“Not for the faint of heart!” I mouth to a man I went to high school with over 20 years ago. We stand in the locker room at the local YMCA, trying to talk over and around our children. He, pants and no top, is leaving swimming lessons with his young daughter, also pants and no top, while I am arriving, fully dressed for winter with my six-year-old son, also fully dressed for winter. He gestures widely with his hands, indicating, “all of this”, and by that he means, chaos. A type of chaos that is unknowable unless it is yours. And every parent has a different type of chaos, equally beautiful and impossibly difficult, but there is always chaos.
I want to tell him that his daughter is adorable and that I love my son, even though he wears me out, but I am beckoned away by another loud, frustrated, “mama!”. I want to find the man on social media, but he is not there. I want to tell him that I know. That I understand. That the chaos is okay and being exhausted is okay and that it’s okay to not be okay. Because I am rarely okay. And right now, I don’t know a single parent who is okay. Maybe I’m in the wrong group of parents, but maybe it’s more that parenting right now is really hard. That parenting can painfully juxtapose a dislike of parenting with a deep love of your children. And for me, that results in a lot of guilt.
Certainly, everyone’s experience is different. Every parent, caregiver, guardian, and child is different. Life circumstances vary. For many parents, how much life has changed and how much guilt they feel seems like a question it’s safer to not ask. I know I for one don’t want to sit with my thoughts, drunk on lack of sleep and cold medication, up with a sick child and feeling like death myself. A lot has changed. Particularly my ability to take care of myself when sick. Instead, once my son is over his illness, I will continue to parent and go through the motions, even while I am still suffering from whatever virus du jour he has brought home from school. No. Parenting is not for the faint of heart.
In a sleep-deprived state in barely spring 2023, I read an article that argues that the fetus is designed to protect the mother – the being essential for its survival until birth. It is clear to me, however, that this stops after birth, because my child is clearly trying to drive me to madness. I love my child. I could om nom nom his cheeks with cute aggression because I love him too much, but he is a challenging addiction, because he isn’t always kind or gentle. And sometimes he's so awful that if he was an adult human, and not a child, I would have to leave. He is the only human who has felt fully confident and justified in slapping me in the face, punching me in the stomach, stabbing me in the eyelid with a pencil, and throwing things at my head. The angry child special at the ‘all you can tolerate’ parent buffet.
No one told me this, about being a parent, but nearly every parent I know will talk about it with me openly.
Children are mean.
unkind.
selfish.
abrasive.
rude.
ungrateful.
inconsiderate.
And you don’t have to agree with me. Your experience might not be mine. But I’m not going to pull my punches. Parenting is hard for me. And I’ve been exhausted for eight years. And nothing could have ever prepared me for that. Except maybe prolonged insomnia. And I have but one glorious, but challenging child. Hats off to the parents of multiple kids. I see you, but I can’t join you.
No one is born inherently knowing how to parent. There is no magical button of patience to slam over and over again as you child tests your patience all day, refuses to help tidy, flat out rejects what you made to eat, argues over every little thing, and blames you for making them die in their videogame (you distracted them by existing). The parenting experts agree that meeting your child’s challenges with empathy is key to developing and maintaining a strong relationship, which is important because connection creates cooperation. Except none of them offer solutions on how you’re supposed to do all of this in the world as it exists for a lot of parents today: emotionally burnt out, economic systems that offer little reassurance of stability, financially stretched, ongoing threats to the human rights of women, little to no community.
Or at least, I haven’t read that book yet.
As I read my way through each of my struggles, concerns, and anxieties, I knew what I wanted wasn’t what I was finding. I needed literature written by mothers. Not how-to books about the caretaking of babies, but the reality of this life: Ambivalence, exhaustion, rage, disillusionment. Where are we, in the literature? Where is the research on mothering?
Rivka Galchen titles one of her book chapters, “Literature has more dogs than babies.” But she is not wrong. Most babies that appear in literature are very quickly transformed into children or adults. This is no surprise. Babies are a lot of work and there is a lot of doldrum in the day-to-day work of mothering. As a subject, motherhood and mothering have a complicated relationship in the literature. Many books about parenting or children tend to fall into the self-help or how-to category. Many of them are written by men. The works that have been written by women have often been panned by critics, in a longstanding tradition of criticizing women’s writing as being too sentimental or too self-involved. This is not limited to men criticizing the writing of women only. I have seen several pieces written by women criticizing the work of their female peers, using terminology like, “cloyingly sentimental” or arguing, as Judith Newman did in her New York Times book review of Anne Enright’s book, Making Babies, that “No subject offers a greater opportunity for terrible writing than motherhood.” (She thought the book was great, by the way.)
Far from being too sentimental or attributable to poor writing, some writers, like Marie Darrieusse[NW1] , suggest it is less an issue of the literary world than cultural. She argues that babies are not necessarily all that interesting to men, whose point of view continues (with that of whiteness) to prevail in what constitutes appropriate literary subjects, and ‘serious’ literature. Is it true because of the subject, or is it a social and cultural reflection of how we feel about mothers and motherhood? Are mothers and babies not suitable material for ‘serious’ literature because they are ‘women’s business’? Is that why we are often plot drivers, rather than the central protagonist? How can mothering become a part of ‘serious’ literature if both men and women act as gatekeepers?
Mothering, and the institution of motherhood, are fascinating to me as an experience, but also as a type of lineage that women have shared for thousands of years. There is something sacred to a lineage from which all human life is born. To be a woman. To be the carrier of life. Without mothers, Virginia Woolf reminds us, “seas would be unsailed and those fertile lands a desert. We have borne and bred and washed and taught…the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, ...[i]” and
“…sometimes we are happy and sometimes we are tired and cross and each minute is an effort of patience. We make dinner. We put our child to bed. This is what routine is like, or love.[ii]”
n xx
[i] Woolf, V. 1945 A Room of One’s Own. Penguin Books. New York: New York, p. 130.
[ii] Greengrass, J. 2018 Sight. Hogarth, New York: New York, p. 66.
[NW1]In her book Bebe
[NW2]https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/stranger-guest-literature-pregnancy-new-motherhood/
[NW3]Writing a Woman’s Life, 1988
I read this with relief “while I am still suffering from whatever virus du jour he has brought home from school.” My son is 15 thé bugs and germs and viruses, the sleepless nights and the worry never end! So “No. Parenting is not for the faint of heart.” I so so agree!
Great writing, honest and poignant too… bon courage pour la suite! As we say hère… x
Ahh, je ne savais pas! Je suis dans l’Aveyron, région Occitanie, normalement le SW mais c’est juste! Et vu le temps qu’il fait on pourrait croire qu’on n'a jamais quitté l'Irlande !