A Life's Work Quotes

“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.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“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 the 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.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“A visit to the cinema is no longer that: it is less, a tarnished thing, an alloyed pleasure.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“Time hangs heavy on us and I find that I am waiting, waiting for her days to pass, trying to meet the bare qualification of life which is for her to have existed in time. In this lonely place I am indeed not free: the kitchen is a cell, a place of no possibility. I have given up my membership of the world I used to live in. Sometimes I listen to music or read, and it is like a ray of light coming in from outside, bright and painful, making me screw up my eyes. When we go for a walk I see young women in the street, beautiful and careless, and a pang of mourning for some oblique, lost self makes my heart clench. I look down at my daughter sleeping in her pushchair, the dark fringe of her lashes forming arcs on her pale skin, and a contrary wind of love gusts over me; and for some time this is how I am, blown this way and that, careering around like a crazy, febrile gauge trying to find north.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“But it is not merely a taboo against complaint that makes the hardship of motherhood inadmissable: like all loves this one has a conflicted core, a grain of torment that buffs the pearl of pleasure; unlike other loves, this conflict has no possibility of resolution.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“I imagine the corruption of myself running through her tracts, into her veins and recesses. I long to withdraw my sting from her innocent body.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“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.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“The day lies ahead empty of landmarks, like a prairie, like an untraversable plain.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“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. Consequently I bury myself further in the small successes of nurture. After three or four weeks I reach a distant point, a remote outpost at which my grasp of the baby’s calorific intake, hours of sleep, motor development and patterns of crying is professorial, while the rest of my life resembles a deserted settlement, an abandoned building in which a rotten timber occasionally breaks and comes crashing to the floor, scattering mice. I am invited to a party, and though I decide to go, and bathe and dress at the appointed hour, I end up sitting in the kitchen and crying while elsewhere its frivolous minutes tick by and then elapse. The baby develops colic, and the bauble of motherhood is once more crushed as easily as eggshell. 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.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“… literature has long since discovered and documented this place of which I thought myself to be the first inhabitant,…”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“Sometimes, when she has been two or more hours from the source of my body, I begin to feel a sort of elemental anxiety for her, as if she were walking a tightrope and had gone too far out, as if she could not exist for so long in time, in gravity, away from me.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“But the issue of children and who looks after them has become, in my view, profoundly political, and so it would be a contradiction to write a book about motherhood without explaining to some degree how I found the time to write it. For the first six months of Albertine’s life I looked after her at home while my partner continued to work. This experience forcefully revealed to me something to which I had never given much thought: the fact that after a child is born the lives of its mother and father diverge, so that where before they were living in a state of some equality, now they exist in a sort of feudal relation to each other. A day spent at home caring for a child could not be more different from a day spent working in an office. Whatever their relative merits, they are days spent on opposite sides of the world.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work

“Y también me ha forjado a mí, porque a pesar de que no la he ayudado ni comprendido, he estado siempre con ella, y esto —de repente estoy segura— es la maternidad; esta mera presencia es suficiente.”
― Rachel Cusk, Un trabajo para toda la vida: Sobre la experiencia de ser madre

“When finally we are able to converse, I find her decided, fully formed, already beyond the reach of persuasion. My relationship with her is like my relationship with anybody: it takes the form of a search for oneness, a oneness lost but haunting with the prospect of its recapture.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“I am sure there must be a word for it in German, something compound like lifegrief that would translate as outpouring of sorrow at the human condition, for I do not entirely believe that it is a digestive malaise.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“somehow force the chaos of us into it. I’ll call you soon, says”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work

“Julia bakes marvelous cakes, the woman next to her informed me after a pause. Really? I said with frantic delight. I’ve always thought I’d love to be a baker. Do you make any money out of it? The two women looked at each other like schoolgirls, with horrified eyes.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“I lack the sense of stardom in my own life that would urge me to adorn myself.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“We are like awkward lovers, like two people, any old people, clumsily sharing the regular cup of human emotion.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“You came from my body! I wanted to say. I was offering her what I had craved often in my life, another body in which to be absorbed, enfolded, enclosed, an element in which to be reincorporated, and she didn’t want it.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“The babies cry and complain, but the women have lashed themselves together to form a raft of comradeship and they sail merrily over that which separately would have drowned them.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“It bristles with lists and bullet points, and with exclamation marks too, apparently denoting humour: they swim before me, mad as eyebrows, embarrassing as politician’s jokes.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“I want my daughter to find out how people cool and turn away when you won’t let them alone, how assurance is destroyed where it is most desperately sought.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“and with the unfounded but distinct impression that my journey there had been at once so random and so determined by forces greater than myself that I could hardly be said to have had any choice in the matter at all.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“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.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work

“My daughter emanates unprocessed human need where the world is at its most civilised; and while at first I am on the side of that world, which I have so recently left, and struggle to contain and suppress her, soon, like so many mothers, I come to see something inhuman in civilisation, something vain and deathly. I hate its precious, fragile trinkets, its greed, its lack of charity. Compassion worms its way into me: but whether it is just sentiment, an annexe of my love for my daughter, or a constitutional change I can't really say.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“The harness of motherhood chafes my skin, and yet, occasionally I find a predictable integrity in it too, a freedom of a different sort: from complexity and choice and from the reams of unscripted time upon which I used to write my days, bearing the burden of their authorship. It does not escape me that in this last sentiment I am walking over the grave of my sex. The state of motherhood speaks to my native fear of achievement. It is a demotion, a displacement, an opportunity to give up. I have the sense of history watching, from its club chair, my response to this demotion with some amusement. Will I give in, graciously, gratefully, handing back my life as something I had on loan? Or will I put up a fight? Like moving back from the city to the small town where you were born, before exclaiming at its tedium you are advised to remember that other people live here, have always lived here. Men, when they visit, are constrained by no such considerations of tact. But it is not merely a taboo against complaint that makes the hardship of motherhood inadmissible: like all loves this one has a conflicted core, a grain of torment that buffs the pearl of pleasure; unlike other loves, this conflict has no possibility of resolution.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“Could it be true that one has to experience in order to understand? I have always denied this idea, and yet of motherhood, for me at least, it seems to be the case.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“Love is more respectable, more practical, more hardworking than I had ever suspected, but it lies close to the power to destroy. I have never before remotely felt myself to possess that power, and I am as haunted by it as if it were a gun in a nearby drawer.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“I know that in some inarticulable way I have over the past week witnessed again her birth; the the sound of her agony, her despair, was the sound of a terrible, private process of creation. I see that she has become somebody. I realise, too, that the crying has stopped, that she has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself. 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. With every cry she has tutored me, in what is plain and hard: that my affection, my silly entertainments, my doting hours, the particular self I tried to bring to my care of her, have been as superfluous as my fury and despair. 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.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother