by Meghan Daum
Like Ginzburg, she would make room for thinking about whether the sun or wind was right for taking the children out for a walk. But to feel contempt for her vocation, to despise or make fun of it, was unthinkable. And she would not be “exiled.” Rather than take time off from work as Ginzburg did, and as so many other mothers of young children do, she would go full speed in the other direction. Writer, supermom, domestic goddess—why couldn’t a woman be all three? Live to the hilt! To the top! The motto of her fellow poet Anne Sexton, who also suffered from mental illness and also took her own life, could have been Plath’s own.
What she seemed not yet to have learned was that it is one thing—and an extremely good thing—to be a perfectionist writer but quite another to be a perfectionist wife and mother because, in the latter case, too much lies outside one’s control.
If she hadn’t given up her first two children, said Lessing—who believed this act of hers had been brave—if instead she’d been forced to spend all her time with them, she would have ended up an alcoholic. I am surely not alone in wondering how different Sylvia Plath’s life might have been if she hadn’t chosen to start a family at the same time that she was trying to launch her career. I had a college professor who, with Plath’s story very much in mind, used to warn her female creative writing students: “You girls all want to set up your domestic lives before your careers, and that’s a mistake.”
It is soothing, then, to consider Virginia Woolf, who, though she, too, suffered from depression and psychotic breaks, and ended up, aged fifty-nine, in the River Ouse, was capable of a kind of contentment and fulfillment that Plath in her much-shorter life never found. Woolf might be called angry, for she was that, and she might be called bitchy, for at times she was that, too. But she was not cruel like Plath. She was not filled with hatred like Plath. She was not as calculating or vengeful or paranoid as Plath, and she does not seem to have been as deranged. Taken as a whole, and despite its grim ending, Woolf’s life strikes us as one of enviable beauty and dignity, full of soaring triumphs and humble, everyday satisfactions. (Having a stable marriage, as Plath did not, was surely a big help.)
Yet Woolf, too, fretted about the kind of woman she was and sometimes beat herself up for being inadequate. A history of mental disorder had led doctors to advise her strongly against having children—advice with which neither she nor her husband quarreled. But still there came a day when she looked back and thought that, in spite of all she had achieved as a writer, not having children meant that her life had been a failure.
I believe that fear of being a failure plays a large part in goading many women who are ambivalent about motherhood into maternity.
That, and the fear of missing out, as neatly put by the narrator of this one-sentence story by Lydia Davis called “A Double Negative”:
At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.
There is no ignoring society’s expectation that its members shall reproduce. (“Happy Mother’s Day,” a barista automatically greets me, even though I am by myself.) Resisters must be prepared for widespread disapproval and even, in some communities, isolation. Object of curiosity, pity, embarrassment, scorn: I am keenly aware of having been, at one time or another, all of these—though, in my case, I’d say this has had as much to do with my remaining single as with my being childless.
Any person who marries but rejects procreation is seen as unnatural. But a woman who confesses never to have felt the desire for a baby is considered a freak. Women have always been raised to believe they would not be complete and could not be thought to have succeeded in life without the experience of motherhood. (Did Woolf believe that her husband’s life must also be judged a failure for reasons of childlessness? I doubt it.) That there could be something in the world that a woman could want more than children has been viewed as unacceptable. Things may be marginally different now, but, even if there is something she wants more than children, that is no reason for a woman to remain childless. Any normal woman, it is understood, wants—and should want—both.
A graduate student of mine tells me, with some heat, “I do plan to have kids one day, but I certainly hope they won’t be the most important thing in my life!”
Am I wrong to think that perhaps, if this is how she feels and continues to feel, she ought at least to consider not having kids?
I can hear her respond, with equal heat, “But that’s not fair. You wouldn’t say that to a man.”
In any case, she will learn soon enough that her honesty isn’t likely to be met with understanding. When Michelle Obama (to name just one prominent, accomplished woman) announces, “I’m a mother first,” she is of course saying what most people want to hear. (It is inconceivable that any woman running for public office today could get away with explaining that although she loves her children dearly, for her, being a leader comes first. President Obama has often been heard to say, meaningfully, “I am a father.” No one leans in expecting to hear first.)
Grace Paley once jeered at the idea that had been put over on women that taking care of children was a profession, a specialization, that had to be done perfectly. To her, this reeked of self-importance. “That is not a profession for grown-up people, to bring up one child,” she said. “It’s a joke.”
Jeanette Winterson has said she does not believe her own literary success would have been possible if she had been heterosexual. In an interview she gave to The Paris Review in 1997, she said, “I can’t find a model, a female literary model who did the work she wanted to do and led an ordinary heterosexual life and had children. Where is she?” Speaking of her younger self, Winterson said, “There was a part of me that instinctively knew that in order to be able to pursue my life, which was going to be hard enough anyway, I would be much better off either on my own or with a woman.”
Things have changed since 1997. It is no longer only heterosexual couples who create nuclear families. Still, I imagine countless women nodding when they read on: “The issue of how women are going to live with men and bring up children and perhaps do the work they want to do has in no way been honestly addressed.”
These days you might say the issue has, in fact, been honestly addressed, though without bringing it any closer to being honestly resolved.
Winterson was born in 1959. In the interview, she mentions how for some women of her generation, the solution was thought to be putting off maternity until they were near middle age—more or less my old professor’s advice not to set up your domestic life ahead of your career. What happened to them, Winterson says, was that they ended up exhausted.
A generation later, at least among people I know (mostly other writers, artists, and academics), many more men are involved with child care, and to a far greater extent, than used to be the case. Nevertheless, as we keep getting told—as if we needed to be told—in most American households, the burden of what has always been thought of as woman’s work (known for damn good reason as never done), including the child care, still falls to the woman, whether or not she also works outside the home, whether or not she outearns her husband, whether or not she has, or is trying to have, a career. In fact, there are plenty of working mothers who do 100 percent of the housework. And for every writer father I know whose career is if not thriving, at least progressing, I know a writer mother whose career is stuck or in decline and who is struggling to get by as much as any woman I’ve ever known. Speaking of struggling, I want to add that although women have always written fiction about the experience of taking care of children, it is only with Knausgaard’s Struggle, an international literary hit that contains much minutely detailed description of such things as diaper changing, baby feeding, and dealing with tantrums, that the world has sat up and found this confessional domestic material, now that it is revealed through male eyes, not just worthy of interest but sensational.
Three years before Winterson, Alice Munro also g
ave an interview to The Paris Review, in which she said: “I think I married to be able to write, to settle down and give my attention back to the important thing. Sometimes now when I look back at those early years I think, ‘This was a hard-hearted young woman.’” Munro confesses to not having been there for her small children and knowing that they suffered for it. “When my oldest daughter was about two, she’d come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other.… This was bad because it made her the adversary to what was most important to me.”
Back to the important thing. What was most important to me. Make no mistake, this was a writer first. More recently, in an interview for The New Yorker, answering a question about whether she considers herself a feminist writer (she does not), Munro says, “I do think it’s plenty hard to be a man. Think if I’d had to support a family, in those early years of failure?”
Here’s my question: Is there any way for a woman in the young Munro’s position to escape being judged—by herself, by the world—as hard-hearted?
All the years when I was considering whether to have a child, I kept wondering how on earth this was supposed to work. It did not help that among older, established writers I knew, there were precious few models. What I saw was a huge group of dysfunctional (mostly divorced) parents whose children all seemed to have problems. It did not help that with each passing childbearing year, I was discovering more and more how incompatible my writing life was with any other kind of life. For one thing, writing turned out to be a torturous process. (I might not have been able to relate directly, but when David Rakoff described writing as being like having his teeth pulled out—through his penis—I thought that I couldn’t have said it better myself.) For another thing, I wanted to write novels, and there was no getting around the fact that novel writing required long stretches of uninterrupted solitude. Many times, just having a man in my life seemed like one person too many, with the relationship inevitably coming between me and my work. And since writing novels is rarely a lucrative profession, like almost all writers, I had to do some other kind of work in order to live, meaning that a substantial amount of time had to be given up to teaching. Finally, it did not help that my career coincided with a period in which the publishing industry has been in a state of chronic instability, not to say crisis, forcing me and most writers I know to accept precariousness and unrelenting anxiety as occupational hazards. All this contributed to my sense that starting a family was as reasonable as building a house on quicksand.
Who knows. If I’d gone ahead and had a child, maybe what happened to Natalia Ginzburg would also have happened to me. I would have begun to feel contempt for writing, my bundle of joy replacing it as the most important thing. This is not impossible for me to imagine. But the picture that comes far more readily to mind is one in which I am typing with one hand and batting a toddler away with the other. And how would I have felt in that situation? I know exactly how I would have felt: angry, frustrated, burning with resentment toward the child, and no doubt toward its father, too. Full of self-loathing, tormented with guilt for having made my child the adversary to my vocation. And if there is one thing I am certain would have destroyed me, it is this conflict.
Because, in the end, it came down to another question I kept asking myself: Can I be the kind of mother I would have wanted to have? Just give them lots and lots of love—oh, this I believed I could do. But I also believed that writing had saved my life and that if I could not write, I would die. And so long as this was true, and so long as writing continued to be the enormously difficult thing it has always been for me, I didn’t think I could be a real mother. Not the kind I would have wanted for my child. The kind to whom he or she was the most important thing, object of that unconditional love for which I had desperately yearned as a child myself and the want of which I have never gotten over. “Children detect things like that,” acknowledged Munro.
Some years ago, my mother, a big animal lover, was devastated by the death of her dog. “You know,” she confessed to me, “I feel worse than I would if you had died.” This is somewhat less awful than it sounds. At the time, she and I had been estranged for years, whereas she and the dog had been companions for almost as long and now its death had left her alone. In fact, even before she said it, imagining how bereft she must feel, I’d had the same thought myself.
My mother was not without kindness or decency. She did not abandon her children or neglect them. But she could not forgive us our existence. (I didn’t ask to be born!) She was human, and we humans always insist that someone must pay for life’s unfairness to us. If nothing else had made me a feminist, this would have been enough: the fate of women like her, forced by society to give their lives to something they neither wanted nor were in any way suited for. Of her three daughters, none would give birth. One decided to adopt; it did not go well.
Mother. “The holiest thing alive,” according to English Romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Our own culture likes to sentimentalize motherhood with a certain kind of mushy tribute, as in those Procter & Gamble “Thank you, Mom” commercials aired during the Olympics. But if being a mom really were something held in high esteem—if it were even regarded with the same respect as other work that people do—women everywhere would probably be a lot happier and more fulfilled than we know them to be.
Now that I have passed the age Woolf was when she died, I can look back and say, thank God, I do not feel that my life has been a failure because I didn’t have children. (A failure in other ways, yes, for other reasons, but not for that one.) To forgo motherhood was the right thing to do. But whether it was a choice I made or one that was made for me is perhaps another question.
“But you love children,” people say to me. Meaning, surely I must have regrets. It is true that I’d rather spend an afternoon hanging out with someone’s kids than with many adults I know. And not too much time passes in the course of my days without my remembering that I have missed one of life’s most significant experiences. But let me say this: the idea of having it all has always been foreign to me. I grew up believing that if you worked incredibly hard and were incredibly lucky, you might get to have one dream in life come true. Going for everything was a dangerous, distracting fantasy. I believe I have been incredibly lucky.
MOMMY FEAREST
by
Anna Holmes
I SPENT THE ENTIRE ninth year of my life horrified that I was pregnant. It began at the tail end of second grade, and continued on until I was ten, when my mom innocently handed me a book that explained the particulars of human development and made perfectly clear that pregnancy could not come before menarche. At the time, I was living with my parents and my little sister on the northern edge of a California college town, where, after school, the neighbor kids and I played on the dark gray macadam of our quiet cul-de-sac, and sometimes, in and around the drainage pond at the end of the street, some two hundred yards away. There were tiny fish in that pond, and nearby, crows, and gophers, and probably a fair number of snakes, although I saw evidence of the latter only once, when I rode my bike past the corpse of an unlucky garter, his skull flattened by the thick tread of one of the motorized bikes that pimply teenage boys rode, whizzing up and over the packed hills of dirt on the farthest reaches of the pond.
The “pond,” as we called it, was nothing more than a place where runoff was collected, and, one assumes, drained, but it was teeming with life: cattails, dragonflies, mosquitoes, tadpoles, and, later in the season, baby frogs. I played there by myself, and sometimes with my friend Rachel, and sometimes with Daniel, a boy two years my junior who lived in a duplex three doors down from my family’s one-story Streng Brothers–designed home. Daniel was shorter than I was, covered in freckles, and probably Scottish in descent—he shared a surname with the man who later became my husband and then ex-husband—and his straight hair stuck out at odd angles, like the bristles on a stiff brush. He was not blessed with a particularly
compelling personality—the most interesting thing about him was the fact that he had accidentally aided in the strangulation of his family’s pet cat after he left a string around her neck that got snagged on the slat of a wooden fence—but he was the only boy on the block, which meant that he could be counted on to do the things other kids my age didn’t want to do, like racing our bikes around, and playing Cyclops, and covering ourselves in the Capay soils native to our area as we brandished plastic shovels and tried to dig our way to China.
Daniel could also be counted on, at least for a few months, to drop trou and show me his penis. I wouldn’t call what we did “playing doctor,” because I had no interest in the medical arts or in feigning illness in order to get a glimpse of someone else’s forbidden flesh. Despite my straightforwardness about what we did, however, I was well aware that there was perhaps something tawdry about pulling down my drawers to expose my genitals to a neighbor boy—and, even worse, asking him to do the same—but I didn’t care: I wanted to get a gander at the goods. Some days, we’d meet up after school and squeeze into the narrow space next to the eastern wall of my house, pull down our pants on the count of three, and spend a few minutes eyeballing one another. Eventually, looking begat discussing, which begat touching, which begat the one day in the summer of 1981, after capturing four baby frogs and placing them in a Mason jar for safekeeping, I pulled down my pants, had Daniel do the same, and thrust myself up against him. We stood there for ten seconds or so, my knees bent and my hips tilted upward so I could snuggle his little penis between my legs more easily—I was a good five inches taller than he was—but soon he got nervous, wiggled back into his shorts, and set out for home. The next morning, after discovering that the baby frogs we’d captured had perished in the suffocating conditions of the sealed glass jar, it occurred to me that the previous day’s sexual child’s play might have made me pregnant, and I spent the next year in a state of mild panic, examining, whenever I remembered to do so, my bare belly for the swelling that suggested evidence of human gestation. None ever came.
