A Life's Work (20 page)

Brief pauses begin to appear in the score of motherhood, silences like the silences between album tracks, surrounded by sound but silences nontheless. In them I begin to glimpse myself, briefly, like someone walking past my window. The sight is a shock, like the sight of someone thought dead. As my daughter grows more separate from me, so the silences become longer, the glimpses more sustained. I realise that I had accepted each stage of her dependence on me as a new and permanent reality, as if I were living in a house whose rooms were being painted and forgot that I had ever had the luxury of their use. First one room and then another is given back to me. Stairs are just stairs again. Nights are once more vague and soundless. Time is no longer alarmed and trip-wired: things can wait, can be explained and deferred. My body has lost its memory of her birth and sometimes I feel surges of girlishness, of youth and lightness.

My daughter has realised that I am different from her. She offers me her lunch and tickles my feet. She makes me laugh. I find things in my pockets, in my shoes, leaves and shells, half-eaten biscuits, a doll's tiny plastic handbag, things she has put there like small offerings to an unimportant goddess. When I return from an absence she runs all the way down the passage and throws herself into my arms. I pick her up and hug her like something I had thought lost. Once, when I am upset and want to stay at home while everyone else goes for a walk, I see her standing at the door in her red coat, her face filled with anxiety. She gets my boots and brings them to where I sit. Another adult picks her up and carries her outside without noticing what she has done, and as the door shuts behind them I am left with the boots, the expression of her love, sitting neatly side by side on the kitchen floor.

Increasingly, motherhood comes to seem to me not a condition but a job, the work of certain periods, which begin and end and outside of which I am free. My daughter is more and more a part of this freedom, something new that is being added, drop by daily drop, to the sum of what I am. We are an admixture, an experiment. I don't yet know what effect her presence will have on my life, but its claim is more profound, more unnerving than was the mere work of looking after her. For the first year of her life work and love were bound together, fiercely, painfully. Now, it is as if a relationship has untethered itself and been let loose in our house. A storm of association rages around her, and at first I find this change relieving, as if I had been speaking a foreign language all this time and could at last revert to my native tongue. But in fact, she has not been waiting all this time merely to speak to me: her ability to relate to other people has grown, like tentacles, out of the body of what she has already become. When finally we are able to converse, I find her decided, fully formed, already beyond the reach of persuasion. My relationship with her is like my relationship with anybody: it takes the form of a search for oneness, a oneness lost but haunting with the prospect of its recapture. It is incredible to me – who remembers that oneness, the image on the snowy screen of her two-inch-long body lying in my darkness, as if it were yesterday, as if it were still there – that our joinedness is for her such a distant state. Sitting on the sofa with her watching cartoons, I put an arm around her and she shakes it irritably off. Minutes later she places a small, plump hand consolingly on my knee. Neither of us says anything. We are like awkward lovers, like two people, any old people, clumsily sharing the regular cup of human emotion. In such moments I feel as though I have survived what insurance policies refer to as an act of God, a hurricane, a flood. It roared around me threatening destruction and then vanished, leaving silence and a world strewn with broken things, a world I patiently repair, wondering what I can salvage, whether I'd be better off just starting again.

I go to London, alone, for the weekend and walk stupidly around Oxford Street in the glare of an urban summer. Everything seems weirdly futuristic, as if I had been deposited there by a time machine. I want to buy clothes, to make up for two years in which I have been as far from fashion as an anthropologist on a long field trip; but the racks of things look incomprehensible and unrelated to me, like costumes for a drama in which I no longer have a part. I lack the desire for myself that would teach me what to choose; I lack the sense of stardom in my own life that would urge me to adorn myself. I am backstage, attendant. I have the curious feeling that I no longer exist in synchronicity with time, but at a certain delay, like someone on the end of a transatlantic phone call. This, I think, is what it is to be a mother. The most terrible feeling of stress and anxiety begins to mount in me there in the shop. My heart flails in my chest with panic. I long for my child, long for her as for a sort of double, a tiny pilot boat winging young and certain up the channel ahead of me, guiding the blind, clumsy weight of me through. I go to the children's section of a department store and stand there amidst the cribs and the baby clothes, the teddy bears and tiny shoes, and I feel alleviated, rescued, plugged into a source of life.

All day I have heard babies crying, faint threads of distress from elsewhere borne past me on the air, and each time I have felt a fine quiver of response, razor-sharp, immediate, and have had to steel myself not to look around. A baby begins to cry there in the children's department, not six feet away from me. It is the raw, tiny cry of someone only a few days old. I look up and see the stroller, the mother frantically jiggling it with one hand while raking through racks of baby clothes with the other, her face a fist of concentration. She is debating something in urgent tones with the older woman – her mother – standing next to her. The baby's cries are fast with barely a beat between them. I know that this means the woman has less than a minute to choose and purchase an outfit, but her mother disagrees with her choice and is remonstrating with her. I can see by the way she moves that her body is still stunned with childbirth. Go home, I think. Go home. Wrap the baby in a tea-towel, she won't care. Just give in and go home. She doesn't give in. She has an image of this shopping expedition and she is clinging to it with sharp teeth. She can't bear something to go unresolved, unfinished, for she fears that nothing will ever be resolved again. She's trying to keep up, to stay in time, but she's swimming against a powerful current. I see her steal looks at her mother, brimming with longing and confusion and hurt. After all these years she has discovered her mother's secret and it is somehow disppointing, a let-down, for she is in those first days of her parturition both mother and child, and the passionate emotion she feels for her vulnerable self finds no reflection in her own mother's disapproval, her compassionless urge to dispute. Years of human politics have adhered to her mother's heart: they hang from it like stalectites, like moss. Her own heart is new, raw, frantically pulsing. Will time turn it, too, unfeeling?

The baby cries and cries; and it is all I can do not to lift it from its stroller and hold its small, frightened body close against my chest, hold it and hold it until it stops, so certain am I that it would, that it would know that I knew, and be consoled.

Extract from ‘The Bad Mother' by James Hillman featured in
Fathers and Mothers
ed. P. Berry (Spring Publications 1990)

Extract from
The Great Fortune
by Olivia Manning © Olivia Manning 1960 (Arrow 2000)

Extract from
Of Woman Born
by Adrienne Rich, published by Virago Press

Extract from
Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems
by Dr Richard Ferber © Dr Richard Ferber (Dorling Kindersley 1986)

All reasonable efforts have been made by the author and the publisher to trace the copyright holders of the material quoted in this book. In the event that the author or publisher are contacted by any of the untraceable copyright holders after the publication of this book, the author and publisher will endeavour to rectify the position accordingly.

Also by
Rachel Cusk

Saving Agnes
The Temporary
The Country Life

 

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Cover

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

Introduction

Forty Weeks

Lily Bart's Baby

Colic and Other Stories

Loving, Leaving

Motherbaby

Extra Fox

Hell's Kitchen

Help

Don't Forget to Scream

A Valediction to Sleep

Breathe

Heartburn

Credits

Also by Rachel Cusk

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Copyright