A Life's Work (2 page)

Full-time paid childcare was what I, with the blithe unsentimentality of the childless, once believed to be the solution to the conundrum of work and motherhood. In those days fairness seemed to me to be everything. I did not understand what a challenge to the concept of sexual equality the experience of pregnancy and childbirth is. Birth is not merely that which divides women from men: it also divides women from themselves, so that a woman's understanding of what it is to exist is profoundly changed. Another person has existed in her, and after their birth they live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness. When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.

In my case a decision was made to demolish traditional family culture altogether, and it was regarded by other people with amazement, approval and horror. The most punitive, unworkable version of family life appears to be less worthy of general comment and concern than simple unconventionality. My partner left his job and we moved out of London. People began to enquire about him as if he were very ill, or dead. What's he going to
do
? they would ask me avidly, and then, getting no answer, him. Look after the children while Rachel writes her book about looking after the children, was his reply. Nobody else seemed to find this particularly funny.

Looking after children is a low-status occupation. It is isolating, frequently boring, relentlessly demanding and exhausting. It erodes your self-esteem and your membership of the adult world. The more it is separated from the rest of life, the harder it gets; and yet to bring your children to your own existence, rather than move yourself to theirs, is hard too. Even when you agree on a version of living that is acceptable to everybody, there are still longings that go unmet. It is my belief that in this enterprise generosity is more important even than equality, if only because the demonology of parenthood is so catholic, drawing to itself epithets of ‘good' and ‘bad' that are largely absent from our experience of ordinary life. As a mother you learn what it is to be both martyr and devil. In motherhood I have experienced myself as both more virtuous and more terrible, and more implicated too in the world's virtue and terror, than I would from the anonymity of childlessness have thought possible.

I have tried to explore some of these issues in this book, with the aim of answering the larger question of what it is to turn from a woman into a mother. My definitions, of woman and of mother, remain vague, but the process continues to exert on me a real fascination. It is, I don't doubt, much the same process that it has always been, but the journey involved is, in my view, far longer for us than it was for our own mothers. Childbirth and motherhood are the anvil upon which sexual inequality was forged, and the women in our society whose responsibilities, expectations and experience are like those of men are right to approach it with trepidation. Women have changed, but their biological condition remains unaltered. As such motherhood provides a unique window to the history of our sex, but its glass is easily broken. I continue to marvel at the fact that every single member of our species has been born and brought to independence by so arduous a route. It is this work, requisitioned from a woman's life, that I have attempted to describe.

This book is a modest approach to the theme of motherhood, written in the first heat of its subject. It describes a period in which time seemed to go round in circles rather than in any chronological order, and so which I have tried to capture in themes rather than by the forgotten procession of its days. There will doubtless be other years for whose insights I will wish I had waited. Instead I have borrowed the insights of others by including in this book some discussion of those novels that I read or recalled during its writing, which seemed to me to give voice to my theme. It is a partial and personal selection: literature has long since discovered and documented this place of which I thought myself to be the first inhabitant, and there are countless poems and novels that could take the place of those I have chosen. It is more to illustrate the particular transformation of sensibility that motherhood effects than to find its most perfect expression that I have mentioned books at all: my experience of reading, indeed of culture, was profoundly changed by having a child, in the sense that I found the concept of art and expression far more involving and necessary, far more human in its drive to bring forth and create, than I once did.

For now, this is a letter, addressed to those women who care to read it, in the hope that they find some companionship in my experiences.

In the changing rooms at the swimming pool you can see the bodies of women. Naked, they have a narrative quality, like cave paintings; a quality muted by clothes and context, a quality seen only here, in this damp, municipal place where we are grouped anonymously, by gender. Though I too have the body of a woman, the sight still briefly arouses in me a child's fear, a mixture of revulsion and awe for these breasts and bellies and hips, this unidealised, primitive flesh which, forgetful here of its allure, seems composed purely of reproductive purpose. The hairdryers sing, the locker doors bang open and shut, the tiled floor of the shower room runs with unguents and foam. Veined, muscled legs stalk to and fro; bare arms untangle matted hair and towel skin that quivers with exertion. Breasts and bellies and hips, customised with moles and scars, with skin smocked or smooth, engraved like runes or blank as new-sculpted marble: declarative and material, they exist as objects, communicating by form alone. Sometimes there are children in the changing rooms and I see them stare in the way I used to stare, and half want to still: in illicit wonder and terror at the suggestiveness of the adult physiognomy, its frank protrusions and fur and patina of age or experience bespeaking untold mysteries of pleasure and pain, of copulation, gestation and birth. Like a trailer for a horror film, the adult body hints broadly at what must remain uneasily within the precincts of the imagination until legitimate entrance to its full unfolding is attained.

As a child, from the moment I gained some understanding of what it entailed, I worried about childbirth. My understanding came without footnotes, without clauses stating that you didn't have to have a baby, let alone might not be able to: like all facts of life, it took a non-negotiable form. All I knew, looking at my narrow, recessless body, was that one day another body would come out of it, although it was not clear how or from where. As I understood it I was not to be fitted with some kind of extraction device at a later date. This same body held the promise of a future violence, like a Mexican pinata doll full of sweets. Some people kept those dolls, unable to inflict upon them the tragedy that was their calling, even at the spur of the most urgent, intransigent desire. Most people didn't. At children's parties in California, where I grew up, we used to beat them with a stick until they exploded and gave up their glorious contents. No exceptional understanding of the matter was required to work out that childbirth would be extremely painful. My early experiences of pain were quickly pressed into the service of this understanding. It seemed to me that an ability to tolerate physical discomfort was a necessary adjunct to the fact of my sex, and whenever I cut or bruised myself, or fell over or visited the dentist, I would feel not only pain but terror that I had felt it, that I had registered an injury so small when the fact of this great and mysterious agony lay so immovably in my future.

At school we were shown a film of a woman giving birth. She was naked, with thin, powerful arms and legs that waved out from the vast, afflicted hump of her belly, and her hair was long and tangled. She was not tucked up in bed, ringed with a bright halo of white-coated doctors and nurses. In fact, she didn't appear to be in hospital at all. She stood alone in a small room that was empty but for a low stool placed in the centre. I was disturbed by the sight of this stool. It seemed an inadequate defence against the onslaught that was to come. The camera gave out a dim, nocturnal picture, and the viewer's impression was of watching voyeuristically through a hole in the wall something terrible and secret, something doomed to travel beyond our comprehension and desire to look. The woman paced the room groaning and bellowing, like a lunatic or an animal in a cage. Occasionally she would lean against the wall for some minutes, her head in her hands, before flinging herself away with a cry to the opposite wall. It was as if she were fighting some invisible opponent: her solitude, amidst the noise and force of her responses, seemed strange. Presently I noticed that she was not, in fact, alone; another woman, this one fully clothed, was sitting quietly in a corner. Occasionally she murmured almost inaudibly, sounds which, though unhelpfully faint, were certainly encouraging. Her presence lent a degree of authority to the proceedings, but her failure to help or at least sympathise seemed inexplicably cruel. The naked woman tore at her matted hair and roared. Suddenly she staggered to the centre of the room and placed herself on the stool, one leg bent and the other flung dashingly to the side, hands clasped to her chest as if she were about to sing. Her companion rose and knelt before her. The camera, being stationary, did not offer us a close-up of this turn of events. In fact, the picture seemed to grow premonitorily darker and less distinct. The two women held their penumbral tableaux of communion for a moment; and then suddenly the clothed woman leaned forward, hands extended, and into them fell the small, thrashing body of a baby. The naked woman's final yell of pain fluted upwards into a yodel of delight.

‘Natasha had married in the early spring of 1813,' writes Tolstoy of his romantic young heroine at the end of
War and Peace
, ‘and in 1820 already had three daughters, besides a son for whom she had longed and whom she was now nursing. She had grown stouter and broader, so that it was difficult to recognise the slim, lively Natasha of former days in this robust motherly woman. Her features were more defined and had a calm, soft and serene expression. In her face there was none of the ever-glowing animation that had formerly burned there and constituted its charm. Now her face and body were often all that one saw, and her soul was not visible at all. All that struck the eye was a strong, handsome and fertile woman.'

In pregnancy, the life of the body and the life of the mind abandon the effort of distinctness and become fatally and historically intertwined. As a sequel to youth, beauty or independence, motherhood promises from its first page to be a longer and more difficult volume: the story of how Tolstoy's Natasha turned from trilling, beribboned heartbreaker into inscrutable matriarch, of how daughters become parents and heroines implacable opponents of the romantic plot. Tolstoy did not write this volume. Instead he wrote
Anna Karenina
, excavating the woman extant in the mother and demonstrating her power to destroy, for motherhood is a career in conformity from which no amount of subterfuge can liberate the soul without violence; and pregnancy is its boot-camp.

My arrival in this camp is meditated but not informed. I know about pregnancy only what everybody knows about it, which is what it looks like from the outside. I have walked past it many times. I have wondered what goes on behind its high walls. Knowing the pain which every inmate must endure as the condition of their release, I have imagined it to be a place in which some secret and specialised process of preparation occurs, in which confidential information is handed out in sealed envelopes that will explain this pain, that will render it painless. I tell my doctor that I am pregnant and he does a sum on a bit of paper involving dates. It is now July. He gives me a date in March of the following year. It takes me some time to realise that this is the day on which he expects my child to be born. He tells me to see the midwife. Close the door on your way out, he says.

The midwife gives me information, but of a particular sort: it concerns the things I can expect to happen to me, but not what she or anybody else intends to do about them. She tells me to come back in a couple of months. I had expected there to be at least some occupational aspect to pregnancy designed to mitigate fear. What am I going to do for all this time? Seeing my stricken face, she recommends one or two books I might read on the subject. I go and buy them and return home. Pregnancy lasts for two hundred and sixty-six days, forty weeks, nine months, or three trimesters, depending on how you choose to count it. The medical profession counts in weeks. The general public, for whom other people's pregnancies pass like life, count in months. I don't know who counts in trimesters, teachers perhaps, or women on their fifth baby. Only those who suffer, people wrongfully imprisoned, people with broken hearts, count days. I veer fretfully from one method to another, but the story of pregnancy is best recounted in trimesters. The first trimester is characterised by nausea and fatigue. The second trimester is characterised by a large stomach and a feeling of well-being. In the third trimester you may experience bloating around the face, swelling of wrists and ankles, varicose veins, piles, chronic heartburn, constipation, clumsiness, forgetfulness, fatigue, feelings of apprehension about the birth and a longing for pregnancy to be over.

Nowhere in these books, I notice, does it mention as a feature of pregnancy the dawning of some sort of understanding of how the baby is supposed to come out. Illustrations of this event are amply supplied: they generally take the form of a series of cross-sections, the first showing the baby in the woman's stomach, the last showing the baby having come out of the woman's stomach. I begin to suspect that the experience is akin to that of being selected from amongst the passengers of an airborne jumbo jet to fly and then land the plane yourself. Occasionally there are photographs, images of women transfixed as if at the moment of death: grimacing, sweating, imploring, eyes screwed shut or turned heavenwards, their bodies drowning in a tangle of sheets and hospital wires or raised up by pain into cruciform postures, arms outstretched. It is as if some secret female history is unfolding in these photographs, a tale of suffering conspiratorially concealed. But even the frankness of its images does not seem to penetrate the mystery of childbirth.
Many women find labour easier when they adopt a vertical position
, reads the caption; or
The baby emerges in an atmosphere of timelessness and peace.