Well hello. Suddenly the term is in full swing. J is crawling everywhere. I have a bad case of the daycare snuffles and no voice, literally, nothing above a whisper, but still lots to say. Here’s another little miscellany, some accumulated thoughts on books and care, etc.:
I finished Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s What are Children For? a bit ago, and gosh I have so much to say about it. Perhaps most of all, I find myself thinking a lot about Berg and Wiseman’s category of “motherhood ambivalence literature”—Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, etc. This category fills out the standard narrative about motherhood and writing or art-making: a woman writer’s main concern is the struggle between the two activities, the anxiety that they might be impossible to balance or hold together.
Part of what I’ve been circling and circling in this space is my great surprise about motherhood so far: surprise about the joy of it, but surprise, too, about the absence of the feelings I’d expected about motherhood and writing. Let us remember that a large chunk of my academic research was about domestic work. Did I expect to find I’d given birth to a small vampire, a creature I adored but who would, if I let him, suck away all my time and creative energy, à la Cusk and Heti and literally almost every narrative about the mother-writer-artist? Maybe.
I was wrong, anyway. But this is not to say I feel like I have endless time to write. I was doing pretty well until school started, at which point I remembered that my life is not just writing and caring. I also have a job, and while it’s a good one, one I enjoy most of the time and a humane one as far as jobs in the U.S. go, it—not the baby—is the actual vampire. It’s so simple, I told my friends a few weeks ago, the solution is just to quit my job! But keep some childcare. Just like that: writing time and baby time and I’m good. Alas. I’m not rich, nor can I make a living from poetry and translation. I feel slightly grumpy that the motherhood ambivalence narratives, from Adrienne Rich onwards, leave out this third element, the job. Lots to say about that.
But what would it look like, I wonder, to write the motherhood surprise book? To write the ambivalence novel that explodes into wonder and joy? Have I just re-invented the sentimental novel? Have I just discovered what everyone else already knew—that babies are great? It’s sort of a mindfuck. But it does seem like the current prevailing sentiment around kids is something along the lines of, well, parenting sucks but we love it anyway. I feel strange, most of the time, expressing how I actually feel about it. Yesterday I taught until after 5 and then sprinted home for some time with Julian before bed. We took a walk. An elderly couple passed us going the other direction. “Cute baby,” said the lady. “Can we take him?” I performed the version of tired new mother I thought I might be expected to perform. Eye roll, please, get him to sleep, whatever. We all laughed. What was I doing? I hadn’t seen the baby all day. If anyone else had actually tried to hold him or give him his bath or stroke his cheek while he had his last bottle, I would probably have ripped them apart with my teeth.
In books, lately, I’ve been most of all to the way the work of care appears, and by motherhood or its absence. I’m struck by the way these elements are not quite the foreground for so many narratives—but they’re more than the background, more than just noise or context.
My first example is slightly unhinged and probably a misreading. On walks (I threw out my back, as they say, so there have been many and I miss running so much) I’ve been listening to audiobooks, and I gave up on most contemporary floof and went back to long older delights: Iris Murdoch, Henry James. The great pleasure of an Iris Murdoch audiobook! Oh, magnificent shimmery James! His characters have something mythological or allegorical about them, I think, not just because of their incredible names but because they catch the light differently on each read. I hadn’t remembered any of the book’s key plot details, and this time (surprise) I was thinking a lot about motherhood’s strange presence. Is it perverse to feel an intense sympathy for anyone besides Isabel? But by the end of the book, what links its two other female protagonists, Mrs. Touchett and Madame Merle, is that they’ve both lost a child: one to long illness and the other to convention and cruelty, though the child is still right there in front of her, making the loss all the more cruel. And Isabel, too—though this is barely mentioned—has lost a child, a baby. “Go and thank God you’ve no child,” Isabel’s aunt tells her upon Ralph’s death. Is this moment of rare emotion on the part of Mrs. Touchett really the cruelty it seems to me? Is the whole book secretly actually about the isolated suffering of bereaved mothers as much as anything?
Anyway. Other selective (mis)readings: I savored Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos (translated by Michael Hofmann) and never wanted it to end. But here’s a lovely little part that is sort of unrelated to the main action, a simile—but it’s the vehicle I want, not the tenor:
Following Ludwig’s birth, there had been a period of firsts like this, when the newborn went from one first to another: first breath, first cry, first drink at its mother’s breast, first smile, first reaching for a toy, raising its head, turning over in its crib, then finally getting up on its own two feet, and a year later, saying his first words. For Ingrid it had all been so many miracles: where does a child come to us from, where is it before it arrives? She had asked many times, as she gazed at the boy sleeping between them.
You’re supposed to read this and think about how a love affair is like having a new baby. But I read it and thought, oh, It’s true, having a baby is like the beginning of a love affair. Or along the lines of my Miranda July misreading: I read Sarah Manguso’s Liars, which I hated at first but came to appreciate very much for its sheer incandescent anger. But it was the descriptions of parenting that saved it for me, humanized it, grounded it, kept it going.
Finally, I am not the first to point out that in Garth Greenwell’s gorgeous Small Rain, the acts of ordinary care that are part of a long-term relationship, presented in all the difficulty and the beauty of such a thing—and the surprise of it, too—are not backdrop but part of the literal structure, the dwelling place without which nothing else would be possible:
and L and I found ourselves in something we had made together, a house more beautiful than anywhere I had lived, full of little graces that were L’s graces: flowers in vases, a yellow teapot, plates with deep blue designs he carried wrapped in his suitcase from Granada; the graces of living he had a gift for I lacked. I was grateful for them, as I was grateful when he set a folding table under the oldest oak and we ate in our yard, a little plastic battery-powered lamp in a Bauhaus design the centerpiece as the sun went down; or watching the deer from our bedroom; or, once or twice, very early in the morning, just at dawn, standing at the bank of windows breathless as a fox investigated the yard.
Thank you so much, Lindsay. What a joy to be read by you.