Being a little blog-ambitious today
(Before I start: my husband came home and fixed the embedded pic in the previous post. Go check us out, young and blissful...)
I recently finished reading this book by Rachel Cusk and I strongly do NOT recommend it. I was looking (still am) for personal accounts on motherhood and the mother-child-experience. After all reference books try to give you the objective view, but we all know subjective is much more fun to read. Not this one. I imagine Rachel Cusk to be this very urban and feminist woman, who is completely removed from what she sees as the traditional (and inferior) feminine role - motherhood. She sets the book up as if her detached feelings were normal but I'm very prone to believe she is proud of her detachment - and therefore most likely contributed willfully to not being a motherly person.
She is right that motherhood changes your identity. I expect that, although I haven't even been through it yet, but I am very uncomfortable with her lengthy descriptions of all the downfalls and problems and the portrayal of her infant daughter as almost an enemy, an intruder who took over her life and made it miserable.
Why do people get SO upset that once the baby is here their whole life is changed and they can't sleep in on Saturdays anymore? I'm sure I'll miss that too (hehe I'm already there.. silly me got herself a dog!), but we don't take steps in life just so we can stay in the same spot. So you wanted a child. Now you have it! Not sleeping through the night is not a mean plot by the child trying to destroy your independent and feminist self. If you wanted to remain what you were forever, maybe you should not have attempted child rearing.
Anyway, she gives herself away in one of the last chapters where she describes the women in the provincial town she and her husband moved to in order to escape the busyness of London (they move back within a few months). They are all matronly, wearing out-of-style flowery dresses, ride their bikes, judge everyone and have tons of children. Plus they are stupid, don't have jobs and are all racist. Obviously she wants the reader to think she has the objective, the more raw and realistic view of motherhood than these lowly women who don't know better than breed all day. Well, she didn't convince me.
Ugh. I finished it... you know, it's tough to drop a book before it ends.
If you're anything like me, don't read it. Save yourself the time for something more fun.
Did I ever mention how much this view of motherhood is a pet peeve of mine?
Not sleeping through the night is not a mean plot by the child trying to destroy your independent and feminist self.
It is also a temporary step that does not last very long.
It seems that some women feel that a baby will just slide easily into their lives. That they will be able to have the exact same lives as before, except with a cute, happy on their hip or in a trendy stroller.
This, of course, is not the case, as far as I can see. Which does not in turn make motherhood a bad thing or something to be dreaded or feared. Life changes all the time.
My mom, who is not a really mommy-mom type of lady, often refers to motherhood as being sacrificial. Not in a negative way, just in a reality way. But with the sacrifice comes the rewards, too.
Okay, I have no point -- I'll stop rambling now... :-)
i agree, well, with both of you.
i'm SURE motherhood is sacrificial. i'm also pretty sure that sleep deprivation can be quite terrible to endure and that always always having to tend to a baby for months on end can be exhausting and that many mothers wish they could put it on a shelf for a couple of hours. there's nothing wrong with that. but i'm also pretty sure that's not all. this book seems to try to give this impression though. as if giving birth equals the beginning of a jail term and the more the baby grows the more the mother manages to free herself.
that's a very depressing viewpoint.