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