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The Unspeakable
I was recently witness to a whispered confession forced out after a bottle of wine. A girlfriend of many years’ standing, writhing as if in pain and almost gagging, said ‘I shouldn’t have had them’. Them being her children. ‘If I could go back, I wouldn’t do it again’.
It was a physical effort to wrangle her feelings into words. She pushed them out of some unwilling place deep within her. It put me in mind, inappropriately, of birth.
I was familiar enough with her complaints about parenting – the mindless repetition, the isolation, the withering sense of self. What I hadn’t realised until then was that the compensations weren’t cutting it for her. Not even close. She acted out her morning routine for me. ‘Put your shoes on. Put your shoes on. I said put your shoes on. This is your last chance to put those damn shoes on.’ On and on until the futility and the inanity of it made her parody the sing-song voices of her children and punctuate the shoe request with expletives. ‘What fucking difference does it make?’ she sobbed. ‘No one is listening to me anyway.’
It’s no secret that parenting is hard. But there’s an implicit promise wrapped up with parenting: that the rewards will far outstretch the trials. We’re sold that we’ll be utterly captivated by our little one’s discovering that his fingers wriggle. That our vicarious discovery of the world through his eyes will compensate us for the one we lost. But what if this isn’t enough?
Judging from my girlfriend’s experience, you do this: you cork your rage, disappointment and regret, and welter in your own inadequacy because there is no space to speak it.
Our world is confessional in the extreme; our every inane biographical detail saturates blogs and reality TV and Facebook.
But this?
This is unspeakable. It is taboo even among one’s closest intimates.
And it could so easily have been me. I never felt anything like ‘maternal instinct’. I didn’t yearn for children or fear there would be a baby-shaped hole in my life. I experienced the few children in my life as I experienced the adults, with some delighting me and some irritating me. So when I fell pregnant a short way into a new relationship (having been assured that our chances of conceiving were remote) I had to face down a terrible fear: what if the instinct doesn’t kick in? What if – the ultimate terror – she arrives and I don’t want her?
From the second that plastic stick changed colour, everything changed. I stopped smoking, and wine became a rare, thimble-sized treat. I listened obsessively to my body, primed for that first pulse of maternal feeling. When my waters broke I was still waiting. At those first contractions I remember thinking, ‘Maybe the pain will connect me’. Perhaps birth itself is necessary: a shamanistic ritual that pushes you to your physical and psychic limits and through that mammoth investment creates love – that big, unconditional, heart-singeing love parenting is supposed to create.
If that’s true I will never know, because eleven hours into labour, with a birth canal that had barely sighed – let alone yawned – I had a non-elective caesarean. I felt cheated. I wanted the birth experience. I needed it.
In hindsight I needn’t have worried so much. My daughter has opened up an entire floor of my being I wasn’t aware was there. Every new sound she masters delights me. I’ve lost hours wrapped in her deliciousness. My parent goggles aren’t just rose tinted; they’ve rose frames, rose rivets and a rose design on the case. But I didn’t know that beforehand. What a gamble to take, hoping that the right feelings would materialise.
I got lucky, so I can’t feel anything but compassion for those rare, shame-filled glimpses of parenting’s ugly underbelly. ‘It took me a long time to like her, let alone love her’, one friend said of her little one after a very unexpected pregnancy. One girlfriend, whose singular experience of parenting could only be described as epic, told me quietly, swirling her red wine around the glass, ‘If I’d known, I would have terminated’. After each admission the speaker rushes to tell me what I already know – that they love their children, obsess about their safety and care desperately about their happiness.
Never, not once, have I seen parental regret, rage and self-recrimination canvassed on parenting websites or in general conversation.
Even literature, which I trust to tell me the truth when nothing else will, is curiously silent on this point. Oh sure, there’s positively a tradition of critiquing parents. They get short shrift in the Brontës and Dickens, who pass over them in favour of orphans. They are universally lampooned in Austen, whose children are always more mature and enlightened than the people who spawned them. There’s an entire oeuvre that dissects nuclear families, with all their idiosyncrasies and failings and ties that survive ‘in spite of’. Think Franzen, Lamb, Shields, Stead.
But I can think of precisely one book that squares up to the idea that we might not like our children (please note that I say ‘like’, not ‘love’. It’s an important distinction): Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin. There’s no wonder that book has something approaching cult status. But even then Shriver made her child almost satanic in order to make her point. From babyhood Kevin evinces an array of diabolical traits. He wears nappies until he is six, desecrates his mother’s lovingly prepared study, goads another child into self-mutilation and is implicated in his baby sister’s loss of an eye. All this before the coup de grace of a Columbine-style massacre. We can hardly condemn Eve, Kevin’s mother, for her ambivalent feelings about him.
But where is the novel about the garden-variety child, with their pedestrian child-like ways that drain the very lifeblood out of their mothers? Perhaps the pained confessions I’ve heard are simply a statistical anomaly. It seems more likely that there are many, many parents out there at war with themselves for not feeling what they think they ought every moment of every day.
If I’m right, why have we gagged them?
S.A. Jones is a novelist, essayist and reader. Her first novel, Red Dress Walking, was published by Allen and Unwin in 2008. Her second novel, Isabelle of the Moon and Stars, is currently being edited.
30 Responses to The Unspeakable
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10:11 am, December 9, 2010
It is not having children, but the atomisation of society and the fetishisation of individual liberty that drives some parents to despair. Just look at the formulation: ‘the rewards will far outstretch the trials’. It’s setting oneself up for exactly the disappointment and upset described to think that it’s ‘worth it’ in terms of what one ‘gets out of it’. It’s also, frankly, quite morally repugnant to approach family life in that way. It might be a wonderful journey at times, but it’s also a right pain in the arse most of the time, so without a sense of duty, the parent is screwed, and more importantly, so are the kids. The fact that ‘duty’ has become a word worthy of eye-rolling is testament to the self-indulgent adolescent stupidity of modern society. (End rant.)
Also, there are plenty of examples in literature – Anna Karenina’s attitude to her second child, for instance – sympathetically and unflinchingly portrayed, from her own point of view.
1:42 pm, December 9, 2010
It’s not a binary proposition, Josh. There are indeed people for whom just “having children” can itself be the root cause. There are many people who have no choice in becoming parents: some of them are lucky enough to love having children, while others, sadly, are not.
2:10 pm, December 9, 2010
Luck has nothing to do with it! Barring psychological illness, people should just get over themselves and make the best of it. We coddle our precious selves and our feelings to a ridiculous, disgraceful degree.
2:57 pm, December 9, 2010
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that everyone in the world should be more like you, Josh — people don’t always have the resources (emotional, financial, etc) to “make the best of it”. What about people who became parents against their will? Unhappy parents who repress their feelings often end up taking them out on their children.
What I think is promoted to a ridiculous degree is that idea that parenthood is the be-all/end-all of human (usually female) life, and that there’s something wrong with anyone who doesn’t buy into that idea that all children are holy innocents who always change their parents’ lives for the better by the simple nature of their adorable existences. There are a lot of people out there who have children but really wish they didn’t, and who do as best they can but are still unhappy with their lot. Allowing them to recognise that they aren’t bad people for feeling that way is not the same as coddling them, and is in fact necessary for mental health.
3:21 pm, December 9, 2010
For some reason, this commenting system isn’t letting me reply to your latest comment, Ali. So this might appear somewhat out of joint in the thread
Why do you think I’m setting myself up as a model? The confessional is another loathsome aspect of modern discourse, so I won’t go into detail, but suffice it to say that I have been a far from perfect parent. I criticise from experience, but not because I have done a brilliant job, but from my own screw-ups. There were always friends around me who offered ‘understanding’ of my feelings, when what I needed was a good kick up the backside (figuratively).
Of course mine is a subjective opinion, and not the only valid one. And yes, you are quite right about rape victims, that’s another case entirely.
I am striking a bit of a harsh tone here, but I was dismayed to read another article suggesting that what we need, in this increasingly emotionally incontinent society, is yet another round of talking about our frigging feelings. Bringing up kids is hard today because we don’t have the structure (extended families, neighbourhoods where people live for generations) that we used to. To ignore that and focus on freedom of expression, is viewing social problems through the myopic prism of subjective individualism. It’s the second half of the classic liberal two-step: fragment society, and then claim the problem is one of individual freedom. FFS!
3:51 pm, December 9, 2010
We seem to be talking about two different things, perhaps. You mention that you haven’t been a perfect parent, which I infer means you’re talking about the trials and uncertainties of how to actually raise children in our world today. What I’m talking about is that there are people out there who wish they had never even had children in the first place, even if the raising of them has gone as smooth as silk. That’s what the article (as I understood it) was talking about: parents who don’t dare confess to people that they wish they had never had their children, for fear of being seen as a monster. Those are the feelings that people should be allowed to own up to — to realise that it’s a perfectly valid human response — regardless of how easy or difficult they’re finding raising said children.
Also, to be clear, I was never referencing rape victims. (How a woman actually becomes pregnant does not dictate whether she she will have the baby, after all.) I’m thinking primarily of men who became fathers not by choice, but because their girlfriends/lovers/wives got pregnant and decided to have the baby against the men’s wishes. (I’ve personally known at least half a dozen guys in this situation.) And of course there are also women out there who are coerced by their partners/families/church/etc into going through with a pregnancy that they did not actually want, or who live somewhere where abortions are simply not available. And of course there are people who have had to assume responsibility for children who aren’t theirs (orphaned nieces/nephews, say) and who wish they had never been placed in that situation.
Society’s ideal may be that children are raised by a committed couple who happily chose to have them, but the reality is a far broader spectrum — many people are stuck with the unalterable reality of being a parent, and regret it.
11:51 am, December 9, 2010
‘To a Poet
Ice splits under the metal
shovel another day
hazed light off fogged panes
cruelty of winter landlocked your life
wrapped round you in your twenties
an old bathrobe dragged down
with milkstains tearstains dust
Scraping eggcrust from the child’s
dried dish skimming the skin
from cooled milk wringing diapers
Language floats at the vanising=point
incarnate breathes the fluorescent bulb
primary states the scarred grain of the floor
and on the ceiling in torn plaster laughs imago
and I have fears that you will cease to be
before your pen has glean’d your teeming brain
for you are not a suicide
but no-one calls this murder
Small mouths, needy, suck you: This is love
I write this not for you
who fight to write your own
words fighting up the falls
but for another woman dumb
with loneliness dust seeping plastic bags
with children in a house
where language floats and spins
abortion in
the bowl’
Adrienne Rich, 1974
See also ‘Of Woman Born, Motherhood as Experience and Institution’ also by Adrienne Rich, 1977, Bantam Books.
Excellent piece, Sarasara.
12:53 pm, December 9, 2010
Erm…Madame Bovary?
8:58 am, December 11, 2010
Yes you’re right. A marvellous example.
1:42 pm, December 9, 2010
You must read Rachel Cusk, ‘A Life’s Work’ — dark, revealing, and incredibly honest memoir of a first year of motherhood. It goes everywhere you talk about.
2:15 pm, December 23, 2010
Thanks Kylie – I will make a point of it.
1:49 pm, December 9, 2010
I have plenty of friends-with-kids who say this and similar on a reasonably regular basis. I guess it depends where you’re coming from but it’s not remotely taboo in my circles – almost the opposite. I don’t know that we gag these people and their stories – there are plenty of books about mothers driven mad or bored to death of their kids – but it can be a challenge to make reading about boredom and this kind of frustration interesting – in your/friend’s words: “Put your shoes on. Put your shoes on. I said put your shoes on” – which is probably why Shriver worked with extremes. It’s not that it’s impossible to write it interestingly, but it’s hard to make it appeal to those people who spend their days like that and want to get away from being reminded of it as they slump in bed at the end of a long day. If it can be entertaining, really gripping – not just painful and bleak, but actually work as a piece of literature and a form of entertainment – then I will be keen to read it, and if it entertains the hell out of me, I’ll publish it.
1:59 pm, December 9, 2010
Suburban Sonnet
She practises a fugue, though it can matter
to no one now if she plays well or not.
Beside her on the floor two children chatter,
then scream and fight. She hushes them. A pot
boils over. As she rushes to the stove
too late, a wave of nausea overpowers
subject and counter-subject. Zest and love
drain out with soapy water as she scours
the crusted milk. Her veins ache. Once she played
for Rubinstein, who yawned. The children caper
round a sprung mousetrap where a mouse lies dead.
When the soft corpse won’t move they seem afraid.
She comforts them; and wraps it in a paper
featuring: ‘Tasty dishes from stale bread’.
Gwen Harwood (1920-95) and published in the 1960s
Yes it’s taboo. And yes, it appears in the world, if you look for it. As a parent, I wonder if our ‘dissatisfaction’ is about not having the courage to parent and educate and live as our heart’s dictate – directed instead, against our will, into a nuclear family scenario that is quite strange and puts a lot of pressure on parents and children alike. Children were once more useful, less objectified – less a mirror of their parents’ worth/lack of self-esteem, perhaps? Like all intimate relationships, the feelings shift and change and are intense.
2:03 pm, December 9, 2010
damn that rogue apostrophe
2:02 pm, December 9, 2010
And hang around with the parents of teenagers and you’ll hear oh-children-how-I-hate-and-resent-and-dislike-and am jealous of-thee-in-thy-arrogant-glory stories to curl your toes! (What ever that means).
3:26 pm, December 9, 2010
What about the mother in The Hours (played by Julianne Moore in the movie)?
True that it’s rare and mostly taboo though. An interesting subject.
3:34 pm, December 9, 2010
Emotions run high because what we are talking about here is the rejection of life. How could you not want something as precious as a new born baby? But the truth is you can. I recall when we had just had our little one and how we would complain about her incessant groaning and gurgling. We jokingly called her ‘demon spawn’ because it was like listening to an exorcism. I recall one of my partner’s girlfriends getting upset by those comments, as if negative remarks about your own child was encroaching on hallowed ground. To be sure the atomisation of society has only exacerbated the problem but the feeling of having made a mistake with no recourse is a crippling and insidious condition that may have damaging effects on the relationship between parents and their children. We need to drop this quasi-spiritual sanctity that surrounds children if we are to tackle this very real issue.
12:11 pm, December 10, 2010
Lovely piece, and thrilled to see that Clare has cited Gwen Harwood: to my mind the poet-laureate of parental ambivalence. It doesn’t have to be at the pitch of Shriver-level horror, more the draining repetitiveness of grim routine.
Like Lou, I’m not sure it’s taboo amongst my friends, but I think we’re culturally ill-equipped to capture the nuance of simultaneous adoration and frustration. Rethinking your identity to accommodate parenthood is both hard and easy, rewarding and disappointing. There’s both more to it and less to it than ‘Sunday Life’ magazine would have you think. (mainly more)
More Harwood, this time from ‘In the Park’
They stand a while in flickering light, rehearsing
the children’s names and birthdays. “It’s so sweet
to hear their chatter, watch them grow and thrive, ”
she says to his departing smile. Then, nursing
the youngest child, sits staring at her feet.
To the wind she says, “They have eaten me alive.”
(Sidebar, I once studied the above poem, and someone in the class passionately argued that the poet’s protagonist is telling the wind that her feet have eaten her alive. Awesome analysis.)
8:55 am, December 11, 2010
Thank you Clare, Jill and Michael for drawing my attention to these wonderful, wonderful poems.
6:52 pm, December 11, 2010
I’m not sure that it isn’t discussed either. I do remember reading discussions on one or two feminist parenting blogs (though don’t remember them off the top of my head, and haven’t got time to search right now – which does sort of undermine my comment). In comedy it’s almost it’s own genre – Roseanne Barr did love her children, but I always felt like she had one eye on how her life could/should have been, and there’s lots of similar comedy around.
12:12 am, December 12, 2010
How fantastic and refreshing to read a piece that so powerfully answers to the repressive and boring parenthood industry! I cannot identify with similar feelings about children to what your friends do – indeed I can totally say my emotions and thoughts about having children mirrored yours in all stages of parenthood – but I can only say: all the power to you for speaking the ‘unspeakable’.
The paradox of parenthood, and the conflicting emotions my own child evokes, has left me baffled. I was discovering things about myself I never knew existed – or, rather, I was constructing a completely different portrait of who I was, immediately after childbirth and onwards. I don’t think it ever ends.
I cannot help but feel sadness that people have children they would rather not have had. Not because I think they are selfish and self-indulgent and cannot possibly know just how wonderfully fulfilling parenthood is, and are therefore, ‘missing out’. No. I feel sadness because they need to deal with this gnawing feeling of dissatisfaction on a daily basis. It is difficult for me to imagine the curtailment of freedom that brings. But surely, it must make people miserable at times. No one is an emotionless robot, always successful at suppressing the vital emotions, as the example you give so well illustrates.
11:44 pm, December 19, 2010
One of the most shocking things in becoming a parent is the realisation that loving your children and enjoying parenthood are often very different things. For me, though I don’t regret having my kids, motherhood has been by its very nature a state of contradiction — of feeling constantly torn — and this is not always an easy thing to absorb or admit.
I’m sure this isn’t just a modern experience caused by our increasing individualism and our inflated expectations of life. I suspect parents have always struggled with these issues (the books cited here show that they have), but perhaps just haven’t had the voice or gumption to express it. You only have to look at the public reaction to Rachel Cusk’s aforementioned book to know how taboo these feelings remain.
Perhaps most confronting is the way we are exposed to ourselves as parents. I often think of just how dignified and discrete (how ‘uncarved’, as I have described it elsewhere) I was before having kids. When I’m yelling at them to get their shoes on for the 20th time (that universal parenting experience mentioned above), it is not just the frustration and tedium of it, but also the repulsion I can feel at the sound of my own voice — a voice I’m sure I would never have had to hear if I hadn’t had children.
I agree with Kylie that Cusk’s book is an exquisite look at these feelings. And, without wanting to blow my own trumpet, I think many of the women interviewed in my book, The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood, talk very openly and honestly about this ambivalent state too.
12:45 am, December 20, 2010
P.S. Just in thinking about this a bit more… it’s interesting, that comment in the article that after admitting to their uncertainties, “the speaker rushes to tell me what I already know – that they love their children, obsess about their safety and care desperately about their happiness”, as if that’s separate to their struggles. Because those are exactly the things that, in my mind, make parenting so painful. The frustration, the tedium… OK, that is real, and can be very tough at times. But then there is, for most of us, also immense joy. As I have heard my partner say: “It’s the toughest thing you’ll ever do, but you’ll laugh more than you ever have.” (Not true for everyone, I know.)
But what I do find so intense, through all of it — the joy and the frustration — is the fear. When I am having those moments of thinking “How did I ever let myself in for this?!”, more than anything it is due to that very intensity of the love and sense of responsibility I feel for my children — and the requisite terror that comes with that. How do we deal with the sense that we will never reclaim that psychic freedom we had (unknowingly) before having children? That’s the biggie for me.
2:15 pm, December 23, 2010
Ah yes, the fear. That is an abyss I hold myself back from considering too deeply. I fear not just something happenning to my child, but what I would be capable of if – God forbid – someone hurt her.
Since writing this piece Rachel a dozen or so people have recommended your book to me. I am going to give a copy to the girlfriend who inspired this article so thank you.
8:16 am, December 20, 2010
‘In the Park’ is one of my favourite poems. I wrote one in tribute, with my own way of addressing the difficult subject matter, that was published at the ‘Verity La’ online journal in October.
Perhaps because I write a personal blog and have written about my own parental difficulties do I feel I can say I am seeing more and more written about this subject than before; that said, rarely do I push through to the white-knuckled fear that Rachel mentions above, which I also experience, or, say, other dark feelings. Perhaps for some people the question of open discussion comes down to a perception of appropriateness of forum. They’d prefer to address it in fiction/non-fiction books that they write (or read), not the internet. I believe if anyone can be helped (and many mothers need it), then all communication methods can be beneficial.
(Hope I didn’t go off topic here!)
(Speaking of children, I have one pulling on my arm and I have to finish up, unfortunately!)
4:07 pm, December 20, 2010
Great discussion. The only other author I want to reference is Ayelet Waldman (married to another author, Michael Chabon) who caused outrage in the US when she declared that she loved her husband more than her (four) children. She received death threats from women who found her statement scandalous, and eventually went onto the Oprah show to talk about her position. Her recent non-fiction book is entitled “Bad Mother: A chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace’. It certainly examines some of these issues although (unfortunately) she does this a little flippantly and self deprecatingly, so that the message is diluted. Her first adult fiction book, ‘Love and Other Impossible Pursuits’ is a great book about a stepmother who stuggles to like/love her husband’s child. Unfortunately her recent fiction follow up is a bit of a disaster, but that’s by the by really.
7:49 pm, December 20, 2010
I agree with Annie, this is a very interesting discussion. The fuss about Waldman is doubly fascinating because of course there is its flipside, which is what happens when one parent (either one, same-sex or hetero) falls too deeply in love with the children! and never sees their partner ‘whole’ again. Doesn’t sound like yourselves? be grateful!! for small mercies.
10:47 pm, December 20, 2010
That’s a brilliant poem, Karen!
I recall feeling a bit taken aback at Mirka Mora’s comment in her autobiography that if she had to choose between her children or her art, she would choose the art. Perhaps I was more shocked at her willingness to admit to this, though, than the feelings themselves.
I can highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Reader-Essential-Writings-Motherhood/dp/1583220720 for some great writings by women over the years on the fraught business of mothering.
1:50 pm, December 28, 2010
I have certainly heard mothers say they never should have had them; and I have wondered it myself. As much as I love my kids, and enjoy many aspects of parenting, at times the loss of self feels too high a price to pay. I agree that the nuclear family is a fairly disastrous structure, particularly for parents of a challenging child; also, that having a child is hard in a culture that indeed disparages duty, encouraging instead only self-realisation (whatever that is). Having a child helps some of us find our bedrock, but for others, it seems to completely obliterate any sense of self-worth. Nicole Chaison’s book The Passion of the Hausfrau: Motherhood Illuminated offers a lovely (and at times side-splitting) take on some of this stuff.
10:27 pm, April 26, 2011
Good article. I don’t think it is a taboo, but I don’t think it is something that people can comfortably express either, and there certainly isn’t much warning about this feelings before hand! In-fact I think a lot of things that happen to the parents while raising a child isn’t talked about enough, we tend to obsess over the birth more than anything and not the afterward. I find that yes there are a lot of mummy and parent groups out there, but if you are experiencing something different from the ‘norm’, or what is expected of you, than you’ll find very little help. Even if you experience something as common as post natal depression, there is very little help for that either.
I think a lot of the problems that contribute to this isolation and loss of self is that we are locked into our tiny little baby bubbles. Family and community is something that has been lost over the last few decades and I think this loneliness is an epidemic in todays society.
I also like how you pointed out in your article that we are all too quick to condemn parents. Even when I was becoming a Mother I noticed how many people would be down on Mother’s groups, as if they were daggy and boring, or telling me “don’t dress like a fucking Mum”. I also found that women my age seem to stress so much about changing after having the baby. Of course your going to change!
All too often I hear slurrs about peoples parenting styles, like Will Anderson ranting about children on leashes at the comedy festival. It drives me nuts how opinionated and condemning we are without even knowing that persons situation.