A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

by Rachel Cusk

Looking after children is a low-status occupation. It is isolating, frequently boring, relentlessly demanding and exhausting. It erodes your self-esteem and your membership of the adult world.

At its worst moments parenthood does indeed resemble hell, in the sense that its torments are never-ending, that its obligations correspond inversely to the desires of the obliged, that its drama is conducted in full view of the heaven of freedom; a heaven that is often passionately yearned for, a heaven from which the parent has been cast out, usually of his or her own volition. The difference lies in the possibility of virtue, and for this reason I understand better those people who would have you believe that their babies don’t cry, that their children bring them only joy, that their families sit around together reading novels, quietly discussing the environment or engaged in constructive play: seeing the situation they have decided, out of pride or integrity or some obscure loyalty to themselves, to make the best of it. What is striking, in any case, is that these dissident voices are male. Their outrage is fresh, the protest of the novice or new arrival. There is something shaming in their objections, for they have arrived in the world of childcare full of revolutionary zeal, of disgust and despair at what they see, and their expostulations, their cries for reform, vibrate with unspoken criticism of those who have lived unprotesting under its regime for so long: the lifers, the long-term residents, women.

I often think that people wouldn’t have children if they knew what it was like, and I wonder whether as a gender we contain a Darwinian stop upon our powers of expression, our ability to render the truth of this subject. People without children certainly don’t seem very interested in anything that people with have to say about it: they approach parenthood blithely, as if they were the first, with all the innocence of Adam and Eve before the fall. Men, it seems, are blowing our cover with their loud objections.

There is in truth no utterance that could express the magnitude of the change from woman or man to mother or father, and in the absence of definitive statement the subject becomes peopled with delusions and ghosts, with misapprehensions and exaggerations and underestimations, becomes separated from the general drift of human conversation, so that parenthood is not a transition but a defection, a political act.

It cries so much that they hate it. Whenever it stops crying the relief is so great that they love it.

The loss of these things seemed a high, an exorbitant price to pay for the privilege of motherhood; and though much was given back to me in the form of my daughter it was not payment in kind nor even in a different coin, was not in fact recompense of any sort. My loss and my gain were unrelated, were calculated without the aim of some final, ultimate balance.

Increasingly, motherhood comes to seem to me not a condition but a job, the work of certain periods, which begin and end and outside of which I am free.