An unabashedly honest look at motherhood

I don’t know about you all, but I’m at the age when many of my contemporaries are becoming grandparents. I hope to someday join their ranks, but thus far I remain grandchild-less, though I do have two lovely grand-pups of whom I am very proud.

Recently, a friend of mine became a new grandmother, and because I am an Instagram follower of both my friend and her daughter, I am the happy recipient of many photos of the new baby and of various goings-on in her realm. The images are beautiful. The baby is cute as a button, and she always looks clean and happy, healthy and content. Her clothes are lovely and the little bits of her environs that are visible in the photos look chic, fresh, cheerful and spotless. The new parents themselves look as happy, healthy and content as the new baby. Only the little dog looks a tad spooked.

Though I thoroughly enjoy these new baby Insta posts, the photos themselves don’t quite reflect my own memories of early motherhood. My babies were cute — don’t get me wrong — they were the cutest babies in the whole world, my then-husband and I would frequently exclaim. But as for the rest of it, well, I’m not sure we had it so together.

It might be just as well there was no Instagram during my early parenthood years. Had there been, I’m not sure it would have been pretty.

I still remember walking into the Charlotte Children’s Center (alma mater for all three of my kids) with my days-old daughter in my arms, sleep deprived and no doubt wearing some version of rumpled lounge or sleep wear, when one of the young teachers caught sight of me and my little one.

“The new baby! Oh, how cute! What’s her name?” she said, to which I replied, “I have no idea.”

Or the time my husband and I took the kids down to Boston, and as we were checking into a rather bougie hotel in Harvard Square, my son, around two at the time (and for some reason with a red balloon in hand) threw up extravagantly in the center of the busy lobby. Or when my other son — maybe 3 or 4 — disappeared at the Champlain Valley Fair, only to appear 10 minutes later walking along, chatting happily with a woman we had never met before.

I could go on.

What brought all this up for me? Answer: “A Life’s Work,” by Rachel Cusk, a brutally honest, often funny, very well-written account of new motherhood. This is no “What To Expect When You are Expecting,” no “What to Expect the First Year,” but rather, a firsthand, uncensored, detailed, emotional, philosophical, in-the-trenches memoir of the early days of being a mom.

“Writing a memoir of motherhood seems like career suicide,” writes Elissa Schappell (The New York Times Book Review). “Although no one told Cusk that, and so she’s gone off and written a book that is funny and smart and refreshingly akin to a war diary — sort of Apocalypse Baby Now … wholly original and unabashedly true.”

Cusk never really imagined herself being a mother. “I regarded it as a threat, a form of disability that marked me out as unequal.” But women must and do live with the prospect of childbirth,” she writes; “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.”

Cusk’s strategy? Deny it. And so, she 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.”

What follows is “an attempt to describe something of that arrival, and of the drama of which childbirth is merely the opening scene.” “A personal record of a period of transition.”

“This book,” Cusk explains, “is a modest approach to the theme of motherhood, written in the first heat of its subject. It describes a period in which time seemed to go round in circles rather than in any chronological order, and so which I have tried to capture in themes rather than by the forgotten procession of its days,”

At one point Cusk ponders whether her book will be of any interest to anyone besides other mothers, then quotes American poet and feminist Adrienne Rich: “The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men is that months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman’s body … Most of us first know both love and disappointment, power and tenderness, in the person of a woman. We carry the imprint of this experience for life, even into our dying.”

Cusk covers a lot of territory in this book, which I have to say I whizzed through, full throttle. At one point she comments about the “profoundly political” issue of “children and who looks after them,” explaining that she was able to find the time to write this memoir because for the first six months of her daughter’s life she cared for her at home while her partner continued to work, an experience which “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.”

This becomes an issue of sexual politics: “Even in the most generous household, which I acknowledge my own to be, the gulf between childcarer and worker is profound. … Bridging this gulf is extremely difficult.”

“Looking after children is a low-status occupation,” writes Cusk. “Isolating, frequently boring, relentlessly demanding and exhausting … it erodes your self-esteem and your membership of the adult world.”

She says the role of a stay-at-home care giver comes to resemble that of an air traffic controller.

This book is smart, profound and unflinchingly honest. At times I was like, wow, was it really that bad? But this book is really not about the baby at all, though she plays a significant role in the text. It’s about the mostly internal experience of being a new mother.

But along with the serious, thoughtful, heart-and-soul-baring torrents, there are some very funny and relatable moments, such as when little Albertine, no longer infantile, has become mobile — “more complex and dangerous” — and is crawling everywhere, pulling herself up on anything she can find, frequently falling and cracking her little head on the marble floor. “She has changed from rucksack to zoo animal,” writes Cusk.

At one point, desperate, Cusk confines her daughter (and thereby herself) into one room. “My daughter zig-zags around it, maddened by confinement. … She beats on the door with her fists, desperate to escape. The floor is flooded to ankle height with her toys. Unidentifiable matter describes paths, like the trail of a snail, over walls and faces. The room has acquired a skin, a crust of dried milk upon which old food sits like a sort of eczema. The kitchen is pollinated with every substance with which my daughter comes into contact: mess spreads like a force of nature, unstoppable. … I wash and rinse and scrub but a strong undertow of entropy appears to govern this overheated little space and chaos is forever imminent, encroaching. Time hangs heavy on us and I find that I am waiting, waiting for her days to pass … In this lonely place I am indeed not free.”

Cusk quotes “Madame Bovary,” Coleridge and infant sleep expert Dr. Ferber, moving deftly from pathos to humor to savvy, insightful exposition. This book is quite a ride.

In this time when the “pro-life” movement is promoting the rights of the fetus over those of the woman who bears and will most likely be the primary caregiver for it, this book is eye-opening and somewhat revolutionary, in that it tells the down-and-dirty truth (from one woman’s perspective) of what it is really like, emotionally and existentially, beyond the pretty-as-a-picture images of mother and child that often fail to tell the real story of the immense amount of work, the sleep and social deprivation, the personal sacrifice, the relationship stress and the seismic personal transformation involved.

Being a mother is a big deal. The connection between a mother and her child is profound. But there is much that is profound also about the experience from the mother’s point of view. Highly recommend this smart, deep, honest, extremely well-written book.