Books
The cliché of love. Nothing prepares you for the visceral shock of motherhood. Suzanne Moore reads a "post-feminist" tract and asks why women are always left holding the baby
Published 03 September 2001
A Life's Work: on becoming a mother
Rachel Cusk Fourth Estate, 224pp, £12.99
ISBN 1841154865
I never saw a dead body until a woman sitting next to me died on the bus in Oxford Street. I never held a tiny baby until I held my own. How was it that I could be an adult, avowedly determined to live life to the full, yet have so little experience of the end and the beginning of life itself? How could I have been so . . . removed?
Yet I sense this distance, this increasingly great unpreparedness among women, especially about babies. To hear motherhood described by many women, these days, it seems most closely to resemble some post-traumatic stress disorder. It all comes as a terrible shock. There is the shock of pregnancy. Something growing inside you. Squirming. There is the shock of weight gain and discomfort. There is the shock of realising that the parasite is going to fight its way out of your body, whatever you might think about that. Because pregnancy is not an illness, there is the shock of dealing with a medical establishment that often treats you as if it just doesn't care. There is the shock of birth, a blood-and-guts experience, however you do it. There is the shock of the baby itself - something has come out of you that is not you. There is the shock of realising that someone has to look after it. All the time. There is the shock of finding out that, whatever the bloke said, it will most probably be you. And then there is the shock of love, unlike any other love. The shock of the cliche.
But you knew all this, didn't you, because aren't we the most prepared generation in the world? Don't we have millions of leaflets and books about how to become pregnant, be pregnant, feed the child? Don't we have our too-posh-to-push mothers with their "Wake me up at the hairdressers" sassiness? Don't we have (lower your voice) elderly mothers? Don't we have the highest rate of teen pregnancy in Europe?
So how come caring full-time for another person is still so secret in some way? Why is it that the theory of motherhood is discussed endlessly, but motherhood the practice still feels so unspoken? As Rachel Cusk says in this wonderful book, "The experience of motherhood loses nearly everything in its translation to the outside world. In motherhood a woman exchanges her public significance for a range of private meanings, and, like sounds outside a certain range, they can be difficult for other people to identify." What she proceeds to do is a remarkable feat of translation, full of enormous insight and sly wit.
Cusk is a writer of enviable poise and intelligence. Restraint, too, so that what could have been another chummy confessional, revealing untold shallows, becomes a work of profundity and depth. Cusk is not messing about here, not lazily slumming in the first person and the quotidian of amusing stories about caring for small children. She is writing at the top of her game, unafraid of being cool and clever. Unafraid of being significant.
This is also a very funny book about very serious things. I have only recently endured pregnancy; yet, until I read this book, I had no idea how much I longed for a critique of the official literature on the subject. Was it only last year that I was reading that the ideal activity in between the first and second stages of labour was not, as I previously thought, threatening murder, or screaming one's head off, but applying one's make-up for one's husband? Naturally, at the same time, I was reading that we must do everything the way that primitive women do. Except die, presumably.
Cusk eviscerates the lumpen body of advice that the pregnant woman is forced to hump around. As she wryly notes, the literature tones down the solitary nature of childbirth and "the fact that attending classes for it is like attending classes for death. Indeed, every effort is made to rip the process of any personal significance at all, so that having read a certain number of these leaflets I am no longer sure whether it is I who will be going through labour or the woman in the orange tracksuit, demonstrating with a grapefruit."
Yet what is really startling about A Life's Work is that it is genuinely post-feminist, not in the sense that we do not need feminism any more, but in the sense that it implicitly points to the holes in the familiar feminist discourse. If we do away with the notion that the personal is political, as feminism-lite is wont to do, who gets left holding the baby? When Cusk talks of motherhood as the work "requisitioned" from a woman's life, she is talking of truth rather than sexual politics. She rightly sees motherhood as "the anvil upon which sexual inequality was forced". She also sees that today's women whose experience and expectations are like men's are understandably nervous about it. This is why she can say that birth not only divides women from men, but "it also divides women from themselves, so that a woman's understanding of what it is to exist is profoundly challenged".
This is the contemporary crisis of feminism. An equality founded on what Cusk might call public significance has produced an emphasis on work as the only measure of parity. Motherhood, as it is lived, is still individual, personal, private, and therefore deeply undervalued, sometimes even by those of us (and nowadays that is most of us) who move between the "real" world of work and the shadow world of family life. Between these worlds, Cusk has crafted a work of beauty and wisdom. And belly laughs. A lovely thing. Oh, and it has the best description of colic I've ever read anywhere.
Suzanne Moore is a columnist on the Mail on Sunday
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