I first read A Life's Work, Rachel Cusk's 2003 memoir about becoming a mother, on a flight to Vietnam, a trip my husband and I had planned as a last, continent-jumping hurrah before trying to get pregnant. I knew—I hoped—that motherhood awaited me on the other side of our vacation, but I didn't know what shape my fantasies about it should take. I loved the renewing exuberance of babies. I thrived on the intimate day-to-day of my family life. And I yearned to see the human expression of my husband and myself joined as one. These were my vague and, I see now, naive desires. But even then, it was clear to me that I needed literary counsel.
I didn't rely on the What to Expect When You're Expecting–type books to fill me in. I've rarely experienced the thrill of recognition from guidebooks that I've felt when reading a memoir or a novel. The organized portrayals of life in self-help books tend to make me feel more alienated, not less. I start out with good intentions, but soon I am hungrily flipping the pages, skipping big, earnest chunks of information, searching for some sign of the chaotic emotions that surely existed before being wrangled into such tidy shape. I'd heard about Cusk's memoir from a close friend. She had pressed me to read it more than once, with a snappy hint of impatience, or maybe it was desperation, in her tone. Looking back, I have this image of her atop a high cliff, her hand held to the side of her mouth, shouting down to me to please-please read this memoir-oir-oir, her voice echoing in the distance that had suddenly sprung up between us. Three years later, I finally picked it up.
"No matter how much I try to retain my self, my shape, within the confines of this trial, it is like trying to resist the sleep an anaesthetic forces upon a patient," Cusk writes about being with her baby. "My daughter quickly comes to replace me as the primary object of my care. I become an undone task, a phone call I can't seem to make, a bill I don't get around to paying." That's not all. "It is only when I walk through the front door to my house that I realize things have changed," she writes, recounting her return from the hospital. "It is as if I have come to the house of someone who has just died, someone I loved, someone I can't believe has gone." Reading this, I instinctively pulled back, my heart guarding itself like a fist against such a stark account of motherhood. When I finished, I simply tossed the book aside and thought, That won't be me.
How wrong I was.
Lately, more and more writers have trodden the same delicate territory of A Life's Work. In 2005, Brooke Shields bravely traded on her celebrity, not to mention her own very personal story, to bring more attention to postpartum depression in Down Came the Rain. Tracy Thompson offered The Ghost in the House, a memoir of her own difficulties as well as an investigation into the lives of other suffering mothers. Thompson makes the case for differentiating between postpartum depression and "maternal depression," arguing that the demands of mothering, and the emotional consequences, reach far beyond those early, disorienting months. ("Many mothers simply consider [depression's] classic constellation of symptoms—chronic exhaustion, dysfunctional eating patterns, anxiety, inability to sleep or concentrate—to be 'normal,'" she explains.) Ruta Nonacs's A Deeper Shade of Blue is a more clinical approach to detecting female mood disorders. These books do the hard, lonely work of asking others to pay attention to the terrifying spiral of emotion that can take place after one becomes a mother. They are serious and vivid and smart. And yet they still don't describe the sadness that I felt in those profound months of early motherhood. Pregnancy, as abstract as it was, dolled up in its Empire-waist dress, obscured me from the fact of motherhood. I was almost shocked to find that, there at the end of it, lying in an aqua hospital gown splattered with blood, I was actually being handed a baby.
Next Page: "My old life seemed suddenly as distant and unattainable as the moon...."
