A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother

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Cette frénésie critique, d’après elle, était une réaction à ce qui a été perçu comme la trahison d’un secret bien gardé : les jeunes mères ne sont pas aussi heureuses qu’on voudrait le croire. 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. My great love for my children and step-child slowly liberated me from much of what I felt about the past. Nor should we feel the need to constantly bow and scrape to those who have been there before: even discounting Covid, having a baby in 2022 is necessarily different to doing so in 2002, or 1992.

Concerned, Cusk consults a series of healthcare professionals, who all simply congratulate her on her daughter’s healthy appetite.The public reaction to this brilliant account of early motherhood was at the time swift and brutal – and the judgment it received came mostly from other women, writing in newspapers. Oprah Winfrey invited her on the show to defend herself and the book as protests grew about the its honest, gritty account of the misery of those early months. I would recommend against reading this if you are unwell or going through events that provoke any of the feelings described above. Sa mère se retrouve ainsi emprisonnée dans un ‘bunker coupé du reste du monde’, dont les geôliers sont les autres mères, les sages-femmes, les méde-cins et autres assistantes sociales, dans un monde totalitaire régi par l’idéologie des ouvrages sur l’éducation There is some evidence now that colic is caused by an immature autonomic nervous system, which is why it often disappears after 3 months.

One famous columnist wrote a piece demanding that Cusk's children were taken into care, that was she was unfit to look after them. The letters and messages I have received have been deeply moving and have made me feel part of a community in these early days of my parenting journey. I was forever plotting my escape from it, and when I found myself pregnant again when Albertine was six months old I greeted my old cell with the cheerless acceptance of a convict intercepted at large.I've become jaded by all the chirpy-cherub and smiley-mummy garbage which is what passes for expectant-baby literature.

Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. I could not have been more wrong, and although my children are wonderful I often found that in caring for them, I was losing myself. Perhaps largely because of Cusk, honesty about motherhood is not as taboo as it once was (though lines such as “pregnancy begins to seem to me more and more of a lie, a place populated by evangelicals and moralists and control freaks” still provoke a gasp of pleasure in their excoriating resonance). What in God's name is Rachel Cusk, a witty young English novelist, thinking, publishing a memoir entitled ''A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother''? And on the whole quite a lot more robust than our neurotic health care system has us believe in the West.

I feel that my own experience of having a baby has been a very positive one- I feel happy and successful as a parent (so far!

In a brief introduction, Cusk notes that the memoir was written just six months after her first daughter’s birth and while Cusk was pregnant with her second daughter. I have little tolerance for whinging and approached it with some trepidation expecting to be irritated. She masterfully and evocatively put into words things I would never have found a way to explain, and reflected on the sociocultural context of motherhood in an insightful and provocative but never preachy way. 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.

It is, I don’t doubt, much the same process that it has always been, but the journey involved is, in my view, far longer for us than it was for our own mothers. A lover of literature, she wants to turn to the classics for guidance, but she realizes that she has never paid much attention to literary descriptions of parenthood, instead skimming them, feeling that they were not relevant to her. I had written other parts of the book in some uncomfortable places: the cold cobwebbed vestry of my parents'-in-law's local church, to which my mother-in-law had the key; the attic of another, earlier house whose stairs were so narrow for my increasingly pregnant body that it seemed possible I might one day get permanently stuck up there.