A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother

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There is a ferociously vigilant intelligence at work in every line of this book, which launches it past the tight orbit of self-pity into something that is actually useful - and occasionally grimly funny, like a Helen Simpson story. I read that when Rachel Cusk's "A Life's Work" came out in 2001, it caused uproar and offended lots of people, especially other mothers.

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 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. Aside from the prospect of self-revelation, it demands on the part of the author a willingness to trespass on the lives of those around him or her.

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. This is not a history or study of motherhood; nor, in case anyone has read this far and still retains such a hope, is it a book about how to be a mother. I have little tolerance for whinging and approached it with some trepidation expecting to be irritated. 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. Instead, he wrote Anna Karenina, excavating the woman extant in the mother and demonstrating her power to destroy, for motherhood is a career in conformity from which no amount of subterfuge can liberate the soul without violence.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. Of course, she is clueless on how to handle childbirth and child rearing, too intelligent to trust the manuals and alas also too intellectual to feel her innate potential for motherhood. Her generation came to experience the brick wall that is one's own (birth) trauma and she is honest enough to accept that we don't know who we are until others make us into something that suddenly fails us anyway. Singing The Wheels on the Bus causes a buried memory to resurface: I was taught – not by my mother – that “the mummies on the bus go yak, yak, yak”, while the daddies go “shhh, shhh, shhh”.

An education in babies, books, breast-feeding, toddler groups, broken nights, bad advice and never being alone, it is a landmark work, which has provoked acclaim and outrage in equal measure. Living on a borrowed estate, he undertook to clear the property, and his young son bonded with his father as they worked alongside each other in the woods. All too familiar a problem in our modern times, I only wish that was addressed more, its seems to have been forgotten, "it takes a village to raise a child," we are not supposed to do it on our own like this. It would have been more pleasant for them inside: the imposition was so direct that I wrote as quickly as I could.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. As unmarried, no child reader, middle section was hard to get through as it felt exhausting to read. This experience 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. Instead I have used aspects of my life as a canvas upon which my theme, which is motherhood, may conveniently be illustrated. But the impact of these and many other realisations is far more violent and dramatic for the author than it was for me.