A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother QUOTES

2 " 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. "

― Rachel Cusk , A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

4 " But the issue of children and who looks after them has become, in my view, profoundly political, and so it would be a contradiction to write a book about motherhood without explaining to some degree how I found the time to write it. For the first six months of Albertine’s life I looked after her at home while my partner continued to work. This experience forcefully revealed to me something to which I had never given much thought: the fact that after a child is born the lives of its mother and father diverge, so that where before they were living in a state of some equality, now they exist in a sort of feudal relation to each other. A day spent at home caring for a child could not be more different from a day spent working in an office. Whatever their relative merits, they are days spent on opposite sides of the world. "

― Rachel Cusk , A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

6 " 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 the 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. "

― Rachel Cusk , A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

8 " The prospect is exciting, for it is when the baby sleeps that I liaise, as if it were a lover, with my former life. These liaisons, though always thrilling, are often frantic. I dash about the house unable to decide what to do: to read, to work, to telephone my friends. "

― Rachel Cusk , A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

10 " Sometimes, when she has been two or more hours from the source of my body, I begin to feel a sort of elemental anxiety for her, as if she were walking a tightrope and had gone too far out, as if she could not exist for so long in time, in gravity, away from me. "

― Rachel Cusk , A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

12 " Time hangs heavy on us and I find that I am waiting, waiting for her days to pass, trying to meet the bare qualification of life which is for her to have existed in time. In this lonely place I am indeed not free: the kitchen is a cell, a place of no possibility. I have given up my membership of the world I used to live in. Sometimes I listen to music or read, and it is like a ray of light coming in from outside, bright and painful, making me screw up my eyes. When we go for a walk I see young women in the street, beautiful and careless, and a pang of mourning for some oblique, lost self makes my heart clench. I look down at my daughter sleeping in her pushchair, the dark fringe of her lashes forming arcs on her pale skin, and a contrary wind of love gusts over me; and for some time this is how I am, blown this way and that, careering around like a crazy, febrile gauge trying to find north. "

― Rachel Cusk , A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

14 " is. But this is a moment to which he brings his gift, which is language, a moment in which his love finds a voice. In this moment he contains the world, its good and its bad. In this moment he experiences an elemental greatness. Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eavedrops fall, Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. "

― Rachel Cusk , A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

16 " 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 her 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 at Alexandria, a world of knowledge has gone up in flames. A chain has been broken. We will never know what the 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 new—in many ways better—world. You are its first mother. And this is the first book. "

― Rachel Cusk , A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

18 " I make this explanation with the gloomy suspicion that a book about motherhood is of no real interest to anyone except other mothers; and even 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. "

― Rachel Cusk , A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

20 " My daughter emanates unprocessed human need where the world is at its most civilised; "

― Rachel Cusk , A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother