1.
We learn the world through body language. Toddlers absorb the physical gestures quickly, the socializations of averted eyes, pointed fingers, stiff smiles. Time is a character on the stage, an unspoken protagonist. Maybe time is also the narrator we write around.
2.
Here’s the thing: motherhood is the mantle of knowing your death will be devastating. Slow or sudden, there is no way to repair their world once you leave it. How many unkissed knees?
3.
From our mothers, we inherit lived minutiae. I learned how to fold shirts, make cobbler, clean the rim of a bathtub. Like Marguerite Duras, I inherited my mother's fear, her particular blend of worry, her relentless stoicism, her fear of germs, the need to disinfect. Also the "hysterical love" I pour on my children.
"We separate ourselves from people by writing," Duras observes. Our mothers represent a madness, a lunacy "that doesn't preclude love" in the child's role of witness. Growing into a mother whose fear is familiar.
4.
"I think motherhood makes you obscene," writes Duras. "A mother indulges all of her games." A mother, like her child, must survive the act of mothering.
5.
In Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich articulates less gendered family roles for the future. She fleshes out a concept of community in which the child can be integrated into work, including a “new fatherhood” in which a man nurtures more.
Seeing childcare as “enforced servitude”, Rich maintains that it can only be improved by acknowledging its value rather than debasing it. By elevating its status to something that even the high-status humans can do.
Rich touches upon the solitary confinement of “full-time motherhood” and the “token nature of fatherhood” which gives a man rights and privileges over children toward whom he assumes only minimal responsibility. Her discussion on the “burden of emotional work” reveals the way rigid gender binaries prevent social change from happening--a nurturing father is seen to do “mother’s work”. And a mother's work is nothing.
Things have changed a little since Rich wrote this book, but only in the margins of heterosexual partnerships where this is made explicit, where this is a conscious effort.
6.
Borrowing from Barry Lopez's discussion of interior landscapes, I think Stories to Read Aloud to Your Fetus can be seen as an attempt to interiorize the landscape of expectancy in a world where female bodies have been rendered a form of public space.
7.
Then there’s the anger towards our mothers for looking to their husbands to fulfill their needs and making their own needs seem irresponsible or “emotional” . Examples of self-hatred include women who want sons, women who prefer male friends, women who can’t enjoy their bodies. We are steeped and socialized into this self-loathing because it is profitable. The way women hate themselves is a thriving market.
My obsession with cruelty. Susan Sontag, Simone Weil, and others. A religious impulse that flowered after having children. To know that love could be Kali, eating her children. Or Medea, killing them to protect them from the father's lack of love.
8.
Jacqueline Rose: “Motherhood is not knowledge or control. It may have to make non-stop decisions, but not according to some fetuses' logic of mastery.”
The mother’s right to life and experience is challenged by the cultural assumptions of what childhood should or should not include. The crime of exposure--of abandonment of a baby--is no longer limited to the infant but now extends into the entire developing life. There is no maternal instinct--there is the choice one makes to mother. There is the ongoing seesaw of it.
9.
In Beloved, Sethe kills her daughter out of love. Toni Morrison insisted on this. She insisted that it was love to kill a child in a world that conspired to kill her slowly, torturously, for entertainment.
10.
Elena Ferrante: “Men insert their thingy inside you and you become a box of flesh with a living doll inside.”
Was this the task of Freud’s hysterical patients--to exhibit all the fear and anxiety for a family who can then go on acting as if they are superior? And fine. Someone has to carry the terror and anxiety. Every family has its designated vessel.
11.
I need to write against the naturalistic fallacy that often undergirds patriarchal thinking. None of this is ordained by a god or by gravity—it is, like war, a choice humans make to normalize and accept certain patterns of behavior. It is also a choice that we must make to undo the damage.
A woman hides her body, hides her pain, hides her fear, because she is guilty. Because she asked for it. She is a mother. She is learning to live in the division we’ve established.
12.
There is no virtuousness in being a mother--there is merely a road one travels which changes the idea of destination, or destiny. As Jacqueline Rose observes: "it is the demand to be one thing only--love and goodness incarnate--that is intolerable for any mother and tears her mentally and physically to shreds."
13.
Obligatory childbearing and sacrifice is what Rose calls “the slave-owning version of motherhood,” an institution that has changed little over time. The decision not to mother is a basic question of consent--to have one’s body be used as a vessel. It is many other things as well, but it is never not this one: a question of consent.
14.
I love D.A. Powell for saying: “If the poet doesn’t risk absurdity, he’s not even in the game.”
Writing motherhood is this dance with an absurdity so astonishing one is tempted to call it God.