A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

by Rachel Cusk

Birth is not merely that which divides women from men: it also divides women from themselves, so that a woman’s understanding of what it is to exist is profoundly changed. Another person has existed in her, and after their birth they live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness. When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.

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.

Childbirth and motherhood are the anvil upon which sexual inequality was forged, and the women in our society whose responsibilities, expectations and experience are like those of men are right to approach it with trepidation. Women have changed, but their biological condition remains unaltered.

My understanding came without footnotes, without clauses stating that you didn’t have to have a baby, let alone might not be able to: like all facts of life, it took a non-negotiable form.

My arrival in this camp is meditated but not informed. I know about pregnancy only what everybody knows about it, which is what it looks like from the outside. I have walked past it many times. I have wondered what goes on behind its high walls. Knowing the pain which every inmate must endure as the condition of their release, I have imagined it to be a place in which some secret and specialised process of preparation occurs, in which confidential information is handed out in sealed envelopes that will explain this pain, that will render it painless.

Pregnancy lasts for two hundred and sixty-six days, forty weeks, nine months, or three trimesters, depending on how you choose to count it. The medical profession counts in weeks. The general public, for whom other people’s pregnancies pass like life, count in months. I don’t know who counts in trimesters, teachers perhaps, or women on their fifth baby. Only those who suffer, people wrongfully imprisoned, people with broken hearts, count days.

I have had troubling hints from other women, too, women who bark with jaded laughter at the mention of the word ‘pain’, or who remark mysteriously that afterwards you’re never the same again. Such clues are never explained; indeed, everything suddenly seems to go rather quiet, as if some vow of silence has been unintentionally broken. I myself decide to broadcast my experiences at every opportunity, once I’ve had them; but the fact that I have never personally encountered such a disciple of truth, have neither heard nor read during the course of my life a straightforward account of this most ubiquitous of happenings, suggests to me the presence of an additional horror surrounding the mystery: that somehow, during those tortured hours, some fundamental component of oneself is removed, so that afterwards although one looks and sounds more or less exactly as one did before, one is in fact a simulacrum, a brainwashed being programmed not to bear witness to the truth.

modern pregnancy is governed by a regime breathtaking in the homogeneity of its propaganda, its insignia, its language.

I long to receive some signal of subterfuge, some coded reference to a resistance. My sex has become an exiguous, long-laid, lovingly furnished trap into which I have inadvertently wandered and from which now there is no escape. I have been tagged, as if electronically, by pregnancy. My womanly movements are being closely monitored.

The baby plays a curious role in the culture of pregnancy. It is at once victim and autocrat. It is a being destined to live only in the moment of perfection that is its birth, after which it degenerates and decays, becomes human and sinful, cries and is returned to the realm of the real. But in pregnancy the baby is a wonder, a miracle, an expiation.

Now that I am closer to labour, other women begin to drop louder hints about it. I hear of episiotomies, of Caesareans in which the anaesthetic didn’t quite work, of badly sewn stitches, of painful internal examinations, of fifty-hour confinements. Words like mutilation and tearing are mentioned. I no longer know whether I am more afraid of the pain of childbirth or the interventions it invites.

It is as if I have come to the house of someone who has just died, someone I loved, someone I can’t believe has gone. The rooms, the furniture, the pictures and possessions all wear an unbearable patina of familiarity: standing there I feel bludgeoned by tragedy, as though I were standing in the irretrievable past.

They exclaim when I open the door, fully dressed, normal: at the returned fact of me, like an undelivered letter. Where’s it gone? they laugh, pointing at my stomach. Pregnancy is a hallucination now. The mystery of the baby inside me has passed unsolved.

My ownership of my daughter is preoccupying, uncertain and fraught. In hospital I felt immediately a sort of animal-like habituation with her presence; at home I am in transactional shock, as if I had gone out and bought something extremely expensive, something for which in the shop I felt the fiercest, most private desire, and were now regarding it with shrivelled courage in my sitting room. I show it to other people, fearing their assessment. I let them touch and even hold it, silently frantic at the damage they might do, desperate to have it back. I both want and fear it, and yet can consummate neither my desire nor my fear, can neither use nor relinquish this precious purchase, for my feelings obstruct each other and hold me in a kind of deadlock.

perhaps it is the clinical, hospital-appointed nature of the birth itself that has caused me to lose the thread of things, for in truth my experience of birth was more like the experience of having an appendix removed than what most people would understand by ‘labour’. Without its connecting hours, the glue of its pain, the literalness of its passage, I fear that I will not make it to motherhood; that I will remain stranded as someone who merely had an operation, leaving the baby with no more sense of how she came to be here than if she had been left on the doorstep by a stork.

The vision of myself that I briefly glimpsed in the park – unified, capable, experiencing ‘the solidarity of life’ – is one that I will continue to pursue over the coming months. It proves elusive. Its constituents, resolutely hostile, are equally unruly. To be a mother I must leave the telephone unanswered, work undone, arrangements unmet. To be myself I must let the baby cry, must forestall her hunger or leave her for evenings out, must forget her in order to think about other things. To succeed in being one means to fail at being the other.

The break between mother and self was less clean than I had imagined it in the taxi: and yet it was a premonition, too; for later, even in my best moments, I never feel myself to have progressed beyond this division. I merely learn to legislate for two states, and to secure the border between them. At first, though, I am driven to work at the newer of the two skills, which is motherhood; and it is with a shock that I see, like a plummeting stock market, the resulting plunge in my own significance.

The question of what a woman is if she is not a mother has been superceded for me by that of what a woman is if she is a mother; and of what a mother, in fact, is.

The prospect is exciting, for it is when the baby sleeps that I liaise, as if it were a lover, with my former life. These liaisons, though always thrilling, are often frantic. I dash about the house unable to decide what to do: to read, to work, to telephone my friends. Sometimes these pleasures elude me and I end up gloomily cleaning the house, or standing in front of the mirror striving to recognise myself. Sometimes I miss the baby and lie beside her crib while she sleeps. Sometimes I manage to read, or work, or talk, and am enjoying it when she wakes up unexpectedly and cries; and then the pain of moving from one life to the other is acute.

And she has wrought me, too, because although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence.

All that is required is for me to be there; an ‘all’ that is of course everything, because being there involves not being anywhere else, being ready to drop everything. Being myself is no compensation for not being there.

This new love is banked and dammed. It is love with walls, with rooms. It is conversational, corresponding, detailed, civilised. It is more like romantic love, the love of adults, than I could have anticipated. I have to stop myself from talking about my daughter, from recounting her exploits and narrating her relation to me. There is less that I have to do for her now, and the withdrawal of her helplessness draws a veil over the murky history of my care of her. I imagine, ashamed, her caring for me when I am old, bringing the bedpans and the bottles; and I wonder what I will have scored, what undisclosed quantity of loyalty and love I have earned during these testing months. I did not know, in truth, that they were a test. I forgot that she would one day spring to life, would one day walk and talk and tell me what she thought of me. I wonder if I offended her with my reluctance, my fury. I wonder if I tormented her. I hope that I have been good, like Cinderella, when it was hard to be; not like the ugly sisters with their big feet and horny toes, whom retribution has unforgiving in its sights, who love, but too late.

I read somewhere that it is inappropriate to refer to a mother and her newborn child as two separate beings: they are one, a composite creature best referred to as mother-and-baby or perhaps motherbaby. I find this claim unnerving, even threatening, in spite of the fact that it perfectly describes the profound change in the co-ordinates of my being that I experience in the days and weeks after my daughter’s birth. I feel like a house to which an extension has been added: where once there was a wall, now there is a new room. I feel my heat and light flowing vertiginously into it.

He wishes to know whether people who don’t have children realise what weekends are like for people who do. The fact is, there are no weekends. What the outside world refers to as ‘the weekend’ is a round trip to the ninth circle of hell for parents.

I think about the days people spend with their children, remote, crisis-torn, then elapsed, like the days of a disaster on the other side of the world. These days do not seem to attract the recognition, the international concern they evidently deserve. Even those parents who publicise their predicament are difficult to counsel. Besieged as they are, yet they generally disclose no contrary desire; their attitude to the glories of an unencumbered life is, if anything, faintly mocking. They rail, and yet an offer permanently to remove their children from their care would almost certainly be turned down: they vent their frustration, but keep their love a closely guarded secret. Such versions of family life come to seem impenetrable to me. I cannot subscribe to the hell they portray, not because I do not recognise it, but because the hardship of parenthood is so unrelievedly shocking that I feel driven to look deeper for its meaning, its cause. 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, t...

One does not, it is true, often hear a woman observe with incredulity that her baby won’t seem to go away, not even for a night so that she can get some sleep, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t think it, hasn’t always thought it. 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.

Months after her birth I still found myself affronted and incredulous, as if at some foreign and despicable justice, by the fact that I could no longer sleep in or watch a film or spend a Saturday morning reading, that I couldn’t stroll unfettered in the warmth of a summer’s evening or go swimming or wander down to the pub for a drink. 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.

A feeling of dispossession and rootlessness took hold of me, thrived in me, putative but vigorous, and it was only once I had ceased to house it and actually brought it to life that I saw it was merely a phantom, a construction. I had given, it seemed, concrete expression to my grief at the fact that I could no longer live the life that I had been living. I had moved away because I thought I no longer belonged where I was.

Suddenly our life was like a drama in which a bomb is being disabled against the clock. We were, all at once, the slaves of time, and we kept our daughter to the kitchen so as better to contain her ticking, to contain her power to destroy. Only when she was upended, neutralised by sleep, did the ticking stop; interludes which washed swiftly and soundlessly past us like flood waters, bearing away the pleasure of books or conversation too quickly for us to do more than grab at them.

The business of looking after a child possesses a core of unruliness, a quality of continual crisis, and my version of motherhood lacked, I saw, the aspect of military organisation with which such a core should be approached. I do not use the word ‘military’ lightly: conscription to the world of orthodox parenthood demands all the self-abnegation, the surrender to conformity, the relish for the institutional, that the term implies.

The secret life of parents, like that of lovers, is nocturnal and effervescent, full of strange pacts and compromises, of fallings-out and reconciliations both violent and meaningless. The search for the limits of love, it rapidly becomes clear, is indistinguishable from the search for the limits of our isolation.

In her growing up I have watched the present become the past, have seen at first hand how life acquires the savour of longing. The storm of emotion, of the new, that accompanied her arrival is over now. I find that I am living in the knowledge of what I have, so that I see happiness before it quite passes. It has taken me a year to achieve this feat, this skill that has eluded me over a lifetime. I understand that it means that I am standing still. Motherhood sometimes seems to me like a sort of relay race, a journey whose purpose is to pass on the baton of life, all work and heat and hurry one minute and mere panting spectatorship the next; a team enterprise in which stardom is endlessly reconfigured, transferred. I see my daughter hurrying away from me, hurtling towards her future, and in that sight I recognise my ending, my frontier, the boundary of my life.

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. My daughter is more and more a part of this freedom, something new that is being added, drop by daily drop, to the sum of what I am. We are an admixture, an experiment. I don’t yet know what effect her presence will have on my life, but its claim is more profound, more unnerving than was the mere work of looking after her.