Almost 12 years ago, before I went on maternity leave, a friend loaned me Rachel Cusk’s 2001 book A Life’s Work, a visceral account of the early months of new motherhood.
Later, my friend messaged me with panicked second thoughts, urging me not to read about colicky crying and lost identity for fear it would plunge me into despair. Her warnings were such a deterrent that later the book took on fantastical properties in my sleepless imagination; I feared reading it in case its contents propelled me to foist my golden-haired infant on to a passing stranger.
Since then, myriad authors have written about the dark side of motherhood, in thrillers like The Push by Ashley Audrain and The Upstairs House by Julia Fine as well as Claire Kilroy’s novel Soldier Sailor, Sheila Heti’s autofiction Motherhood and Lara Feigel’s memoir Free Woman.
This deluge of, for want of a better term, “sad mum lit” has served as a corrective to the veneration of motherhood, and gives a literary voice to a period of women’s lives typically dismissed as emotional and incoherent. However, these books on maternal ambivalence and struggle could have negative consequences. In a recent essay in the online magazine Vox, journalist Rachel Cohen explains “How millennials learned to dread motherhood”. She writes that: “Women my age have absorbed cultural messaging that motherhood is thankless and depleting, straining careers, health, and friendships, and destroying sex lives. Today, it’s genuinely difficult to find mainstream portrayals of moms who are not stressed to the brink, depressed, isolated, or increasingly resentful.”
No one is solely blaming books for declining birth rates. High childcare and housing costs are a deterrent. More positively, social shifts are encouraging increasing numbers of men and women to shrug off conventions and choose a child-free life.
Yet, like Cohen, I find myself hankering for a more joyful portrayal of parenting. The problem is that describing the virtues of kids risks appearing Pollyanna-ish or proselytising. There are few things more annoying than a tone-deaf parent trying to convert a non-believer — or worse, someone struggling to have children.
Social media is, of course, saturated with positive depictions. Recently I’ve become fascinated by Carrie Johnson’s Instagram posts, showing life with three children under four to be made up of wonder and Fair Isle jumpers. Her husband, the former UK prime minister Boris Johnson, is barely in the picture. Sara Petersen, author of Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture, says that sort of omission highlights a social media trend creating “a version of motherhood” that is “apolitical”, contributing to a “fantasy of a beautiful, natural version of motherhood that exists solely as a result of a mother’s labour of love, not through the cushioning of money, resources, and childcare”.
The genre of “sad mum lit” has served as a useful corrective to cloying clichés. Books can feel like a lifeline when your world has shrunk in the early months of motherhood, as Cusk’s did for me when I finally picked up her memoir. She wrote of reaching a point “at which my grasp of the baby’s calorific intake, hours of sleep, motor development and patterns of crying is professorial, while the rest of my life resembles a deserted settlement”. Of course, I’d known that the early months would be difficult. But knowing and understanding are not the same.
Traditionally seen as anti-intellectual or uncreative, with Cyril Connolly’s declaration that there is “no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall” long serving as a sexist warning, the act of caring has been raised by fiction and memoirs such as Cusk’s to a topic worthy of literary examination — though there were antecedents, one of my favourites being Celia Fremlin’s The Hours Before Dawn (1958). In books, the arc of parenting can be seen as an adventure, with setbacks and triumphs, like becoming a mountaineer or pursuing a great love affair, worthy of inquiry.
It’s true that huge swaths of time are devoted to dull repetitive tasks — after hours in a soft play centre I have sometimes felt my brain ache with boredom. But I dispute the notion your brain atrophies with parenthood. There might be less time for the theatre or reading, but watching babies and older children engage with the world inspires new ideas. Interacting with offspring can proffer greater insights into your own emotions, psychology and familial bonds than months on the therapist’s couch. It’s not just that kids keep you in touch with trends, but their ideas rupture old ways of thinking. Their interests take you into new directions. Their worlds become yours. I probably won’t do much with the information I’ve picked up about Paris Saint-Germain or chess YouTubers. But it doesn’t matter. It taught me about tribes of enthusiasts.
I suspect identifying the positive aspects of children risks making you look sappy. (I haven’t even mentioned love.) Writing about parenting at all carries its own dangers, marking one out as softer than peers who focus on serious matters of economics or geopolitics as if children and parents were not part of the economy or the world.
There is a broader cultural tendency to see darkness as more dramatic or authentic than joy. The novelist Ursula Le Guin once argued against Tolstoy’s claim that happy families are all the same, because it implied “that happiness is easy, shallow, ordinary, a common thing not worth writing a novel about” while “unhappiness is complex, deep, difficult to attain, unusual, unique indeed, and so a worthy subject for a great, a unique novelist”.
The truth is parenting can be boring and tiring but it is also joyful, creative and stimulating. If there were no upsides no one would do it. Surely that’s worth investigating?
Emma Jacobs is an FT features writer
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