To mother or not to mother

An early Mother's Day newsletter about mothers, from a non-mother

My big plan for April was to read books centered around motherhood, following my late-March read of Olga Ravn’s My Work. It sounded like the perfect plan, because Mother’s Day coincides in Brazil and the US in early May, and so I could send you a little newsletter about books on/with/discussing mothers as a way to mark the occasion (enough so that I bought Kate Brigg’s The Long Form late last month for this purpose).¹

I forgot that moods come and go, and I had lost track of my own objective by the middle of the month (The Long Form currently sits on top of a pile of books purchased in the past few weeks, as I left it when I came home that March day).

Still, I’ve read some titles that left a mark, so maybe not all is lost:

I should begin with a clear caveat: I am not a mother, nor do I think of having children. I’m comfortable admitting that it hasn’t been a plan and, at the ripe age of mid-thirties, nor does it look like it ever will be one. Still, motherhood has loomed over me for several years in the past decade because of my research (you can’t study queens without studying how they happened to—or were expected to—birth heirs), and I have developed a dormant interest in how the language of this experience could be used for other means.² So you could say then that my interest in motherhood comes from a cultural perspective, and that my intellectual approach to it is less about the biological realities of it than about the creative impetus assigned to it.

That, alongside my love for The Employees, brought me to Olga Ravn’s My Work. In my words, the premise is the following: Anna, a main character-narrator reports, in a fragmented and non-linear way, her experience not just of pregnancy but also of the first two years of being a mother, mixing genres, formats, and voices. It’s not an easy book to follow, and not just because of its unconventional structure. One of its peculiarities, but also its difficulties for a casual/breezy reading, is that at no point does the book stake a claim to the adequacy or inadequacy of this new mother, an author who’s refashioning herself while learning how to be a mother in the meantime. But it also comes across as the process of how to be an adult, with comments on spending money not in surplus on trendy clothes, on searching for often-not-there answers to her internal turmoils, on questioning where can the creative mother in the twenty-first century fit.

“Over the course of her education, Anna got the impression that any art made by a woman except Virginia Woolf was a secret, because no one referenced or engaged with it, and therefore Anna too was a secret—just as the child had been a secret inside her, and also the birth, now that it was distant…”
(Ravn, My Work, trans. Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russel, p. 192)

There’s no big character arc in My Work, because Anna’s trajectory is one of rekindling her old self or, better yet, getting to know this new self in the making while she gets to know this new person whose bodily existence has been tied to her own. It is not by chance that Anna is a struggling writer. Generative forces, which can be chaotic in themselves, are thrown in disarray when a big life change happens, and what could be bigger in Anna’s life than an unexpected child?

If you got to a bookstore today, it will likely be easy to find tales about motherhood—from non-fiction to fictionalized memoirs to auto-fictional pieces to full fiction. But what I found compelling about Ravn’s work was that the biological and physiological realities of birthing a child are not raised to a certain mystical status separated from, and superior to, the cultural and social realities that frame those experiences. Anna recognizes both her partner’s support and his full incomprehension of what is happening to her in several different levels of her interior and social selves. And those personal experiences are extrapolated to her intended role as an author, a writer whose work can be integrated into a cultural web that tends to efface women’s work—both in the house and in the culture.

Sheila Heti’s Motherhood also considers this problem—of women’s cultural labor—but from the perspective of an outsider: a woman of forty who feels the pressure to act now, to heed to a final call of a biological imperative for reproduction before it’s too late. I knew very little about the book before jumping it, only that it discussed this big question that, for some generations now, has been a recurring source of pressure: to have or not to have. That, and that was recommended to me by a friend.

Heti’s unnamed protagonist, a “childless woman of child-bearing age” (how amazing is this?), is, very much like Ravn’s Anna, a layered individual, with desires that are not fully unpacked, still working out what she wants in relation to who she is (and vice-versa). In Heti’s book, it is not so much about who to be once a subordinate and needy “whom” enter the equation, but whoness is still at the center of it: who can a woman be if she decides not to have children? Or, perhaps even before that: if the decision to bear children is one that is central to womanhood, what is left of womanhood once one refuses it? In this quasi-memoir novel, the pressure toward decision comes from everywhere—including the narrator’s internal monologues—because while she feels she does not want to be a mother, she is unsure of what is left without it.

The uncertainty of the non-decision, or of the anti-decision, is a strong one. It will likely resonate even with readers who are not struggling with this specific question, because the curse of unmoored choice is a heavy burden. The unnamed narrator’s partner, Miles, explicitly tells her it is up to her to decide if she really wants a child. But how can we tell whether we really want something? If anything? Motherhood is an experience in how saying “no” to something does not automatically mean saying “yes” to its opposite or its alternatives, and it is in this unknown that the burden of motherhood is construed around women “of child-bearing age.” But, again, you can also say that is the burden attached to all Big Life Decisions, for all paths taken and not.

“When I think about everything that could be or couldn’t be, I think I don’t want our flesh—my mother’s flesh, my grandmother’s flesh—to just be divided and replicated. I want their life to be counted. I want to make a child that will not die—a body that will speak and keep on speaking, which can’t be shot or burned up. You can’t burn every copy of a single book. A book is more powerful than any murdered, than any crime. Then to make a strong creature, stronger than any of us. To make a creature that lives inside many bodies, not just one body that is so vulnerable.”
(Heti, Motherhood, p. 199)

Heti’s main character is also a writer—struggling, perhaps, like Anna, but certainly successful enough to travel to talk about her work. And it is through and in this exercise of generation that the narrator finds her purpose, or at least a fulfilling way to channel those chaotic energies. Motherhood is not a creed for childlessness, but it can be approached as a philosophical inquiry into the nature of decision-making and how honoring those before us means sometimes breaking away from their path.

While reading these (and Shirley Jackson’s borderline hilarious but always slightly overwhelming memoir Life Among the Savages), I couldn’t help thinking back to Elena Morante’s The Lost Daughter, and its protagonist Leda, who loves her daughters but also admits without much push that spending three years away from her daughters felt like “someone who is taking possession of her own life” and that she came back not really for love of them but for love of herself (Ferrante, The Lost Daughter, trans. Ann Goldstein, pp. 117-18). Ferrante would revisit the “woman academic who leaves her family to follow her passions” later, in the Neapolitan Quartet, but the shorter length of The Lost Daughter and its tighter focus makes it land harder here. As Ravn’s and Heti’s novels, The Lost Daughter doesn’t pass judgment on its protagonist. It suffices that Leda, like Anna and the unnamed author, exposes herself in full, dents and all, and it is up to us as readers to open space for them or risk missing out on what they have to offer.

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April round-up:

• Maurice Druon, Les Rois maudits 1: Le Roi de fer (more about it here)

• Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch

• Sheila Heti, Motherhood

• Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

• Barbara Comyns, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

• Virginia Woolf, The Three Guineas

• Nona Fernández, Voyager: Constellations of Memory (trans. from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer)

1. As previously, I do not make money from the links to Bookshop.org; they are provided as reference, and shopping through them supports my local independent bookstore.

2. Again, this is very much influenced by my research, and by one example in particular: Queen Blanche of Navarre had one daughter, who predeceased her before getting married. But that never stopped Blanche from calling everyone her son/daughter as she saw fit. As part of her testamentary output, she’s not shy to call both King Charles VI and his wife Isabeau of Bavaria “my son” and “my daughter” respectively, because as the eldest foremother in court that was her naturally self-assigned role.