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

“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

“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

“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: 'A writer of almost electrifying intensity.' Irish Times

“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

“I needed to be her mother more than she needed my mothering.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“Like gestures of love that abruptly cease, I come to value my habit of self-adornment only with its disappearance: it was proof that I cared, and without it I feel a private sense of sad resignation, as if some optimistic gloss has been stripped from my life. Sometimes I think back to that history of caring – as a self-conscious child, an anxious teenager, an attempted woman of fashion – amazed that it could have ended so precipitately, for it was in its modest way a civilisation, a city built from the days of my life. The last chapter of this history – pregnancy – was as vivid as any other: it contained no hint of an ending, no clue that things were about to change. It is as if some disaster has occurred which has wiped me out, an earthquake, a falling meteor. When I look at old photographs of myself they seem to resemble the casts of Pompeii, little deaths frozen in time. I haunt the ruin of my body, a mournful, restless spirit, and I feel exposed, open to the air, the weather, and to the scrutiny of others. I know that there must be some physical future for me, but it is bogged down in planning problems, in administrative backlog. I hold out no great hopes for it in any case. The bright little body of my daughter takes up all my time. It is like a new house, a new project. I’ll be lucky if I ever find the time to make the long journey back to myself, to the old ruin, and hurl a coat of paint over it before the winter of middle age sets in.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

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

“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, that their children bring them only joy, that their families sit around together reading novels, quietly discussing the environment or engaged in constructive play: seeing the situation they have decided, out of pride or integrity or some obscure loyalty to themselves, to make the best of it.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“There are books about motherhood, as there are about most things. To reach them you must pass nearly everything, the civilised world of fiction and poetry, the suburbs of dictionaries and textbooks, on past books about how to mend your motorbike or plant begonias and books about doing your own tax return. Childcare manuals are situated at the far end of recorded human experience, just past diet books and just before astrology.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“At this point I don’t just want her to go to sleep. She has to go to sleep otherwise I don’t know what will happen. My position is at once reasonable, utterly desperate, and non-negotiable. I put her firmly in her crib. I remove myself to the bathroom and close the door. There is a long moment of silence that is both blessed and threatening. It is filled with my command, and with the possibility that her requirements will not yield to mine, that she continues to exist beyond the limit of my patience, my love, my ability to own her. Then, next door, she cries. I begin to shout. I don’t quite know what I am shouting, something about it being unfair, about it clearly being completely unreasonable that I should want FIVE MINUTES on my own. GO TO SLEEP! I shout, now standing directly over her crib. I shout not because I think she might obey me but because I am aware of an urge to hurl her out of the window. She looks at me in utter terror. It is the first frankly emotional look she has given me in her life. It is not really what I was hoping for.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

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

“But women must and do live with the prospect of childbirth: some dread it, some long for it, and some manage it so successfully as to give other people the impression that they never even think about it. My own strategy was to deny it, and so I arrived at the fact of motherhood shocked and unprepared, ignorant of what the consequences of this arrival would be, 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

“somehow force the chaos of us into it. I’ll call you soon, says”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: 'A writer of almost electrifying intensity.' Irish Times

“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