I’m taking a non-fiction elective this semester, and one of our required readings is “A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother.” I knew nothing about it before opening it, and as a person who’s already a little bit terrified at the idea of someday being responsible for the survival of another human being, this book hit me hard.
The prose is absolutely beautiful. Cusk’s words flow out naturally and accessibly even as she’s unpacking serious emotion, and I blew through this book in about two days. However, they were a depressing two days.
Cusk chronicles her journey from finding out she’s pregnant, through child-birth, and her daughter’s first year on the planet. Cusk is very open about the fact that she knew next to nothing about child-rearing aside from what she learned on the pamphlets handed to her at the OBGYN, and the typical social norms of ‘what mothers do.’
Her book is the missing voice of what I think are probably many women who come home with their first baby and think ‘what the hell am I doing?’
Cusk’s transition to mommy-hood looks nothing like the happy smiles, white-washed living rooms, and intimate play-time that are so prevalent in Huggies commercials. Cusk feels like she’s doing a jail sentence, lonely and isolated in semi-solitary confinement for most of her daughter’s first year. From three months of colic and around-the-clock feedings that cause Cusk to feel like she’s always sleeping on her feet, to realizing that she’ll never get her own independence or sense of self back, the window into her first year of motherhood is a startlingly dark and often depressing place.
Cusk loves her daughter unconditionally, but espouses, for maybe the first time, how much society forgets about the mother in parent-child scenarios. One scene that got me particularly is when she finally loses her cool on her infant daughter for incessantly screaming for over three hours after being put down for a nap. She shouts and it makes her daughter stop, but Cusk goes away with a horrible sense of guilt and remorse that leads her to call all her friends and family in tears that she’s shouted at her child. Their responses are all about how horrible it must have been for the baby, and bear absolutely no redemption for Cusk, and this devastates her.
Walking with Cusk through this book put me in a bad place while I read it. I was dark and gloomy the entire time, and I was so tempted to give this book 2 or 3 stars because I didn’t enjoy reading it. But a few days of perspective tells me this book really deserves 5 stars because I didn’t like it; because it made me think. I’ve had a ‘yes/no/maybe’ response to having children for most of my adult life, and this book put me in a gloomy place because it brought to light all of the things I’m terrified about. It really made me think about the true answer to the question: Do you want to have children? And I came out with a very definite “I don’t know, now.”
But really, that’s the whole point of this book. It’s not supposed to be enjoyable; it’s supposed to open a door to a conversation that no one wants to have, which is that motherhood is not (at least not for everyone) filled with daily wonder and joy and happy sacrifice. Motherhood is hard drudgery, grueling sacrifice, and it tears a woman apart in a way in which she can never put herself back to the way she was before.
And while Cusk doesn’t end the book continuing to hate her existence, she does find motherhood to get better as her daughter leaves infanthood behind, this book is an incredibly powerful testament to the unpopular experience that I’m sure, more often than not, is very real for a majority of new moms.
A recent meme that cracked me up said “Don’t compare yourself to other moms. We’re all a hot mess, some just hide it better than others.” It’s so true. I think that books like this are vital to exploring the motherhood experience. I think a lot of women are striving to an ideal that doesn’t exist, and don’t want to share any feelings other than those that you see in a sitcom. Sharing our experiences normalizes them and helps us to find a path through what is undoubtably the hardest job on earth…raising a human.
Any mother who tells you she’s never said or done something to her child that she felt terribly guilty about is lying. We yell, we blame, we choose the path of least resistance at times. Anyone who hasn’t questioned their family size when the third or fourth household member comes down with the stomach flu is also lying. You will reach the limits of what you think you can handle over and over again. But it’s innate. It’s our biology. And it goes so fast even though it feels like the clock ticks slower and slower at certain stages.
It’s also important to know that some people aren’t “baby people”. That first year can be HARD. For me, I found the first 8 weeks to be brutal, and had to really mentally prepare myself to go through it a second time. No sleep, your body isn’t yours (if you’re nursing), you look like a deflated marshmallow, you don’t really go anywhere…your whole life is a fog with this tiny fragile being. The pressure is monumental. I would reach twilight and feel a sense of dread…night is coming, the world goes to sleep, and I wander these halls and sit in this rocker for hours on end and wait for dawn. Add the natural baby blues in the early week or two and it’s dark. When I brought my second child home I called my best friend and said, “I’m dreading the night. I want to cry. You can’t fix it, I know it will be fine and this all goes so quickly, but right now I want to cry about how hard it is.” And she let me. Numerous times. With no judgment. That’s what books like this do. They let us cry in the midst of a miracle.
This totally makes me feel less terrified about having children. :)
I’m glad. It’s your choice to make, but again, anyone who thinks they know what they’re doing is lying. It’s all on-the-job training :)
This book sounds interesting, but as someone who is currently in the middle of that year. Yeah, not touching it with a ten foot clown pole. I don’t need to read about something that I’m experiencing every day, and from your description it sounds spot on.
Even as I read this review and feel the familiar gloom of those first months, I read your comment and get all nostalgic as you are coming up on my favorite stage! 8-10 months! Happy little interactive cherubs that aren’t terribly mobile. It’s cute baby perfection. Wishing you well!
I know! 7 – 10 months is my favorite baby period per a bajillion (see almost 50) cousins and my own nieces and nephew. I can’t wait currently till she can sit up on her own. A much happier baby she will be.
Oh it is. I ran a bunch of things in the book past my friend who’s a mother of a toddler. She said yes to every single thing.
I wish that I had known this book existed in 2008. The transition from being a human to a mother (this is a joke, we’re all humans) was very hard on me, made even harder when I found out I pregnant again 10 months later (don’t judge it was a bc fail).
Motherhood was my choice three times over;it’s enriching and yet impossibly hard. Sometimes I feel like it’s the most natural thing in the world and other times I can be found crying in the bathroom because of all the stress: homework, dinner, housework, grading my own students’ HW, baths, doctor appointments, getting the eldest to read for at least 20 mins and hopefully like it, getting the middle guy to stop mixing up his Q’s, getting the youngest to use the potty so I can finally stop using diapers for the first time 7 years (hint: it’s not working).
But then they hug me or do cool things like like draw me a hyena circling an elephant calf (don’t worry there are hidden elephants to save the calf), or you know, brush their teeth without me having to go ballistic on them.