A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother

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The only reason I didn't make a big stink about having to do so was because I had already read Cusk's "The Country Life," which was brilliant on a number of different levels. This book focuses on the negative experiences of early motherhood (from her pregnancy to her child turning one) but within that context is so much more of what motherhood on a whole is about (particularly in the western modern landscape.

On the other hand, I read an extract from the book about 2 years before I had a baby and couldn't understand what she was going on about. On and on it went, back and forth: I was accused of child-hating, of postnatal depression, of shameless greed, of irresponsibility, of pretentiousness, of selfishness, of doom-mongering and, most often, of being too intellectual.

This latter is particularly valuable to Cusk, showing her that, to Coleridge at least: “Parenthood is redemptive, transformative, creative. I don't like to be presumptuous, but it seems like most of them were just pissed because it did not make them feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I've been trying to read something which will really prove insightful, not some nonsensical preachy drivel dished out by someone who is telling me what it "ought" to be like. Ben Bradlee tells the story of how this lifelong love of working outdoors enabled him to forge an intimate connection with his own son, Quinn, who was born with a heart defect and is learning disabled. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from.

Penelope Leach gives, I think, an accurate definition of postnatal depression: she says that in postnatal depression the mother believes that there is something faulty or abnormally difficult about her child.

The book generated mild controversy for its “brutal honesty” ( Publishers’ Weekly) about the reality of childcare: Cusk focuses on her struggle to maintain an independent sense of herself in the face of her child’s needs. I make this explanation with the gloomy suspicion that a book about motherhood is of no real interest to anyone except other mothers; and even then only mothers who, like me, find the experience so momentous that reading about it has a strangely narcotic effect.

Join now to access our Study Guides library, which offers chapter-by-chapter summaries and comprehensive analysis on more than 5,000 literary works from novels to nonfiction to poetry. For now, this is a letter, addressed to those women who care to read it, in the hope that they find some companionship in my experiences.I wrote this book during the pregnancy and early months of my second daughter, Jessye, before it could get away again. A woman, a grandmother, to cook her a beautiful meal and lovingly hold her baby in her arms so that she can eat it in peace and then go and have a nap. When the baby begins to sleep more and Cusk finds a few hours to be her “old self” again, she feels guilty, comparing herself to an adulterous spouse. I have tried to explore some of these issues in this book, with the aim of answering the larger question of what it is to turn from a woman into a mother. 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.

Having read the book, I remain staunchy child-free but have a respect for mothers and what they endure. In telling these stories, the director examines not only the particulars behind these ventures, but also the motivations and commitments driving their creators, as well as the challenges associated with carrying out these undertakings. It is more to illustrate the particular transformation of sensibility that motherhood effects than to find its most perfect expression that I have mentioned books at all: my experience of reading, indeed of culture, was profoundly changed by having a child, in the sense that I found the concept of art and expression far more involving and necessary, far more human in its drive to bring forth and create, than I once did.It is one solution for the father to remain at home while the mother works: in our culture, the male and the female remain so divided, so embedded in conservatism, that a man could perhaps look after children without feeling that he was his partner’s servant. I think a lot of the Asian countries where it’s very common would be pretty offended by that description! Perhaps I need to state in print that, obviously, I love my baby to a degree that feels like a sort of madness, that I can bring myself to tears at the thought of anything happening to him.