Upon my return home, my astonishment turned to weepy exhaustion, which soon spiked to anxiety. Sometimes all three moods descended at once, leaving me slumped on an enormous blue exercise ball, halfheartedly bouncing my bundle of joy. My husband and I, once the portrait of modern equality, had fallen out of step. With a third person to tend to constantly, I felt as if we were being pulled apart like a wishbone, just when we needed each other most. Breast-feeding was a disaster at the start. We—my son and I—couldn't seem to get the hang of the "latch," and my nipples were so finely wounded, it looked like I'd been wearing a bra filled with shards of glass. One afternoon I found myself envying the ridiculously preppy cover of a J. Crew catalog. The models wore khaki pants, and their heads were thrown back in laughter. I wondered if my days would ever seem so crisp and manageable. My old life seemed suddenly as distant and unattainable as the moon.
But there is a difference between the bone-shattering depth of depression and the blast of confusion that comes as you step into your new role as mother. Bringing awareness to depression is a crucial effort. Still, these crusades sometimes overshadow another maternal secret: There is inevitably a certain amount of sadness that comes with motherhood. This, it seems to me, is a truth we are still reluctant to confess. It may be even harder to admit the grief that resides one step away from postpartum depression, the mourning that comes naturally with letting go of your life as you once knew it.
Which is what makes Cusk's book so significant: She simply describes her anguish without categorizing it. I revisited A Life's Work when my son was a month old. I might as well have been reading a different book. I underlined almost every sentence, pressing my pen hard against the page in agreement. I was so relieved to have found a text that articulated this experience—this nerve-racked love, this richly complicated initiation into motherhood.
Of course, Cusk is not the first to have admitted feeling destabilized. Writers like Adrienne Rich paved the way decades ago with books like Of Woman Born. "No one mentions the psychic crisis of bearing a first child," Rich declares in her 1976 book, "the excitation of long-buried feelings about one's own mother, the sense of confused power and powerlessness, of being taken over on the one hand and of touching new physical and psychic potentialities on the other, a heightened sensibility which can be exhilarating, bewildering, and exhausting."
Anne Lamott should be made an honorary mascot of the genre for her ability to capture the slapstick misery and hilarity of it all. "I feel like I'm breaking my motherly balls trying to keep [my son] safe," she confesses in Operating Instructions. "Sometimes he's the Dalai Lama, and sometimes he's like a cross between a bad boyfriend and a high-strung puppy. And it never matters what my needs are. He never says, 'Hey, babe, you've been working too hard—why don't you take a couple of hours off? I'll just lie here and read.'"
These writers are reassuring to me because they not only capture the floundering sense of oneself that goes hand in hand with this adventure, but also make room for the possibility that sorrow may be as intrinsic to becoming a mother as the transcendent love that has long been celebrated.
In part, the surprise I have felt in making my own way has been in finding that I both do and don't have maternal instincts. I have always been able to care for my child with the tenderness I assumed I would feel. But from the start, my happiness commingled with distress. In other words, I had to learn—I am still learning—who I am in this incarnation. One of the rewards has been catching my breath and letting myself grow alongside my son.
At the end of Cusk's first year with her daughter, which is also where she ends her memoir, she sees a woman with a newborn in a department store. The baby is sobbing. The mother is frantic, "her body still stunned with childbirth." Cusk, a wiser and calmer mother by this time, looks on, pleading silently with the new mom to let go of this errand she is clinging to as if it held the secret passageway to her old self, to surrender and take her baby home. Cusk's unspoken advice to this woman is also just what I needed to hear: Be patient. Time makes the mother.
