A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother

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But women must and do live with the prospect of childbirth: 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.

From that irreconcilable beginning, it seemed to me that some kind of slide into deeper patriarchy was inevitable: that the father’s day would gradually gather to it the armour of the outside world, of money and authority and importance, while the mother’s remit would extend to cover the entire domestic sphere. Most recently, after a long period of consideration, she attempted to evolve a new form, one that could represent personal experience while avoiding the politics of subjectivity and literalism and remaining free from narrative convention. Fifteen years ago, filmmaker David Licata focused on four projects and the people behind them in an effort to answer this universal question. That is an issue of sexual politics; but even in the most generous household, which I acknowledge my own to be, the gulf between childcarer and worker is profound. We are all different, we all led different lives before we became mothers, we all have different levels of support systems and expectations.It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Seeking guidance, Cusk turns to literature, finding that motherhood is an experience rarely written about: “As a sequel to youth, beauty, or independence, motherhood promises from its first page to be a longer and more difficult volume: the story of how Tolstoy’s Natasha turned from a trilling, beribboned heartbreaker into inscrutable matriarch, of how daughters become parents and heroines implacable opponents of the romantic plot.

How does the baby survive while the parent learns to understand and respond to the child's communications? This is rather more difficult if one of you works at home, in spite of the widely held belief that a career such as my own is ‘ideal’ if you have children.At one point the author refers to the feeling that as a mother you are not fully yourself when you are with the baby but when you leave you feel that you are missing something of yourself. I was hoping for a voice which I could relate to as a mum, and the ambivalence of my feelings towards motherhood.

Few men, however, would countenance the injury to their career that such a course would invite; those who would are by implication more committed than most to equality, and risk the same loss of self-esteem that makes a career in motherhood such a difficult prospect for women. I eagerly awaited the arrival of this book, having heard of Cusk's work - and the resultant criticisms. 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. She finds herself unable to reconcile her baby’s needs with the demands of her own selfhood: "To be a mother I must leave the telephone unanswered, work undone, arrangements unmet. Sleepless nights, yes; colic, yes; but also a raw, frantic love for her firstborn daughter that she depicts and dissects with both rigor and amazement.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. My appetite for the world was insatiable, omnivorous, an expression of longing for some lost, pre-maternal self, and for the freedom that self had perhaps enjoyed, perhaps squandered.

Could she not see that it was she, in her car, that represented the very danger she congratulated herself for pointing out? This book is a modest approach to the theme of motherhood, written in the first heat of its subject.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Claire Messud, Guardian Books of the Year 'Cusk is not afraid to address frankly the grief for freedom lost, the despair, pain, boredom and guilt - all in the context of the mother's unspeakable love for the baby . You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. There are, of course, many important analyses, histories, polemics and social studies of motherhood.