A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

by Rachel Cusk

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.