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November 02, 2006

And Here's Where We Part Ways, She and I

I finally finished reading A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, and found myself utterly disappointed. It started out as a beautifully written description of the despair of the early days of motherhood, capturing very well (or so I thought) my own desperate first days of postpartum depression. However, it never went anywhere. The drudgery plodded on, the despair never resolved or turned to joy, there was no epiphany of the wonder of motherhood or moment of seeking any professional help. I was left with so much sadness that instead of finding her New self, Rachel Cusk simply pushed her daughter away (her daughter seems to be a shadowy, peripheral thing in the book; never referred to by name, and never really acknowledged as a person), resenting her cries, leaving her to cry alone in her room for hours and hours, and ultimately describing the gulf between her and her toddler as if it were some sort of personal freedom. At the end of the book, her daughter falls and cuts herself, pushes her mother away and runs to her father. And, at the beginning of an outing that the author refuses to go on, her daughter left a pair of red boots at the door to her mother's room. I wanted to cry. It is then that Cusk starts to go on about missing the fleeting days of babyhood. But, I wanted to scream, the damage is already done. She revels in her "escape" from breastfeeding at three months.

Yes, this parenthood stuff is hard and oppressive at times. But, in the words of a good mommy friend, "parenthood is a front-end investment." I can't imagine not being as close to Lily as I am now. She is starting to stake out her independence, little by little, but on her own terms. I know her as I know myself. I can only hope that this serves to cement our bond into her entire childhood and even adulthood. I think to the future and hope that this time will bear fruit when Lily is confronted with some of the more difficult choices of growing up. This is all foundation work.

The reason I resorted to medication for my depression was because I felt a rift between how I was supposed to feel about my child (difficulties and all) and how I actually felt. It was like I could see life through a pane of glass, but couldn't get to it. Rather than retreat into myself and make her suffer, in those first endlessly needy months, I got help. I went for the quick fix because I didn't want to miss anything and I wanted to put her and her needs, for the time, first.

I'm not sitting here judging Cusk as a person, especially since this book is a work of literature and was mostly written after the fact, much of it with a tone of attempting to be darkly humorous or poignant. But the picture of motherhood it painted was not one I was ultimately able to feel at peace with. She talks about the evils of parenthood being visited upon babies, who then perpetuate these same things upon their own children. I got frustrated at her attitude of being a helpless observer, a prisoner. She writes as if utterly isolated from other people (and her own child). As I said, at first I could very strongly identify with her feelings, but I was left at the end of the book as if waiting for a punchline that never came.

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