A Life's Work

by Rachel Cusk

  In this brief period, while the baby lies enshrined in her separateness – or is receiving, as I now see it, the slow shock of that separateness, is being administered the powerful and momentarily paralysing charge of her humanity – I feel a profound bewilderment. It is as if I am unable to find any connection between my physical implication in the fact of her existence, and the emotional world I had imagined would automatically accompany it, a world in which I would as automatically be included. Pregnancy begins to seem to me more and more of a lie, a place populated by evangelicals and moralists and control-freaks, a place haunted by crazies with their delusions of motherhood. Or perhaps it is the clinical, hospital-appointed nature of the birth itself that has caused me to lose the thread of things, for in truth my experience of birth was more like the experience of having an appendix removed than what most people would understand by ‘labour’. Without its connecting hours, the glue of its pain, the literalness of its passage, I fear that I will not make it to motherhood; that I will remain stranded as someone who merely had an operation, leaving the baby with no more sense of how she came to be here than if she had been left on the doorstep by a stork.

  My physical possession of a child is, nevertheless, compelling; or rather, the physical fact of her remains a surprising embodiment of my feelings of emptiness. These sensations do not belong to my voided and sutured body. I have felt them before, throughout my life: a yearning for some correspondence with an object outside myself, a yearning to have, to experience otherness through ownership. As yet these yearnings, and their satisfaction by the object of the baby, are not so distinct from material cravings. The baby, after all, is a doll whom I dress and feed and carry about as proudly as a little girl. These libations are modest, but the premium of their object is high. Other possessions have faded in their interest, or have suffered from my irresponsibility or the changing fashions of my desire. Now I am held in a kind of stasis of expectation and unstated commitment as I wait to discover the complexity of what I have. My certainty that this complexity will show itself, and that when it does I might well be unequal to it, occasionally fades and is forgotten as the baby sleeps and feeds and silently stares. She is pale and pretty and tiny. Other people exclaim at her goodness. I am, apparently, her mother.

  When she explodes, rather later but no less spectacularly than the midwife predicted, I am caught languid and somewhat unprepared in the pleasant rays of my false dawn. I have taken her for a walk in the park with a friend. I am, I believe, being rather successful: walking, talking, while the baby sleeps on in a pouch against my chest. In the two or so weeks since her birth I appear to have soldered together my past and present, to be both myself and a mother. I have physical contact with my child. I talk to my friend. I decide to risk this vision by taking us all to a café on the other side of the park, where I must remove the baby from her pouch and sit with her on my lap at a table and drink coffee. The perturbation I feel while contemplating and then executing this feat belongs, as does my vision, to a dream: it is the feeling that will press against and then puncture my sleep, letting in the first rivulet of consciousness and behind it the raging flood of the real. The fact is that I know neither what it is to be myself nor to be a mother. I know neither my child nor my friend. I don’t even know about the weather. We sit at an outside table. A bruised bank of cloud gathers over us. It starts to rain, hard. I try to pack the baby back into her pouch, and I do it clumsily and unconfidently, and suddenly she starts to cry, to scream with an extraordinary, primitive anguish; and I am in disarray, knocking over coffee cups, fumbling with change, trying to speak, to pacify, to explain, holding the baby this way and that in the drenching rain and finally running through the park, the empty pouch flapping at my front, the roaring baby held out before me like something on fire, my friend trotting embarrassed behind, until we reach the road and madly, desperately, I flag down a taxi and somehow force the chaos of us into it. I’ll call you soon, says my friend strangely. I glimpse her through the window, slim and well-dressed, compact, somehow extraordinarily demanding and utterly implacable, politely waving from the pavement. A feeling of social anxiety, of terrible, private unease dogs me on the way home as I fight in the swaying taxi to stem my daughter’s grief, the breathtaking geyser of it as if from somewhere deep and dark and without limit. These two trains of thought do not disturb each other. I am surprised to discover how easily I have split in two. I worry; I console. Like a divided stream, the person and the mother pay each other no heed, although moments earlier they were indistinguishable: they tumble forwards, each with its separate life, driven by the same source but seeking no longer to correspond.

  The vision of myself that I briefly glimpsed in the park – unified, capable, experiencing ‘the solidarity of life’ – is one that I will continue to pursue over the coming months. It proves elusive. Its constituents, resolutely hostile, are equally unruly. To be a mother I must leave the telephone unanswered, work undone, arrangements unmet. To be myself I must let the baby cry, must forestall her hunger or leave her for evenings out, must forget her in order to think about other things. To succeed in being one means to fail at being the other. The break between mother and self was less clean than I had imagined it in the taxi: and yet it was a premonition, too; for later, even in my best moments, I never feel myself to have progressed beyond this division. I merely learn to legislate for two states, and to secure the border between them. At first, though, I am driven to work at the newer of the two skills, which is motherhood; and it is with a shock that I see, like a plummeting stock market, the resulting plunge in my own significance. Consequently I bury myself further in the small successes of nurture. After three or four weeks I reach a distant point, a remote outpost at which my grasp of the baby’s calorific intake, hours of sleep, motor development and patterns of crying is professorial, while the rest of my life resembles a deserted settlement, an abandoned building in which a rotten timber occasionally breaks and comes crashing to the floor, scattering mice. I am invited to a party, and though I decide to go, and bathe and dress at the appointed hour, I end up sitting in the kitchen and crying while elsewhere its frivolous minutes tick by and then elapse.

  The baby develops colic, and the bauble of motherhood is once more crushed as easily as eggshell. The question of what a woman is if she is not a mother has been superceded for me by that of what a woman is if she is a mother; and of what a mother, in fact, is.

  Colic and Other Stories

  My daughter has colic. Horses, I was of the opinion, had colic. It seems a callous appellation for what afflicts her, the wordless suffering of babies and beasts. I am sure there must be a word for it in German, something compound like lifegrief that would translate as outpouring of sorrow at the human condition, for I do not entirely believe that it is a digestive malaise. Nor, I suspect, does the medical profession: I see it referred to variously as three-month colic, ‘colic’, and ‘what many people understand by the term “colic”’. Occasionally a brutal practitioner will call it ‘wind’, hinting at a view of emotion in children as pestilential and unsavoury. All, however, agree that it presents itself as bouts of apparently causeless crying which occur at specific times of the day and for which there is no cure or consolation.

  My daughter’s symptoms correspond exactly to this description, save for some confusion over the times at which the colic occurs, which seem not specific but general, random and frequent. I consult books on the subject, all of which insist that colic, like a Swiss train, arrives and departs on time. My experience of the regularity of hours and days and seasons has altered so dramatically over the past few weeks that time has become a sort of undifferentiated mass ordered only by the exigencies of the baby’s sleeping and waking, her crying and equally baffling contentment. The idea of her displaying a particular behaviour ‘in the afternoons’, as the books suggest, or ‘between four and six o’clock’ is outlandish. The books advise walking up and down with the baby, rhythmic rocking, putting her in a pouch o
r sling, singing or dancing. I have recently read that the government is providing underprivileged teenaged girls with dolls that wet their nappies and cry incessantly, in the attempt to acquaint them with the realities of motherhood. The suggestion is that these dolls will rain down upon the pavements from the top floors of tower blocks within an hour of their issue, leaving the girls free to pursue careers in high finance. My books, similarly, carry health warnings on the subject of crying. A baby’s crying, I am told, can cause depression and psychosis, and can result in you harming your baby. If you feel that you would like to harm your baby, put it in a safe place and leave the room for ten minutes. The tone of this instruction is curt, following on from mellifluous pages on the subjects of breastfeeding, bonding, and how you and your partner might divert yourselves sexually until you are able to resume what is described as ‘full intercourse’. It peters out into a series of telephone numbers, for organisations with names like CRY-SIS.

  Having apparently reached a sort of Land’s End of charted motherhood, I quickly see that the problem is one I must study and solve myself. Mothers soon come to recognise the meaning of their baby’s different cries, I read. I have indeed worked out that on those occasions when the crying is halted by feeding, I might interpret in retrospect its meaning to have been that of hunger; or one of its meanings, in any case. The baby’s cries are so deafening, so urgent, so redolent of emergency that my first instinct on hearing them is always to rush her to hospital, or leave the building as if a fire alarm were going off. I understand that crying, being the baby’s only means of communication, has any number of causes, which it falls to me, as her chief companion and link to the world, to interpret. Further, it is suggested to me that this interpretation is being used as the information upon which she is with every passing minute founding the structure of her personality. My response to these early cries, in other words, is formative. I should do nothing that I don’t intend to continue doing, should make no false moves, lest I find myself co-habiting in the months and years to come with the terrible embodiment of my weaknesses, a creature formed from the patchwork of my faults held together by the glue of her own apparently limitless, denatured, monstrous will.

  I have no difficulty in understanding what I read of the early relationship between mother and child. The child’s yearning to be repossessed by the mother’s body, its discovery of desire and satisfaction, its exploration of the limits of itself, and of another person and the fact of that person’s own will; the mother’s impulse both to protect and to expose, to yield and to separate, her responsibility both to love and to sort of steer everything in the right direction: I can see it all. The problem is that this vision doesn’t much seem to resemble my situation. The baby’s objections seem both comprehensive and startlingly personal; my own responses random, off-key and profoundly unmagical. It is not only difficult to believe that I am the object of the baby’s desire, an object she is unresting in her attempts to enslave to her own will; it is in fact quite possible that she doesn’t like me at all. I have enough imagination to picture the blur of her world, the fog of herself through which differentiation is impossible, the imperatives of her body and yet its paralysis; I do not believe that she is necessarily composing a list of objections to my conduct. It is merely that when I come looming through this fog I don’t appear to improve things.

  I wake to find her red and rigid on the bed beside me, the room vibrating with sound. It is 9.30 am. I have been up many times in the night to feed her, and at some late point we clearly slumped jointly into an unexpected sleep. Other people have gone to work, to school, while we slept: the world is at its desk. We are in the housewifely slurry of everything that is both too late and too early, of madness and morning television. The day lies ahead empty of landmarks, like a prairie, like an untraversable plain. The baby is roaring. It is the sort of sound that permits no pause between deep sleep and full activity. I leap to my feet, pick her up and am pacing the reeling room with her within seconds. Dimly I remember feeding her perhaps two hours earlier, but decide to feed her again anyway while I think of something else I can do. My thoughts have become rat-like and rudimentary with guesswork, with lack of sleep. Feeding is something I do with a measure of confidence only because I have done it several times before, not because I understand particularly when and how it should be done. This morning she won’t feed. Suddenly it is like trying to feed a kitchen appliance, or a shoe, bizarre and apparently inappropriate. Her body is ramrod-straight, her open mouth a furnace of noise, her face blue and red with fury. Milk runs in untasted rivulets down her affronted cheek. I decide on a change of scene. We go to the bathroom, where I intend to change her nappy. Again, this strategy has worked before, although I am unsure why. I lie her down on the mat. Immediately the crying stops. Delighted at the speed with which I have disarmed her, I sit down on the bathroom floor and lean back against the wall. I trill at the baby as she lies there watching me. Presently I change her nappy. I pick her up. Immediately she roars. I put her down again. She stops. I clean my teeth, I get into the bath, I get out. I get dressed. I try picking her up again in the hope that something has changed, but it hasn’t. She roars. When I put her down, she stops. I wonder whether it is possible to spend the whole day in the bathroom. The telephone rings in the next door room and I go to answer it. Back in the bathroom, she roars. I turn on my heel and go back in. I pick her up. She stops.

  Downstairs in the kitchen I prepare and eat breakfast with one arm while holding her with the other. She looks around happily enough as she is waltzed from cupboard to table. I read the newspaper. I clear up, again with one arm. The arm that is holding the baby has started to ache, but the consequences of a transfer to the other side are potentially devastating. Presently I see that it is time for her to be fed. Having abandoned feeding as a strategy, I am reluctant to introduce it again. At some point, though, she will grow hungry and cry, and in any case my memory of the earlier crying has become fuzzy. The idea of taking some sort of initiative, of being a mother as opposed to a rapid response unit, is attractive. Offers of milk, this time, are accepted. In the silent kitchen we sit, the baby watching me with bead-bright, unfathomable eyes as she feeds, I watching her as one would watch some exotic, uncaged animal, wondering what she is going to do next. I pray for this stasis to continue, for the telephone and doorbell not to ring, for the city to go about its morning without troubling me. It is in such moments that a drop of confidence wells glittering from the baby and slowly splashes into the gaping vessel of myself.

  Her eyelids begin to droop. The sight of them reminds me of the possibility that she might go to sleep and stay that way for two or three hours. She has done this before. The prospect is exciting, for it is when the baby sleeps that I liaise, as if it were a lover, with my former life. These liaisons, though always thrilling, are often frantic. I dash about the house unable to decide what to do: to read, to work, to telephone my friends. Sometimes these pleasures elude me and I end up gloomily cleaning the house, or standing in front of the mirror striving to recognise myself. Sometimes I miss the baby and lie beside her crib while she sleeps. Sometimes I manage to read, or work, or talk, and am enjoying it when she wakes up unexpectedly and cries; and then the pain of moving from one life to the other is acute. Nevertheless, watching her eyelids droop, my excitement at the prospect of freedom buzzes about my veins. I begin manically to list and consider things I might do, discarding some ideas, cherishing others. Her eyelids droop again and close altogether. In repose her face is as delicate, as tranquil as a shell. As I look, an alarming colour spreads rapidly over it. The skin darkens, promising storms. Her eyes flip open, her body writhes, her small mouth opens like a yawning abyss of grief and pain. She roars. She bellows. She cries out in anger, agony, outrage, terror. I feel as if I have been discovered in some terrible infidelity. My thoughts of freedom cover themselves and scatter and I am filled with fury and shame.

  Have I poisoned her? The idea that there was something in the mi
lk always occurs to me at such times. I have seen the phrase arrayed in bullet points, stamped out in bold, in the many leaflets and books I have perused on the subject of colic. It is a terrible phrase. It fills the heart with hopelessness and gloom, like stories of corruption in high places. How will I know? How will I root out the evil? Bottle-feeding mothers are generally advised to change the baby’s brand of formula milk without delay if such a suspicion adheres to them. Breastfeeders like myself must go through a rather more ascetic process of expiation. Think back over what you’ve eaten and drunk over the past twenty-four hours, I am advised. The suspects are legion, but the proof of their guilt is vague. ‘Culprits’, as they are called, include alcohol, coffee and chocolate; cabbage, onions and garlic; citrus fruits and spicy food. Beans. Tea. Anything raw. Some mothers find that excluding dairy products entirely from their diet improves things somewhat. I have been told of a woman who would use a breast-pump to remove all the milk from her breasts after she had eaten anything. The baby is choking and pulling her knees convulsively up to her chest. I imagine the corruption of myself running through her tracts, into her veins and recesses. I long to withdraw my sting from her innocent body. I think for the thousandth time how much I dislike breastfeeding. I want to stop. And yet the memory of the earliness, the unnaturalness of her birth always persuades me to extend her lease on my body a little longer. I am unable to decide whether the symbolic value of this offering outweighs the fact that it appears to have the effect of three-hourly administrations of cyanide.