A Life's Work

by Rachel Cusk

  It was, I reflected later, something of a pact with the devil. With the end of breastfeeding my sense of normality was duly returned to me, but for a while, whenever I picked her up or held her on my lap my daughter would turn her head towards my empty breast and I would feel the pang of her loss. Guiltily I would think that I had baptised her early in the eternal doctrine of human pain, of things passing, of what was loved vanishing, never to return. As for myself, that lactating, matronly spectre, that mother I so feared, went away, and in her place was just me. I was not so ample, so proprietorial, so necessary as she. Behind my breasts I was revealed to be doubtful, unconfident, unreliable. Over the weeks I noticed the baby moving towards her father like a plant towards a new source of light. I had lost one sort of authority, but perhaps another would come to take its place. I had defected from the throne of motherhood, but I liked to think I would evolve my own presidential style. Sometimes, in the afternoons, I would get into bed with her for a nap, and she would lie beside me drinking her bottle, her eyes fixed in fascination on my body. A preliminary wave of sleep would roll warmly over us. I could feel us falling together through the bright constellations of our thoughts. Even as I crossed the line into sleep I felt her cross it too; I felt her go to sleep just as when I was a child I used to feel snow falling outside my window. Later I would open my eyes to find her sleeping head on my stomach, her body curled as if in homecoming around my side, and I would lie very still, knowing that if I moved she would wake.

  Extra Fox

  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. Breastfed children, the book states, are not only healthier, longer-lived and more disease resistant than the other sort, they may also be more intelligent. I read this last claim several times, unable to make sense of it. As far as I know I myself was not breastfed, which may explain the problem. A quantity of evangelical fire is reserved for those tempted to sin with the bottle. There are lists, mnemonic, like the doodlings of schoolgirls, with headings such as ‘Benefits of Breastfeeding’ and ‘Problems with Breastfeeding’. Problems with breastfeeding, I discover, are almost always the mother’s fault.

  1. Baby cries after feeds. The baby could be wrongly positioned on the breast. Check that you have got her latched on properly before you start. Think back over everything you have eaten or drunk in the past twenty-four hours and try to find out what might have upset her.

  2. Baby feeds too often. Perhaps you are removing her from the breast too early. She should always end the feed, not you.

  3. Feeds take too long. Why are you trying to hurry her? Perhaps you should check your schedule and find out why you are trying to rush through this important stage in your baby’s life.

  I feel hated, chastised. I feel repelled by these naked women with their pendulous breasts. The chapter on bottle-feeding has a sombre tone, an atmosphere of reprimand like a headmistress’s study. This book supports all mothers, it says insincerely, not just those who breastfeed their babies. If you really feel you must bottle-feed then at least make sure that your baby doesn’t miss out too much. Hold her close when you feed her, perhaps pressing her against your naked breast, or alternatively use a feeding tube. This is a small tube that you can tape to your breast, through which the baby can suck. It is especially helpful for mothers who have adopted a baby and are saddened by having to miss out on the experience of breastfeeding. Briefly, bizarrely, I find myself considering the use of a feeding tube, but before I know it we are on to ‘Returning to Work’. Everyone, it seems, is suddenly going back to the office, except me. The breastfeeding angle is closely examined. What you do is, you take your breastpump to work, and at the times when the baby usually feeds you pump the milk from your breasts. I sense that all this pumping at meaningful hours is not just for old time’s sake. At the end of the day you take the milk home and either freeze it or store it in the fridge. Then somebody gives it to the baby the next day while you’re at work. It seems an awful lot of bother to me. I’m still in my dressing gown trying to work it out when they all come charging back for a final chapter on ‘Having Another Baby’.

  I am given another book by a friend, an old book that seems to date from before the apocalypse. This book does not mention breastfeeding. Instead it advises a practice run with the sterilising equipment before the birth, and the application of full make-up immediately after. The author recounts an incident after the birth of her first child (she’s had four, all strapping boys) when she and her husband worked flat out in the kitchen for a full forty minutes getting that hungry baby his first bottle! There are no pictures of naked women here. Instead there are pictures of babies, clean as pins, wrapped in crisp white towelling as if the stork had just brought them. The mechanics of bathing, sterilising, scouring and nappy changing are dwelt on. The pristine chamber of the baby’s room is toured. Nursery equipment is listed and illustrated. The baby spends a lot of time in the white depths of his crib, like something in a cloud or a casket, while his mother folds starched nappies into different shapes in a nearby room. These babies don’t cry, or perhaps you just can’t hear them all the way from the nursery. A tactful door is closed upon the sinful, rumpled warmth of the adult bed, its flesh, its secretions. We are crisply advised against ever taking baby into our bed, not if we want to keep our marriages, and besides, we’ll have all hell to pay getting him out again! Night feeding appears to occur in the nursery, covertly, like an infidelity, while husbands slumber on un
awares, but is quickly stamped out. The book ends abruptly on a series of cliffhangers and unanswered questions: is the baby ever taken out of his crib, or does he stay there silently before one day just getting up and going to school? Does the mother wear full make-up for night feeds? Is her husband, last seen alive working flat out in the kitchen on day one, dead, or just asleep?

  My mother tries again, this time with more success. She gives me Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care. Dr Spock is engrossing on the subject of rashes. In fact he is a fund of information on most things, having appointed himself a sort of missionary to aid those inhabitants of swamps, mines and oil platforms who are mysteriously beyond the reach of the medical profession. His prose is full of danger and emergency: ‘if you can’t get to a doctor’, ‘if you’re in a situation where you have to sterilise’, ‘if your milk supply is fading fast and you don’t have access to a doctor, health nurse, or other medical professional’. Spock is a passionate advocate of doctors as the only things that stand between families and full-scale nuclear meltdown. Spock’s doctors want nothing more than to know if your child’s temperature is nudging three figures, if she won’t eat her supper, if she has a flat rash of spots roughly three millimetres in diameter that rise and form hay-coloured crusts on the third day. Together, Spock hopes, doctors and parents will see off capitalism, consumerism and environmental catastrophe, for social change can only start in the home, with parents who defy traditional gender roles and act as domestic equals, who don’t let their children play with toy guns or watch violent films, who explain their reasons and set a charitable example and what’s more can identify the rash of impetigo, a red area of infection that blisters after three days and forms hay-coloured crusts and is highly contagious. Spock’s babies are cheerful souls, in spite of their temperatures, their constant gastro-enteritis and chronic excrescences of the skin, in spite of the shadow of global destruction that hangs over them. They like their milk, and when the time comes they like their turnip too. They could use more fresh air than they generally get. They don’t like being fussed too much by guilty working parents, by fathers full of suppressed anger, by mothers who want them to be walking before the baby next door. In their anomic, tyrannical hearts they like to know who’s boss, for weakness drives them to enslave and dominate, to make fools of their parents. Spock has seen it all, parents who follow their children around the house with bowls of rejected food, who act as human zimmer frames for toddlers, who are in and out of bed like jacks-in-the-box all night fetching milk and rocking and soothing. It’s only natural that a baby should have a lusty, rebellious nature: what’s important is that you sculpt it into something decent and upstanding, something civilised.

  I imagine Spock in his office, at the end of the day, sitting in a black leather chair while the world grows dark outside. He is slightly Vulcan in appearance. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. His head is full of his own refrain and he wonders for the hundredth, the thousandth time how he could be at once so accepted and so misunderstood, so dominating and yet so powerless. He has been fair, he’s looked at it from all sides, and yet he can’t seem to get this procreation-civilisation message over. In his head it is perfect, sound, complete, but on paper he is read as both permissive and oppressing, at once the man who spawned a generation of draft-dodgers and a sort of pediatric prince of darkness presiding over the nocturnal misery of helpless infants. They’re all angry with him, and yet what did he ever do but try to help? Nobody has any respect for the medical profession any more, that’s the problem, it’s all going to pot, more bombs and guns and gas-guzzlers than ever, more spoiled babies …

  I go to the bookshop myself and purchase Your Baby and Child by Penelope Leach. I am looking not just for answers now, but for a narrative that expresses the world of my daughter, that explains her to me again; for my involvement seems to have muddled her and as she grows more complex, less coherent, so like a bewildered lover I search for something to reorganise us and return us to the purity of our early days. Ms Leach appears to be just the thing. Her tone is smart but sympathetic. She has a schoolteacher’s plain grasp of Freud and Winnicott, of theories of attachment and childcare trends. Like Mary Poppins, like someone in a fairytale, she is on the side of children. This baby is a person she crisply declares, scattering all before her. How would you like it if people just wanted you to go to sleep all the time and never talked to you? Or expected you to spend all night on your own in the dark? Or got angry when you cried and never wanted to play and kept moaning about wanting some time for themselves? Poor babies! Penelope Leach’s prescription for misery is fun: more fun for baby, she says, is more fun for you. Have conversations! Show her the flowers, the sun, the sky! Don’t keep her in that playpen, get in it yourself! She deploys case studies on the un-fun subject of night wakings. When Alison’s baby wakes at 2 am, Alison sighs loudly and puts her head under the pillow in a fury. Alison, it seems, is the maternal equivalent of people who wear black hats in Westerns, and gets what she deserves. Her baby cries louder and louder, and when Alison finally drags herself out of bed to feed her, the baby is in such a state that the milk goes down the wrong way and she won’t go back to sleep. Beulah, on the other hand, leaps lightly from her bed at her child’s polite 2 am summons. Her baby smiles as she is lifted from her crib. She feeds gratefully and returns immediately to sleep. Alison’s time score? An hour and a half, and she didn’t even want to get up in the first place. Beulah’s? Twenty minutes. Hah!

  I try talking to my daughter. I sing her songs, rambling epics set to music in which she is the central character. She squirms with delight and makes noises back. One day she laughs, an extraordinary sound that flies from her mouth like a dove produced from a magician’s hat. We all work to produce the laugh again, stumbling each time across a different formula to summon it. The baby is moved from her carriage to a chair in which she reclines against a bank of cushions like a tetchy monarch while we, her court, strive to entertain her. Her night wakings become more frequent. By day I feel a burden of social anxiety in the baby’s presence, like a hostess. We await her reviews of the theatre the world has become for her. When she sleeps I read the books again until I know some of their passages by heart, and because my daughter changes but they do not their meaning never quite penetrates, the connection with the real is never made. Like schoolwork their pages refuse to spring to life and so I learn them by rote, cribbing for some assessment only I apprehend and fear.

  Somebody buys my daughter a book, a cloth thing that is part-toy, and her eyes light up when she sees it. I show her the pictures. She is apparently enthralled. I buy more books for her. She can sit up now, and they surround her in stacks. She sifts through them alone, uncomplaining, for literally hours at a time while I read childcare manuals in an adjacent chair. Eventually it strikes me that there is something wrong with this arrangement. I sit her on my lap and we look at her books together; I show her the sheep, the duck, the cow. I realise that my head is full of mantras, of the maddening phrases of Spock and Leach and their ilk. Their tics have haunted me, have invaded my language. Now I point and make animal noises like someone in an asylum. Presently words begin to appear in my daughter’s books and with them a new verbal virus comes to plague me. Oddly I don’t mind it as much. It is inane, bizarre, redolent of madness. Elmer flies in the wind. I have to check it from spilling from my mouth at inappropriate times. What’s under the table, Spot? She becomes attached to a book that is too old for her, by Dr Seuss. It is about the alphabet.

  O is very useful.

  You use it when you say

  Oscar’s only ostrich oiled an orange owl today.

  There is a picture of a flamboyant ostrich holding an oil can over the head of an orange owl. Dr Spock and Dr Seuss have become confused in my mind. I imagine one became the other and these verses strike me sympathetically as the ravings of an addled sensibility, as postcards from the edge.

  X is very useful if your name is Nixie Knox.

  It also c
omes in handy

  Spelling axe and extra fox.

  The extra fox wears a smart yellow jacket. It haunts my dreams, flits dashingly across my waking hours.

  I begin to relive at high speed my own evolution towards language, towards stories. Reading books to my daughter revives my appetite for expression. Like someone visiting old haunts after an absence I read books that I have read before, books that I love, and when I do I find them changed: they give the impression of having contained all along everything that I have gone away to learn. I begin to find them everywhere, in pages that I thought familiar: prophecies of what was to come, pictures of the very place in which I now stand, and yet which I look on with no spark of recognition. I wonder how I could have read so much and learned so little. I have stared at these words like the pots and pans, the hoarded gold of a previous civilisation, immured in museum glass. Could it be true that one has to experience in order to understand? I have always denied this idea, and yet of motherhood, for me at least, it seems to be the case. I read as if I were reading letters from the dead, letters addressed to me but long unopened; as if by reading I were bringing back the vanished past, living it again as I would like to live every day of my life again, perfectly and without misunderstanding.

  *

  ‘From the first’, writes D. H. Lawrence in The Rainbow,

  the baby stirred in the young father a deep, strong emotion he dared scarcely acknowledge; it was so strong and came out of the dark of him. When he heard the child cry, a terror possessed him, because of the answering echo from the unfathomed distances in himself. Must he know in himself such distances, perilous and imminent? He had the infant in his arms, he walked backwards and forwards troubled by the crying of his own flesh and blood. This was his own flesh and blood crying! His soul rose against the voice suddenly breaking out from him, from the distances in him.