The week my daughter was born, I had my first manic episode. She was born in the morning—I’d stayed up all night laboring—and for three days afterward, I did not sleep. It’s not as though I didn’t try; when I lay down it felt as though my eyelids were spring-loaded. In the small hours when my daughter slept, I rearranged furniture, scrubbed at the bathtub grout with a toothbrush, and attempted to remove oily milk stains from onesies the baby would promptly outgrow. The doula chalked all this up to adrenaline, but to me it felt like there was something urgent I was forgetting, and I wandered the apartment at night, searching for whatever it was. I was lucid enough to realize that soon I would have to be hospitalized and sedated. Eventually I noticed that I was trapped in a pattern of reliving each minute detail of the birth. My mind was desperately running the trail of small memories, back and forth, back and forth, to forge a beaten path that I would be able to find again later. And then suddenly, the answer came: I needed to write. The thing I was forgetting—or afraid of forgetting—was my experience of childbirth. Those memories were precious, and if I continued my new life as a mother without pausing to write them down, they were liable to slip away.

That third night, I wrote for hours and hours, filling page after page. (Only later did I learn there was a word for this: hypergraphia, a pathological impulse to write.) Around four am, my husband found me sitting on the floor of the baby’s room, laptop glowing in the pitch dark, and I reassured him in the language of the delusional, the self-aggrandizing, and the conspiracy-minded that I had found it, the solution, and everything would be fine if he would just leave me to my work. I was right, though; when I was finished, I slept.

Reflecting on it now, I think, of course. The long-awaited and -feared threat to my creative life had finally arrived, and my indomitable urge to create was forced to assert itself. This part of me wished to prove that it was willing to sacrifice my safety, my sanity, even risk my survival. And the contemporary discourse around motherhood, particularly within writing circles, had conditioned me to believe all this might be necessary. Like many young female writers, I had ingested a lot of opinions, from panels and editorials, about whether motherhood could be compatible with a writing career. I’d read Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work and Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation and so much Ferrante—memoirs and fiction that made it seem impossible to both write and mother, even as they were themselves evidence of this possibility. I had for years repeated the mantra “book before baby.” But eventually, time went by, and the book did not sell, and I was getting older. I wondered if rejecting the good thing I did have the power to conjure was only self-punishment for my powerlessness to wangle that other good thing I wanted (but might never get).

So I had the baby, and a few years later I had another, even as I lived in terror that they might prove the adorable Trojan horse by which failure and unhappiness and doom would be ushered into my life. But now that I’ve crossed the divide, I feel that, for as necessary as the despairing maternal accounts are, lately there may have been an overemphasis on what a writer loses to motherhood, and little discussion at all of what might be gained.

*

I am far from alone in my anxiety. We’ve come of age in an era that has seen the explosion of a veritable cottage industry of harrowing tales of maternal unraveling. Not so long ago, mother-protagonists were—with some brilliant exceptions—rare. Trust me, I exercise great discipline in not dedicating the rest of this essay to Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, and Toni Morrison. But there is still something revolutionary in the unsilencing represented by more recent accounts of motherhood, which have tended to foreground deep ambivalence, rage, and often regret. It’s also true that popular portrayals of motherhood remain frustratingly white, cis, and wealthy, limiting our access to varying narratives. Though bygone conventional wisdom held that maternal rage was not interesting or “universal” enough, readers in fact have an enormous appetite for more incisive portrayals of this not-at-all marginal experience, the truths of which were for so long politely contained behind mythic saints and monsters.

Julie Phillips, in her book The Baby on the Fire Escape, notes that the mother figure is antithetical to the classic hero’s journey—she is what the young son must leave behind in pursuit of adventure. And while the novel did feature heroines early on, it was from its inception a bourgeois form intended to morally instruct young female readers. In this tradition, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady (1748) made their marks; the heroines’ stories often resolved either in sexual ruin or marriage. What came after marriage remained obscured, the mother denied subjectivity. Psychoanalysis, in its turn, embedded the perception of the mother as little more than an accessory to her child’s narrative arc. “The Freudian view… was that mothering was the end of growth and achievement for a woman,” Phillips writes. “The psychoanalytic insistence on the Oedipal drama as the origin of both creativity and the self relegates the mother not only to a supportive role but to a predetermined one.”

I can’t help but feel that this conceptualization of mothers was on full display in the first wave of the memoir boom of the aughts, which brought us runaway hits from the perspective of the grown daughter or son whose mother had become monstrous through her failure at this supportive role—Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors is representative. Readers gobbled up the private, shameful details of the mother’s failure, eager to offer up for evaluation what Bracha Ettinger called the “ready-made mother-monster,” whose villainy could neatly account for the writer’s neurosis and perhaps also stand in as a proxy scapegoat for the reader’s own dysfunction. More contemporary memoirs of maternal experience can seem almost like a defiant response.

Phillips suggests, in her biographies of writers and artists who are mothers, that Diane di Prima thrived under the discipline that motherhood imposed upon her life, and that Doris Lessing’s strong perspective on power and politics would never have taken shape had she not been forced to observe from the periphery. In telling her subjects’ stories, Phillips reclaims the hero’s journey for them. “Their subjectivity was in their losing and finding of themselves, first in adolescence, then in maternity, then in maturity, confronting their ‘annihilation’ and regaining their power,” she writes. “It’s the story of a central figure who goes on a journey of self-discovery… Someone who descends into the underworld and comes back.” Becoming a mother is one of the most profound transformations that occur in an average life, upending one’s identity and relationship to self and world not just once but, as Phillips points out, again and again. And so it is strange and disappointing that maternity is more often the terminus of narrative than its beginning. Even feminist texts have a way of wrapping up the grand journey of self-discovery with the revelation of pregnancy or childbirth, so that the mother-to-be can exit the stage gracefully, off to occupy the irrelevant territory where she will live out her days.

Whether the mother in question is a subject or the artist herself, we too often fail to see her as a full, dynamic character. This cultural oversight owes something not only to Victorian values and Freudianism but also to second-wave feminism, which often rejected mothers for their perceived complicity in female oppression. The mother was, as Andrea Liss writes in Feminist Art and the Maternal, “a silent outcast for many feminists who strategically needed to distance themselves from all that was culturally coded as passive, weak, and irrational.” Liss is referring to visual artists of the late twentieth century when she writes that, in order to be successful, they often felt pressure to “avoid any imagery that would code their art, especially work that dealt with anything female—motherhood being the most debased—as ‘sentimental.’” But it would have applied as easily to writers of literary fiction and nonfiction. Recently I met some elders at an event, all of whom attested that for years they had strained, among art and literary circles, to keep their maternity a secret; this felt necessary if they wanted to be seen as “serious.”

Thankfully, the tide has turned dramatically on this point. The novels of Ferrante, Cusk, and others, as well as the work of queer writers such as Maggie Nelson, Constance Debré, Cherríe Moraga, Carole Maso, and A.K. Summers are dedicated to complicating motherhood, snatching it back from patronizing assumptions of docility, humility, conformity, inevitability.

*

I have often wondered if our historic squeamishness about the dark side of motherhood might owe in part to our collective determination to uphold the fantasy that we ourselves, the readers, were loved without any trace of hatred or resentment. By now the cat is out of the bag. Lately any time motherhood appears as a subject, it is to provide a stark counterpoint to the pretty picture of contented maternity, revealing instead a gothic inner landscape of anger and desperation. It’s often given the horror treatment, or at least portrayed as a descent into near-madness, in the manner of Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love, and the films “Tully” and “Baby Ruby.” The message—beware procreation—no longer comes from non-mothers in the form of ideological appeals to female liberation, but from mother-writer-ghouls in the form of dispatches from Hell.

Children undoubtedly make time, money, and deep focus scarcer, particularly for women, but assuming—big assumption, I know—that a writer isn’t too mired in caretaking to continue writing, couldn’t her motherhood also occasion new experiences, perspectives, and depths of feeling that might be conscripted as fresh, powerful material? Might there be such a thing as a “maternal gaze”? To be sure, the term is often used in child psychology, particularly when studying the impacts of a mother’s visual attention and responsiveness on the child’s development. But I am here referring to a way of seeing that is particular, or at least much more accessible, to those who have lived as a mother-figure (of any gender). Indulge me. If the male gaze sees desired objects, and the female gaze sees autonomous beings with desires of their own, the maternal gaze sees something further: those desires locked in a merciless struggle with responsibility to others.

Whenever critics and theorists are thinking about motherhood, two themes consistently emerge. The first is ambivalence. “It is not a matter of ‘balancing motherhood and work,’” writes Liss. “It is the feminist mother’s admission that ambiguity is often the norm, an ambiguity that constantly tears and heals, between the mother self and her professional self, between the mother self and her sexual self, between the mother self and her own child self.” The mother is a figure caught between love and hatred, self and other, present and future, and often a figure very nearly rent in two by inner conflict. The desire to flee my home for several recuperative weeks alone in a cabin and the simultaneous, irreconcilable desire to wake the children I have finally managed to put to sleep, so that I can be with them a little longer—this, to me, is the essence of motherhood. For many women writers, the ability or requirement to inhabit this both/and mindset begins early, whether or not they ultimately choose to have children. If it did not, we wouldn’t spend so much time agonizing over the decision. From the time I was small, I always knew there was no answer that didn’t involve the terrible grief of thwarted desire. That fraught curiosity is reflected brilliantly in Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, a novel composed of questions that are never satisfyingly resolved.

Even leaving aside what they want for themselves, mothers engage in maddening calculations in the attempt to do what’s right for their children. Sara Ruddick notes in Maternal Thinking that a child’s preservation, growth, and acceptability are “often in tension.” “If a child wants to walk to the store alone,” she writes, “do you worry about her safety or applaud her developing capacity to take care of herself?” When a mother-character is written with any intelligence whatsoever, these competing demands weigh heavily on her psyche. Meanwhile, literally everyone has opinions on how she makes these decisions, and their opinions will contribute to her self-doubt. The practice of motherhood is always aberrant in contrast with the prescribed standards of ideal motherhood, which are contradictory and impossible, and as a result, mothers are relentlessly exposed to the “gaze”—the scrutiny—of others, which makes it all the more outrageous that for so long their own perspectives were absent.

The second theme is sometimes called “intersubjectivity,” or what Julia Kristeva describes in her writing on feminine genius as “a self which cannot be separated from its various attachments to others.” Motherhood is, as Kristeva puts it, a “catastrophe of identity.” A mother often intuits her children’s inner experience and feels their joy and pain as her own, and she carries the burden of her own radical capacity for harm. A mother revisits childhood at close range, remembering her own private dramas vividly but able to make sense, this time, of what she is witnessing, to see the long shadows already being cast. A simple but ingenious application of “intersubjectivity” appears in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts are constantly revealing her caretaking impulses, by anticipating her son’s sensitivity, her husband’s bruised ego, her guest’s hurt feelings; Mr. Ramsay thinks primarily of his career. That distinctive, wandering point-of-view is itself reflective of the blurred lines of maternal consciousness. It has taken me a decade or so of intellectual growth, plus becoming a mother, to fully appreciate Woolf’s project—even while she was famously influenced by Freud’s ideas, she recognized, and remedied, his failure to acknowledge the mother as a subject.

Personally, I find it useful to understand the mother-character as a figure implicated not only in a web of complex intimate relations, but also, more broadly, in larger social and political communities. Certainly there are mothers who turn away from the outside world out of fear or a determination to hoard advantages for their own clan, but it’s hard to imagine a mother who, hearing of some disaster on the other side of the world, doesn’t immediately think of her own children. So to my previous definition, I’d add that a “maternal gaze” would necessarily involve a shift in the perception of world events and systems. Ours is a culture that imagines that all violence, neurosis, and antisocial behavior begin at home. “Motherhood is, in Western discourse, the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts, of what it means to be fully human,” writes Jacqueline Rose in Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty. “It is the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which it becomes the task—unrealisable, of course—of mothers to repair.” The view on society, from this vantage, would seem to be rather important. No one feels the emergency of late-stage capitalism more acutely than struggling mothers, especially those who are poor, of color, undocumented, disabled, or queer. For Rose, adequate narratives don’t leave motherhood “stranded on the far shore of history,” but see it as absolutely central.

*

In keeping with the maternal capacity to hold two opposing truths, I want to recognize both the impossible demands and the creative potential inherent to writing through motherhood. The requirement of motherhood that is often blamed for sabotaging the mother’s creative career is what has come to be known as the “mental load.” The quantity of mundane junk that fills the mind—appointments needing to be scheduled, snacks needing to be packed, special outfits required, worries about development or school performance—that might seem at odds with the kind of mental promiscuity required for art-making. Undoubtedly this can be true. But it’s also possible that this kind of attention to detail trains the mind toward a heroic capacity for observation, which does not go unappreciated when it’s time to do the work of character development and scene building.

Since having children, I’ve noticed a differing quality of attention in myself. Even more than before, when I step off a subway car, I can give an inventory of all the people on it—their outfits, their tattoos, their wounds, their moods, their peculiar cargo, their books, their conversations. This one has a large dog at home; that one is battling a heroin addiction. “I felt suddenly older,” writes Rivka Galchen in Little Labors, “even as the puma [baby] also, in her effect on me, made me more like a very young human in one particular way, which was that all the banal (or not) objects and experiences around me were reenchanted. The world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning. Which is to say that the puma made me again more like a writer (or at least a certain kind of writer) precisely as she was making me into someone who was, enduringly, not writing.”

Certainly, I feel as though the maternal, as a theme or subject, is in its infancy—we have hardly scratched the surface of what there is to say about it. Vital as they have been, I’m eager to see what will succeed this recent crop of overwhelmingly bleak portrayals of motherhood. Joy is harder to capture. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts was one example of a more textured, complex, unconventional, and even expansive account that might give a hint of what’s to come, while Miranda July’s All Fours, a story that claims as its beginning not even childbirth but menopause (imagine!) was the hit of the year because eroticism, self-discovery, and transformation are fixtures of the maternal adventure, too, if rarely acknowledged. But I’m even more interested in the innovations of style and form that might emerge as a response to the challenge of writing the maternal.

I think of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag” theory of fiction, which imagined a literature made not in the image of the spear, but in the image of the satchel—that other, more feminine technology, which might gather all manner of worldly items to bring home for observation. More academic writers would also include here an analysis of Hélène Cixous and a position on écriture féminine, the notion that women do or might or even ought to claim their “otherness” through a writing style that better captures their point of view, which differs substantially and challenges the “phallocentric” tradition, perhaps by becoming more fluid, non-linear, diffusive, circular, plural, simultaneous, or sensory. Fifty years of scholarship are beyond the scope of this essay; I merely wonder if writers who are mothers might imagine their work as a subcategory of écriture féminine, which can reflect the particularities of their experience through their use of language.

Already, there are writers who are imagining this literature into being. In the contemporary landscape, I think of Rivka Galchen, Ayşegül Savaş, Kate Zambreno, Maggie Nelson, Jenny Offill, and Valeria Luiselli. These writers have used clever style innovations, such as copious paragraph and section breaks, non-sequiturs, and tone that verges on the aphoristic to mimic the interruptions and disjointedness of those early years with small children. It often feels as though the writers (or their protagonists) are carving out moments of insight, surfacing briefly from domestic demands to reach for something higher, and then being subsumed again by the diurnal. Some, too, have borrowed from the odd diction of childhood, using language to productively defamiliarize all that which adults take for granted. But I want even more. 

How, I wonder, can language be recruited to the task of rendering ambivalence and intersubjectivity? In how many different ways can a sentence contain two contradictory truths at once? How can form resist the cult of self and accommodate a shared consciousness? How could pacing be made to convey the strange passage of time when in the company of an infant?

Of course, the divisions and inner conflicts are real and inevitable; I feel them even now, as I write this essay and attempt to box out my anxiety about finding childcare for the summer. But I also ask myself who is served by the notion that these things must always be divided. I’ve found surprising pride and confidence in my ability to shift between a multiplicity of identities, and under the pressure of motherhood, I’ve achieved a greater sense of clarity than ever before about what my highest needs are, as an artist and as a person. But whenever possible, I’ve also learned to appreciate the places where the edges bleed into each other—the abundant ways that mothering has made me a better friend, the effect of a lifetime of reading on my perception of childhood and memory, the clear impact on my prose of the playfulness that now fills my days.

Perhaps it’s worth returning for a moment to the significance of the “maternal gaze” in child psychology. That shared look from mother to child and back again is believed to instruct how the infant interprets emotions, develops language and social skills, and, in short, understands the world around them. But when my son reaches up to map my face with his tiny hands, I wonder about the reciprocal force of that gaze. I am more determined to write than ever, because the stakes are higher; I write because I have to, but now, in some way I can’t explain, I write for my children, too. To nurture their sense of what’s possible, yes, but also to capture what they are teaching me to see. To signpost the beaten path I began down on those first strange, sleepless nights. ♦