Night Waking Quotes

“Would I do it again, understanding as I do now and didn’t then, that failure at motherhood is for life and beyond, that everything that happens to my children and my children’s children is my fault? That my meanness and bad temper are going to trickle into the future like nuclear waste into the Irish Sea? No. Not because I don’t love my children - everyone loves their children, child abusers love their children - but because I don’t love motherhood and you don’t find that out until it’s too late. Love is not enough, when it comes to children. Bad luck.”
― Sarah Moss, Night Waking

“It is the logic of amateur cake decorators and sock knitters across the land, that production of any kind is by definition a moral way of spending time. As if more stuff is what the world needs.”
― Sarah Moss, Night Waking

“All the parenting books, eighteen-century and modern, warn against appearing to take your children's irrational anxieties too seriously. I have, myself, yet to experience a fear assuaged by the brisk application of common sense.”
― Sarah Moss, Night Waking

“No, I’d open a refuge for mothers. A retreat. Concrete 1970s brutalism, an anti-domestic architecture without flounces. Something low with big windows and wide corridors, carpets to deaden sound. There will be five or six rooms off the corridor, each with a wall of glass and sliding doors looking on to a cold, grey beach. Each room has a single bed in the corner, a table and chair. You may bring your laptop but there is no internet access and no telephone. There are books with a body count of zero and no suffering for anyone under the age of eight. A cinema where everything you wanted to see in the last eight years is shown at a time that allows you to have an early night afterwards. And the food, the kind of food you’re pleased to have eaten as well as pleased to eat, is made by a chef, a childless male chef, and brought to your room. You may ask him for biscuits at any moment of the day or night, send your mug back because you dislike the shape of the handle, and change your mind after ordering dinner. And there is a swimming pool, lit from below in a warm, low-ceilinged room without windows, which may be used by one mummy at a time to swim herself into dream. Oh, fuck it, I am composing a business plan for a womb with a view. So what? I’ll call it Hôtel de la Mère and the only real problem is childcare. Absent, children cause guilt and anxiety incompatible with the mission of the Hôtel; present, they prevent thought or sleep, much more swimming and the consumption of biscuits. We need to turn them off for a few days, suspend them like computers. Make them hibernate. You can’t uninvent children any more than you can uninvent the bomb.”
― Sarah Moss, Night Waking

“It is no wonder women's careers collapse after childbirth; the image of ourselves exposed and whimpering on hospital beds reappears in our minds as we ascend the podium or open the meeting.”
― Sarah Moss, Night Waking