Rachel Cusk wrote a book called A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother that was published in 2001. I bought this book to read in either 2003 or 2004, either before Seb was born or soon after. I don’t remember exactly when it was that I started to read this, my first motherhood memoir, or dubbed in those days, “The Momoir.” I think it was before I started my MFA work and way before I had Oren in 2005. But I never finished it because at the time I couldn’t take her raw honesty and candidness of how difficult it was for her to be a mother or become a mother. It was stark, and I needed some cushion at the time since I didn’t know what I was doing or feeling either. I picked up the book again and finished it this time. I can appreciate her style of writing now that I am a bit more seasoned and my kids are practically grown-ups.
Here is something that jumped out at me today as I was reading: “The question of what a woman is if she is not a mother has been superceded for me by that of what a woman is if she is a mother; and of what a mother, in fact, is.” This sentence both pulls me back into what it was like with little babies and feeling like I was out of my mind and also speaks to the mental and emotional space I seem to be inhabiting now too. Maybe I have inhabited this space all the time I have been a mother. I wouldn’t be able to articulate the questions as well as Cusk does; the way I’d ask these questions about being a woman/mother is slightly more basic, less classy:
What the hell…!?
Our oldest is 18 and graduated from high school in May 2021. He decided not to go to college and so he is working full time. And living at home. Full time. We are all winging this. Brian and I have no idea how to parent a kid who is becoming an adult and doesn’t think he needs to live by rules. Maybe he doesn’t… Our role as parents has made a sudden gargantuan shift, and it is hard to figure out what-all has changed. It’s easier to know what he thinks should be different for him: We can’t tell him what to do anymore. He doesn’t have a curfew. He eats junk food as long as he pays for it. Restrictions on his phone are lifted, and we do not have access to it. But it seems like we should still be able to have house rules, rules that you abide by as long as you live in this house. Most of these are surrounding technology, and they are pretty strict. All through the kids’ childhoods, we have protected our home space to be quiet, safe, and a place where we do things together: talk, listen to music (eek, technology!), and watch movies/TV (oops, there it is again!), read (I know, I know, books are technology too). I’m also thinking that if a person is not just a renter paying a monthly fee, then there should be some other kind of compensation. Like, fix a meal. Clean up after a meal. Clean the STINKING (or stinky) bathroom. Or, last one, how about, JUST PICK UP AFTER YOUR OWN *bleep* SELF! These are hard to enforce with an “adult” (I use the term loosely) who works full time at a very physical and exhausting job. It’s just hard to enforce things with this particular 18 year old, too. He’s our boundary pusher, always questioning authority, always has.
Even my 16 year old is pushing back more than I’m used to, these days. I feel like I have no idea what is going on anymore. I used to be able to lay down the law, the rules, the routine, and now I have no structure. Except for myself. I am happily able to structure my life, my time, my world, but in order to really enjoy it, I have to close the door and not look out, or, not look past the doorway of the 16 year old’s room, in particular. I definitely have lost my influence in there.
Rachel Cusk says this near the end of the book: “I feel as though I have survived what insurance policies refer to as an act of God, a hurricane, a flood. It roared around me threatening destruction and then vanished, leaving silence and a world strewn with broken things, a world I patiently repair, wondering what I can salvage, whether I’d be better off just starting again.” She is talking about getting past her daughter’s first year of life, but I think this still identifies what it feels like to be a mother, what we do as our kids grow apart, further and further, and finally totally away from us, out of the house. I think the reason I feel so discombobulated, still wondering who I am, what it means to be a mother now with older kids is because they are still at home, and so I am still completely consumed with them, thinking about them, but I can’t DO anything with that except just hold it. Loosely. And be ready to completely let go when they do move out. I think the broken things that Cusk is talking about needing to patiently repair is her own world, her own sense of self. As a mother, I think that I have been doing this a little bit at a time, lately. I haven’t necessarily been hit by a hurricane, but tons of smaller storms that I have to clean up after and fix things after, gradually, along the way. Less cataclysmic maybe. Then again, I don’t know if it’s about fixing things so much as reinventing the wheel. I am reinventing myself, how I parent, who I am outside of parenting. I have to. This is what makes parenting so interesting, though. You get to see who your kids develop into as completely separate humans from yourself, but you also get to see what kind of human you develop into because they exist and because of the struggles you go through because of them, with them.
