reading and writing motherhood
I was reading motherhood long before pregnancy. Since childhood, honestly, when I’d read Parents Magazine cover to cover, a sort of existential searching for what I’d someday become. In recent years especially, books about motherhood remain some of the most memorable and wonderful and painful I’ve read. I gobble them up, they’re honey-covered and bitter. To hear an intelligent woman unravel the problem of motherhood is the most interesting thing I know.
I’ve always known that I would be a mother someday, in one way or another. It’s a simple and very common destiny, but it has felt as weighty to me as a much more unusual one. Maybe it’s because I’m so solitary, hermit-like, emotional, and so often buried in my mind. I present a sort of environment that is somewhat inhospitable to children, who need honest and generous attention. I like to keep my attention to myself, I’m very good at it. It’s possible that I am not actually the sort of person who is best suited for the sacrificial posture of motherhood. I expect I may actually dislike it – is that terrible to say? Not that I will dislike my children (no, I will love them), but that motherhood itself will feel like a task for a doppelgänger, not for my own self. That I’ll feel somehow outside of it. That it will feel like a too-tight-shoe.
I think it will feel like a too-tight-shoe. I think it sort of feels like a too-tight-shoe for everybody, especially now, when it seems like everyone has too little support and too little money and too much going on. But it will be my too-tight-shoe. My problem to solve. My hill to climb up forever. And the baby I am pregnant with, now so much a mystery, will be my child, and we will belong to each other. That is something. It has never been my plan to exclude myself from something that feels so tantalizingly challenging and wild, though in an alternate universe I could imagine being forty and childless and happy.
To think about it is one thing, to experience and unravel it in the long ordinaryness of living is another. I’ve been thinking about it for so long. I expect to keep thinking about it once this baby is born and starts growing outside my body, but I expect it will be different.
I think about all the young adult fiction I devoured when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen. I’d read multiple thick books a week with colorful covers. I’d carry home armfulls from the library only to go back for more. I couldn’t get enough of investigating teenagerhood, feeling always like it was something just beyond me, inscrutable. Each book added to my knowledge and context, but my living never quite added up to what I read. It little ways, yes, but not in any way that felt complete, like a novel feels complete. And then I was past it. I’d already done it. And none of it quite landed in me like the books made me think it would. Or it did and it didn’t – I can’t quite remember. I sailed on through, I never was kissed by any boys like in the books, I went to college, I grew up. I didn’t read young adult fiction anymore. Why did I love those books so much? Why did I read them so voraciously? I think it felt like I was looking at my own future, a future that never quite unfurled. What I got was more real and less literary.
Now that I’m pregnant, I wonder if my delight in books about motherhood will continue. I hope that it will. I think that it will. But I also think I’ll start writing books about motherhood, or at least essays and poems, which will absolutely change the way it will feel to read other people’s books about motherhood. I never was allowed to write about this before (though I sort of wanted to). I was always outside looking in. It’s always been my little research project, my detective story more riveting than any mystery novel. What really goes on in motherhood? How does one get through?
In Rivka Galchen’s book Little Labors, one of my favorite motherhood books, she quotes Doris Lessing who said, and had to frequently apologize and rationalize, “nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.” Unfortunately, I know this to be true. I, too, have been a nanny. And I loved those children, but their needs were boring. Please don’t take that the wrong way. I’m not the only one who thinks so! I’ve never been the sort of adult to enjoy playing childrens’ games, and frankly I don’t know many who do. And it’s more complicated than simple boredom. You may have heard of the term “art monster” – it comes up a lot in motherhood books actually. The idea is that to be an artist you have to also be a monster. You have to be willing to eat everything you love. You have to let it all move through you, none of it too precious. You have to be unrecognizable. You have to let it take you over. You can imagine how being an art monster is hard to reconcile with motherhood. To be a mother, you have to give yourself over to something very delicate. You have to be recognizable, safe, and consistent. You have to protect what you love, with intuition and fervor. You have to stand outside of it, let it unfold around you. You can’t let it take you over like a monster is taken over, you have to keep your head. You have to let it grow and leave you without regret.
This is the problem that the writer-mothers turn over and over like a stone in their palms. I read it in every motherhood book I pick up and love, it’s the thing I kept turning pages in motherhood books for. This is the trouble with being blissfully childless all these years but fully aware of my child-full destiny – I knew the other shoe would drop, and what then? I’ve gotten to be an art monster for a while now, a woman wildly wandering around a quiet house stacked with books and all the work I’ve worked hard to create for myself, all the while knowing I would become a mother too and everything would change, myself included. If you know something is going to flip your whole life over, why prolong the wait? But also why not? I think all this thinking about it made me not a very good art monster – that’s a part of it too. Something always holding me back from that wholehearted monstrosity. Something always keeping me tied to nurturing, like a skill to keep up because I’d need it someday. As soon as Bobo, our dog, entered our life as a puppy, I felt it arrive in me again. A baby who needed me, I wanted to stare at him all day. My monstrous productivity dropped immediately, replaced by unproductive love for a vulnerable creature. Oh my, I thought. Oh my.
Even the term “writer-mother” is interesting. Flip it around and it reads differently: “mother-writer”. One has to be first and one has to be second. Now when I hear that a writer has children, I want to find the babies in her books and I’m sort of scandalized if I can’t find them. I want to hear the big problem! I want to know how it’s working out! Did having a baby ruin your work? Did you learn something new in the universe? Maybe that’s the reason I love the motherhood books, in each one the writer is getting at the question that feels essential to me. How do you reconcile motherhood and art? How do you make art about motherhood that renders it fully? It represents a gorgeous non-dualism, an incredible balance of things that live in opposition, to see a woman willingly allow her children to inhabit her writing too. To let the vocation be two-fold, hyphenated, and all the better for being so. To allow the voice of the book to be a mother. For so long that was forbidden in literature. The cardinal rule: no babies. But what if you put a baby in it, what then?
What if you put a baby in my life? What then?
More and more women are getting to write motherhood books, because publishers are publishing them, I guess. I’m sure women wanted to write them before but weren’t allowed. I’m curious – is the audience for these books mothers or destiny-mothers? Will I still read them once I start actually living the problem they represent? If I write my motherhood, who will read it? Will it undo me to try? Will my child undo me? But here’s something I know: all the writer wants is to be undone. All the writer wants is to let the book be torn out of them, while cradling it so gently. All the writer wants is to be monstrous and nurturing, both at once.
a “motherhood book” reading list
( I wish there were more books on the list, but sadly good motherhood books are somewhat hard to find. Almost all of the books I’ve listed on the “motherhood books I’ve read” list are literary fiction and literary non-fiction and are explicitly about motherhood, they don’t just feature children as a plot accessory. Also I should note that I truly do recommend these books for anyone, and very especially for any woman. Writing about motherhood isn’t just for mothers – like all true literature, the most universal truths can be found so keenly in the particular.)
motherhood books I’ve read (and loved!)
(of course there were other books I’ve read and loved that were written by mothers or featured characters who were mothers, but these are the titles that stick out in my mind as “motherhood books” – the ones that keep motherhood as a central theme)
The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling
And Now I Have Everything by Meaghan O’Connell
Motherhood by Sheila Heti
Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Weather by Jenny Offill
Little Labors by Rivka Galchen
The Need by Helen Phillips
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits (sort of)
Daybook by Anne Truitt (sort of)
Anagrams by Lorrie Moore (sort of)
Like a Mother by Angela Garbes (more scientific non-fiction, but still essential and beautiful reading)
motherhood books I haven’t read or haven’t finished yet but that are on my list
A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk
Guidebook to Relative Strangers by Camille T. Dungy
The Blue Jay’s Dance by Louise Erdrich
After Birth by Elisa Albert
Look How Happy I’m Making You by Polly Rosenwaike
a candid motherhood podcast hosted by two writers (sadly, now defunct but the archive is golden)
essays
“mother, writer, monster, maid” — rufi thorpe — vela mag
why all the books about motherhood — lauren elkin— paris review
“why are we only talking about mom books by white women?” — angela garbes — the cut
short stories
“People Like That Are the Only People Here” by Lorrie Moore
blogs written by mothers with excellent writing
(have I mentioned before how much I adore informal writing? I know there are others to add to this list that I’m not remembering now. haven’t been reading blogs lately, though I miss them. it seems less people (especially excellent writers) are diligently writing them. probably because of the lack of money.)
Erstwhile Dear by Rachael Ringenberg
Orangette by Molly Wizenberg
know a motherhood book?
I welcome recommendations BUT — please only recommend a motherhood book to me if you’ve read some of the others on the list so you know I’d like it. I’ve read motherhood books I didn’t like and they’re not on this list. Don’t let that deter you, but also maybe let it. I am a monster after all.