An inquiry into motherhood
on The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy
I remember one gloomy afternoon when I was 16. The school was almost bare, and if there were anyone left I did not recognise them. Sitting on a staircase in the carpark, I waited for my mother to pick me up. Half an hour passed, then an hour. I became anxious, nervously biting my nails and regretting my decision to leave my phone at home. When I finally saw her red Honda, I stood and felt my anxiety quickly turned to anger. “Where were you?” was the first thing I uttered, my tone sharp and unpleasant. “Why are you always late? There’s no one here!” I continued, my voice breaking. I turned to her. She told me there was an issue at the restaurant. She couldn’t leave on time. “I’m sorry,” was the last thing she said before tears ran down her cheek, her eyes never leaving the road.
Not a day goes by that I don’t think of that afternoon. Years later, I would find this book and realise that my worst fault was not insolence - it was ignorance. My mother had started a business when I started high school, knowing that I was finally grown enough to be left on my own. She had stopped working when she had children. In my whole existence, she had been a stay-at-home mother, ever-present to our needs. I must admit, I had felt disdain towards her decision to surrender her career for her family. After all, I had seen many women succeed at both. Sacrificing your career meant sacrificing yourself, and giving in to a system that is meant to cage us.
Yet, when my mother attempted to rebuild her career, to escape this prison she was in, I showed her no respect.
“Did I mock the dreamer in my mother and then insult her for having no dreams?”
Deborah Levy writes. I’d like to believe that women always have the choice in this. But am I not incredibly privileged to even be able to say that? I had judged her, harshly, with a benchmark of independence she was never socially entrusted with.
I’d like to believe the choice is always present. But motherhood is a mould women are expected to twist and break to fulfill. We - children and husbands and partners and internet warriors - cast that mould; holding our hands over her eyes and never permitting her to see clearly. My actions had not only filled my mother with guilt, but might have fortified the prison I silently insisted she escape. Sinéad Gleeson wrote about returning to creative work after she had children: “All creative urges were instantly replaced by maternal guilt. The audacity of me heading off alone. The added implication being that my husband is incapable of minding our children solo for a handful of days.” For most of my life, I had looked at my mother as a primary caregiver and my father an onlooker; a supervisor. For many seasons I was angry that my mother slowly let go of my hand. I glowered at her sudden intermittent absence, even though I spent my teenage years demanding that she release me. Never once did I demand such thing from my father (years later, I would be on my bed watching Mindhunter when Bill Tench said “All fathers are absent fathers.” My father is very much present, yet this is a concept we can all feel for.).
I had always imagined my mother as a kind of adventurer. It wasn’t hard to imagine her so: she was always telling us how she left her small village for college at the other end of the island; the many characters she played during her time with a traditional dance troupe; her exciting career in agriculture that she embarked on after graduation.
But back home, it is considered the natural course of events, even today, for young women to graduate only to get married and have children. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a womb and a decent supply of eggs must be in want of a child,” Gleeson cheekily wrote in her essay, On the Atomic Nature of Trimesters. “Be thin! Be beautiful! Be pregnant!” she continued, “The entire concept is predicated on biology-as-destiny, as though the acme of being female is to be a mother…The assumptions what female bodies are, should be, or can do have progressed, but the expectation of eventually choosing motherhood has persisted.” Had she been born in another time, in another world, would she have chosen Motherhood?
Would she not have kept her career, or leap on an opportunity that might have taken her out, somewhere – anywhere – else? Would she not have traded a starter home for the horizon? I would like to ask her this one day, if she has what Gleeson calls a “ghost life”: a parallel life of endless possibilities; “One life of no choice and little variety predicated on economic circumstance, the other free of material constraints.” I know what I would hear: Of course not! Never – she would never trade her children for anything, she loves us beyond anything the world can offer her. But I hope she hears somewhere at the back of her mind a whispered yes.
I used to say that one of my biggest learning curve in adulthood is learning to forgive my mother. We all come to learn to forgive our parents, I think, but the truth is, I often find that there might not be all that much to forgive: we were both thwarted into expectations of womanhood that never worked to our advantage. It was, for her, inevitable. Kodrat, as we Indonesians call it – biology as destiny, the true, natural place for the woman – was not to be insulted or refused. My mother had lived it, she had done her time. I would love to proclaim that we learned to release her from the prison we all watched over, but who am I kidding. She broke out, ala Shawshank Redemption, and she is all the finer for it.
