A Life's Work
Rachel Cusk
My rating - 5/5 stars
To be honest, I don’t think I ever thought much about motherhood and what it entails, till I myself became a mother. The event was an eye opener, literally. And what I did think at the time of my pregnancy and then being a new mother, has now found an echo in Cusk’s memoir. She writes about her own experience and she does it with such honesty and straightforwardness that you cannot help but gasp, at certain moments, because it is so rare to find words expressing your own emotions.
Being a new mother is not easy, especially the first time. Apart from the known physical exhaustion, which does disrupt the normal routine she always took for granted before child birth, it is the mental stress, the anxiety which becomes her constant companion after that. For one, she is tired, like all the time, and afraid if she is doing it right by her child. She feels contradictory emotions – a sort of bewilderment at first, then love, even frustration and then remorse for feeling frustrated. She wishes for some time for herself, to take care of her own being and when she is away from her child, she feels tormented because she doesn’t trust anyone else to take care of her child the way she thinks she can.
I have gone through these emotions too. And frankly, the love and attachment came later. I was mostly overwhelmed because besides taking care of a child as a first time mother, I was also confronted with a difficult family situation. It still gives me shivers to remember those days.
Reading A Life’s Work has kind of given validity to my thoughts. To think that I am not alone in thinking the way I did, is a relief. To be able to write about it as she did, a freedom of mind I wish I had when I was that young. It is liberating, the reading of this book.
Cusk has agency, she is aware of her own emotions, she can think, write and get published. She can be heard. I know of so many women who are so conditioned in the established structure that even the idea of thinking for themselves must be alien to them. What still makes this memoir a very powerful one for me is that Cusk is searingly honest about what she has felt and gone through. She has put her heart out for everyone to see. This is brave enough. That she has given a voice to sometimes latent or maybe unspeakable feelings of many others, is much admirable.
Being a new mother is not easy, especially the first time. Apart from the known physical exhaustion, which does disrupt the normal routine she always took for granted before child birth, it is the mental stress, the anxiety which becomes her constant companion after that. For one, she is tired, like all the time, and afraid if she is doing it right by her child. She feels contradictory emotions – a sort of bewilderment at first, then love, even frustration and then remorse for feeling frustrated. She wishes for some time for herself, to take care of her own being and when she is away from her child, she feels tormented because she doesn’t trust anyone else to take care of her child the way she thinks she can.
I have gone through these emotions too. And frankly, the love and attachment came later. I was mostly overwhelmed because besides taking care of a child as a first time mother, I was also confronted with a difficult family situation. It still gives me shivers to remember those days.
Reading A Life’s Work has kind of given validity to my thoughts. To think that I am not alone in thinking the way I did, is a relief. To be able to write about it as she did, a freedom of mind I wish I had when I was that young. It is liberating, the reading of this book.
Cusk has agency, she is aware of her own emotions, she can think, write and get published. She can be heard. I know of so many women who are so conditioned in the established structure that even the idea of thinking for themselves must be alien to them. What still makes this memoir a very powerful one for me is that Cusk is searingly honest about what she has felt and gone through. She has put her heart out for everyone to see. This is brave enough. That she has given a voice to sometimes latent or maybe unspeakable feelings of many others, is much admirable.
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