A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk

Author:Rachel Cusk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2015-01-15T16:00:00+00:00

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There are books about motherhood, as there are about most things. To reach them you must pass nearly everything, the civilised world of fiction and poetry, the suburbs of dictionaries and textbooks, on past books about how to mend your motorbike or plant begonias and books about doing your own tax return. Childcare manuals are situated at the far end of recorded human experience, just past diet books and just before astrology.

It is possible, I sense, to make a specialism out of anything and hence unravel the native confidence of those you address. The more I read, the more my daughter recedes from me and becomes an object whose use I must re-learn, whose conformity to other objects like her is a matter for liminal anxiety. Most of these books begin, like science fiction, with a sort of apocalyptic scenario in which the world we know has vanished, replaced by another in whose principles we must be educated. The vanished world is the mother’s own. It is the world of her childhood, and her own mother was its last living inhabitant. In those days, the story goes, mothers were told what to do by their mothers. The apocalypse, of unspecified cause but generally agreed to have been recent, put paid to that. Like the great library of Alexandria, a world of knowledge has gone up in flames. A chain of command has been broken. We will never know what these mothers whispered to their daughters, what secrets they handed down the years. Something about leaving babies in prams at the bottom of the garden, we think. But the point is that this is a new – in many ways a better – world. You are its first mother. And this is its first book.

My mother didn’t tell me much about motherhood, it’s true. She said she couldn’t remember. None of you ever cried, she said vaguely, and then added that she might have got that wrong. She too seemed to have heard about this apocalypse. You all do it differently now, she said. She bought me a childcare manual, with a picture of an ugly baby sticking its tongue out on the cover. Every time I look at the picture it reminds me of what I thought about children before I had one, and what they thought about me. The recollection is a shock, like an unexpected glimpse in a mirror. The text inside is righteous and faintly bullying. It bristles with lists and bullet points, and with exclamation marks too, apparently denoting humour: they swim before me, mad as eyebrows, embarrassing as politicians’ jokes. Their conviviality cannot conceal the dictatorial lust belonging to scientists of baby management. The authors prescribe a regime of mandatory, indiscriminate, perhaps life-long breastfeeding. There are pictures supplied, of women breastfeeding naked, in bed, in the bath, in groups and alone. There is a picture of a woman breastfeeding a girl of at least six. They are identically dressed, with long, shining blonde hair.

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