a small sunday thing

file under: thing read that resounds sharply with my experience of motherhood thus far::::::quotes from introduction to rachel cusk's book "A Life's Work"

" 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 coflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle."

and

"I make this explanation with the gloomy suspicion that a book about motherhood is of no real interest to anyone except other mothers; and then only mothers who, like me, find the experience so momentous that reading about it has a strangely narcotic effect. I say 'other mothers' and 'only mothers' as if in apology: the experience of motherhood loses nearly everything in its translation to the outside world. In motherhood a woman exchanges her public significance for a range of private meanings, and like sounds outside a certain range they can be very difficult for other people to identify. If one listened with a different part of oneself, one would perhaps hear them."

and

"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 yours 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. . .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 anonymity of childlessness have thought possible."

and finally

". . .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 neccessary, far more human in its drive to bring forth and create, than I once did."