A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

by Rachel Cusk

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...