My work, p.18
My Work, page 18
Anna thinks for a while, then she writes:
Garden
Textiles
Tongue-and-groove pliers
Cooking
What is this? Anna thinks, looking at the list she has written. It appears incomplete.
There are large parts of my life where I am alone, all alone, Anna thinks. For example, when I’m on my way from one place to another. Where I am entirely my own person. Where no one owns me. What writing comes from this place? I think this place will save me.
Anna recalls a night a few weeks ago when she cried and told Aksel: “The two of you are devouring me.”
Very soon I will have to leave to save myself.
The part of me that is determined by my life circumstances, the part of me that has always existed, innate or fostered in childhood, these are the deep-rooted tools that will keep death at bay.
Anna stops writing. She listens for something inside and waits.
Twenty-Seventh Continuation
SUMMER IN THE BIG MAN’S HOUSE
2 years, 1 month, and 24 days after the birth
JUNE 2018
DAY ONE
1.
My new rule: As long as I’m in this house, I’m not allowed to go back and read what I have previously written. Nothing will come of it but getting stuck in the already-said. I must continue to the end. Although I have tried putting it off and haven’t touched the manuscript for a year, I can’t avoid this work any longer. Completing this book is somehow tied to my life and well-being.
More rules: I must sit down and write for two hours every day.
I can’t write in secret but must inform my family of these hours I’m taking to write.
Every day for the next ten days I must write.
There are three of us here: the woman, the man, and the child.
We’re spending ten days in a house in Spain.
The stay is part of a residency program I applied for under the guise of doing work, but we have agreed to spend it as a holiday instead.
When we arrived at the house, I began to long for a life in which the man takes care of the child all day while I write. There is a study on the first floor that remains in the same state the former owner left it in.
When I stepped into the room and closed the door behind me, it was as though this former owner flew into me, and I told myself the smell in there was his. I sat down at the desk, in front of the window with the heavy, red drapes. Dust whirled up and glittered in the sun. There were floppy disks and an old hat. And while I sat in the shade of the study, looking out at the sun-scorched mountains, I was again struck by this yearning for the man to cook, to drive, mind the child, clean, for neither of them to spare me a thought while I sat here working and could disappear.
I tell myself that my writing is not depriving them of anything. That by choosing to write, I am not demanding any sacrifice of them. This is the life the big man who built this house, a famous author, once led. I can’t bring myself to demand this of my family — that they sacrifice themselves for my art. Yet in this study, in another world, the temptation is enormous and I allow myself to feel it completely: the family is insufferable.
How am I to love this man downstairs in the kitchen who both annihilates and protects me? I cannot live without the love of a man. This is both pathetic and wonderful. There are very few men in the world I can stand. The man in this house is one of them, and he loves me. Now the birds of prey are gliding above the mountain ridge in the bright sun.
I must demand two hours of them. This is my task. To demand time to write. To demand that they forget me.
Implementing writing as a necessary part of our shared life will change my writing, the way I write.
No longer writing in secret.
No longer writing furtively.
No longer writing in the shadow of shame, incoherent notes when everyone else is asleep.
I must tell them that writing is work but also not work. It’s more like a personal sport. No one questions the fact that my husband wants to go for an hour-long run each day. It’s good for him, and he takes the time to do it whenever possible.
That’s how it must be: to create a family life where writing is included.
And not a life in which writing lives in spite of the family.
And not a life in which the family gets by despite a writing member.
2.
How does an author of child-bearing age write after she has had children?
If becoming a mother has been the most life-changing experience of her life, must she refrain from writing about becoming a mother in order to be a good mother?
Is writing about becoming a mother being a bad mother?
Does it subject the child to writing’s destruction?
Does it mean choosing oneself, one’s writing, instead of protecting the child?
Must she kill the writer inside to become a good mother?
So much of what I write has been written in my head on the short walk beneath the pergola from the nursery to my bike after dropping off the child, and from my bike to the nursery in the afternoon.
Why do so many authors write about writing? Why do their readers, who are not authors, want to read about it? Is it because writing is a metaphor for life? And if so, what does it mean to write about becoming a mother? Is writing about motherhood a way of becoming a mother? Is writing itself an act of mothering? A place where the child is and is not? Or, let me rephrase: Is it through writing I become a mother?
When the child left my body, the whole world transformed, not a single living thing could be understood in the same way again. Among the world’s objects was now my child, my own literal flesh, looking back at me. My connection to the world changed radically. Every single thing in the world revealed another, deeper side, because part of my body had left me and now existed among them. I was no longer the same. The divide between what is me and what is the world opened. Everything casts the same light as before, but now I see that it’s living.
3.
I can no longer write in the third person.
Writing in the third person was born of a powerlessness in the face of experience.
To write in the third person was to create someone else to endure the pain.
One invents her. Her name is Anna.
To unravel the suffering, I had to find a place to begin.
Certain things cannot be written in the first person, so they are transferred to the second or third.
A woman looking at someone who looks like herself from a distance; she describes this person.
She starts to walk. She crosses a field. As she moves forward, she walks into a falling snow, and there in front of her she sees the other woman. The woman who could be mistaken for her, and she comes closer step by step. But when they reach one another and see each other’s faces, she realizes they do not look anything alike, it only seemed that way from a distance. The woman she described is a stranger.
The third person is a helpless woman.
Look, I’m writing. I’m writing again. So something inside me must have changed. Is this change for the better? Are my muscles stronger? I’m sitting in the shadowy study. Soon the sun will reach me through the window. And the sun is hot and hard-hitting. I am writing on a mother’s borrowed time.
DAY TWO
4.
Sitting down now, with two hours at my disposal, I’m so thirsty to be writing that the doubt quickly washes away.
A buzzard hangs in the air, the big palm outside the window swishes.
The man asked me: Do you write non-stop for two hours up there?
Me: Yes, pretty much.
But that isn’t true, sometimes I just sit here. I try to reserve the time for not feeling guilty. I read.
The man asked me: How did he, this great author, get rich enough to build this house?
Me: I don’t know how he became so rich and famous. Some just do.
When I schedule time for writing in the midst of family life, when I take these two hours to work and don’t write at other times, I’m filled with thirst and happiness as soon as I sit down. Writing becomes a discipline, a relief, not an art form. When I don’t go back and read what I wrote yesterday, don’t edit, this act becomes a matter of creating space, not of producing.
Will I keep writing this book for the rest of my life?
5.
Which thoughts came to me when I stepped into this office yesterday?
That what I find interesting is not my own life but how a mother writes, and how becoming a mother changes a person’s writing.
That when motherhood began, I found that I could no longer write freely. Writing was not accessible, and at the same time I needed writing more than ever.
And why was writing not free? Because to write is to be a bad mother. Because to write is to fail the family. To protect the child means to omit it. (How is this logical?) To protect love means not to write about its object. Not to write critically about the man. Not to show the child one’s pain. Let the child believe he was brought into being in immense love.
Each time I come in here, I must grapple with these thoughts about writing with the child inside me. Or rather, not the child but the traces it left behind.
And how do the traces of the child write?
The dull pain of scar tissue, the loose joints. The entire body altered by the child’s coming and going, yet still somehow the same as before.
The mountains in the big man’s study.
I sit here.
Searching for the voice for years.
How to write this mother, this mother’s writing? How does she speak? How does she carry the writing forward? This resistance, each time. I cannot hear the voice. It’s locked inside the delivery room I no longer have access to.
Will I keep writing this book for the rest of my life?
DAY THREE
6.
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator has just had a child, and there is something wrong with her. Her husband and brother, both of whom are doctors, say her condition is not serious and at the same time they claim she is ill.
They also tell her she isn’t allowed to write. She believes writing is precisely what could help her. The book consists of the notes she writes in secret after she has been told not to. In order to cure her, her husband has brought her to an old house in the countryside, where she is eventually locked in a room with yellow wallpaper. Meanwhile, her child is minded by a nanny her husband fancies.
The narrator says: If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency — what is one to do?
My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.
So I take phosphates or phosphites — whichever it is — and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again.
Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
But what is one to do?
I did write for a while in spite of them, but it does exhaust me a good deal — having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.
These men in “The Yellow Wallpaper” tell the woman there is nothing wrong with her while maintaining that she may not work until she is “well again.” They tell her she is both healthy and unwell. This contradiction creeps into the narrator, because if she is not ill, but also not well, there must be something about her very being that needs to be tamed, something about her that is intrinsically wrong and not simply an illness she must be cured of.
Since they deem her incapable of telling the difference between what is illness and what is her, what is good and what is bad for her, they forbid her from writing, lock her away, and leave the child in someone else’s care.
In the wallpaper’s pattern she sees monstrous vines twisting and turning, and behind them a woman, creeping around. These wallpaper vines seem like a text — written lines covering a trapped female figure.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” documents the writing that the main character has been forbidden. When she concedes that writing is indeed exhausting, she doesn’t mean writing itself, but the fact that she must do so in secret. That it’s so strongly opposed, that it’s forbidden — that is what’s exhausting. And ultimately, it’s the discounting of her experience and the objection to her expressing herself in writing that makes the woman lose her grip on reality.
In a gruesome but equally pleasing finale, the woman’s insanity is portrayed as a chilling victory. She has finally become what the others told her she was: a sick, wild animal that cannot be trusted, the woman behind the wallpaper. Her husband’s horror proves he has known all along she wasn’t mad. She triumphs by exposing his lie. By mirroring their image of her back at them, she wins back the right to define herself. By courting madness, she courts freedom.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” can be read as a warning of what can happen to a mother if she doesn’t bond adequately with her child, if she feels a certain sadness in its infancy. It warns that this place, a life with small children, can drive a woman mad. It can also just be read as a story about a woman who’s driven mad by her husband’s control issues.
When I read it now, I think the most destructive part of the story is that the woman is forbidden to write. What is dangerous is not writing, but the adamant opposition to it. That one is forced to be sly about it, to write surreptitiously.
That is why I ask openly for this time to write.
That is why I ask openly for this space to speak about becoming a mother.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” tells us how difficult it can be as a mother to insist on your own experience. How all too often attending to the needs of the child is conflated with forcing the mother into silence. And how attending to the needs of the mother is all too often conflated with forcing her into silence. How people believe that just by speaking evil, one makes it come true.
But the belief that it would hurt the child, and the mother herself, to openly speak about the pain of motherhood is a lie. And I don’t want to be afraid of it any longer.
By writing it down on these pages, I relieve us both of the burden, the child and me. Here I put all that is horrible about becoming a mother. Here I put the mystery, everything I don’t understand. Here I put the loneliness, the distance to the child’s father that came with this new life. So neither he nor the child, nor I, must carry it. This book will be a container, a vessel for what a mother is not allowed to be: torn, in doubt, distraught, unhappy.
For as long as I’m writing this book, I think I will remain in a state of postpartum depression. Not writing the book is to remain in the anxiety. Not writing the book is to give power to the fear of words. Not writing is to not become a mother, to remain forever on the threshold of motherhood. To write is to step into it. Let’s see what’s inside. In there is my fate. To be someone’s mother from now until I die.
7.
One poet who is radically reconfiguring the relationship between motherhood and writing, and exposing the idea that a mother is not permitted to write about her children as a culturally contingent belief, is Itō Hiromi.
Itō Hiromi, born in Tokyo in 1955, made her breakthrough in Japan in the 1980s with the long-form poem “Kanoko-goroshi” (“Killing Kanoko”), about a woman who kills her six-month-old child after the child has bitten her breast to the point of bleeding. It’s unclear whether the killing was accidental or premeditated.
The woman in the poem receives visitors and is given gifts while to her it feels like a celebration of her annihilation. Throughout the poem runs the refrain Congratulations on your destruction. Surgical and spontaneous abortions, ectopic pregnancies, and the infanticides of previous generations run through the poem like a glistening trail. Killing small children has always been a part of human culture.
The poem ends by turning the celebration on its head so it’s no longer the destruction of the mother that’s congratulated but the destruction of children and fetuses that’s celebrated:
Kumiko-san / Congratulations on your abortion / Congratulations on killing Tomo-kun / Mari-san / How about getting rid of Nonoho-chan? / Mayumi-san / Was the fetus a boy or a girl? / Riko-chan / It’s about time to get rid of Kōta-kun / Let’s all get rid of them together / All of the daughters / All of the sons / Who rattle their teeth / Wanting to bite off our nipples.
The poem becomes all the more radical when one finds out that Itō Hiromi’s first-born child, a daughter, is named Kanoko. That is, the child in the poem is Itō’s own. It is Kanoko who is killed, not once but multiple times throughout the poem.
Many read both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Killing Kanoko” as texts about postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis, but to me, the diagnostification, the pathologization, of the texts nullifies the women’s experiences. I believe these texts are about what it means to become a mother for anyone who has experienced it, not just those who become ill along the way.
