeated her pages, and particularly to one sentence in the middle of the book where she realises she is now unable to connect with the people around here: “We meet at the uncrossable border between the free world and the closed regime of motherhood”. I was blown away, and intensely relieved, by the admission, and by the constant, shocking, parallel the narrator was drawing between her experience of motherhood and a prison compound. I’d already been impressed by Cusk’s later novel Arlington Park, which I had read a few years back as a single woman raging at what I would later realise was my freedom, but which felt at the time like isolation and loneliness. Here I was with a husband and a child of my own, surrounded by family and friends, realising that I was dragging my happiness around like a ball and chain. But there was someone, somewhere, who had experienced those same feelings and had actually put them in writing.
Rachel Cusk became my secret companion, my confidante, she who was bold enough to articulate what I would later understand was my feeling of ambivalence at being a mother. I realised that other women may have gone through what I was going through.
Cusk was made to pay a heavy price for that boldness: in an article she published in The Guardian in 2008, she revisited the period which immediately followed the release of her memoir. The reviews that came in were nothing short of indictments of her selfishness and entitlement; she was accused of being dangerous to her children or alternatively severely depressed and afflicted with undiagnosed post-partum depression. Her worst crime was to have revealed the travails of early motherhood and to have called out the narrative of blissful happiness for what it is: a fabrication, and a pernicious one at that. Some reviewers worried that reading such a book as Cusk’s would be responsible for ending the propagation of the human race: women would be so put off by the description of early motherhood that they would all desist from having children in revolt.
As Adrienne Rich has demonstrated in her 1976 book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, and as several sociologists and anthropologists have also discovered, women living in the West especially have been made to experience motherhood as a lonely experience, with each mother isolated in her own home, worrying over her mistakes and insufficiencies, drowning in guilt. Things were made worse with the apparition of the neoliberal logic of “intensive parenting” which would make mothering an individual venture at which each must excel, or risk being judged as a “bad mother”. A bad mother today is not only a mother who will starve or severely neglect her children, she is also the mother who will let her children watch television while she takes the proper time to wash her hair or who will dare to admit that she finds playing with them a tedious activity. She is the mother who will write a book to say that she did not find motherhood easy or even enjoyable.
I believe that one of the ways to alleviate the shame and guilt, to break the isolation of mothers is to write and share more writing by mothers.
We need to read accounts by women who have found motherhood to be cruel and disappointing, or else uplifting and empowering, women who have failed miserably at being mothers and others who have only managed to do their pitiful best. The good news is those books are being written – by Rachel Cusk, Eavan Boland, Pragya Agarwal, Maggie Nelson, Doireann Ní Ghriofa, Liz Berry, and many other authors of prose and poetry in English and beyond. Those memoirs and those poems can guide us through our ambivalence, foster a sense of companionship which has been denied to mothers for so long, as long as we make sure they are read and widely circulated.
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