Read Online A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk - Free Book Online

floors of tower blocks within an hour of their issue, leaving the girls free to pursue careers in high finance. My books, similarly, carry health warnings on the subject of crying. A baby’s crying, I am told, can cause depression and psychosis, and can result in you harming your baby. If you feel that you would like to harm your baby, put it in a safe place and leave the room for ten minutes. The tone of this instruction is curt, following on from mellifluous pages on the subjects of breastfeeding, bonding, and how you and your partner might divert yourselves sexually until you are able to resume what is described as ‘full intercourse’. It peters out into a series of telephone numbers, for organisations with names like CRY-SIS.
    Having apparently reached a sort of Land’s End of charted motherhood, I quickly see that the problem is one I must study and solve myself.
Mothers soon come to recognise the meaning of their baby’s different cries
, I read. I have indeed worked out that on those occasions when the crying is halted by feeding, I might interpret in retrospect its meaning to have been that of hunger; or one of its meanings, in any case. The baby’s cries are so deafening, so urgent, so redolent of emergency that my first instinct on hearing them is always to rush her to hospital, or leave the building as if a fire alarm were going off. I understand that crying, being the baby’s only means of communication, has any number of causes, which it falls to me, as her chief companion and link to the world, to interpret. Further, it is suggested to me that this interpretation is being used as the information upon which she is with every passing minute founding the structure of her personality. My response to these early cries, in other words, is formative. I should do nothing that I don’t intend to continue doing, should make no false moves, lest I find myself co-habiting in the months and years to come with the terrible embodiment of my weaknesses, a creature formed from the patchwork of my faults held together by the glue of her own apparently limitless, denatured, monstrous will.
    I have no difficulty in understanding what I read of the early relationship between mother and child. The child’s yearning to be repossessed by the mother’s body, its discovery of desire and satisfaction, its exploration of the limits of itself, and of another person and the fact of that person’s own will; the mother’s impulse both to protect and to expose, to yield and to separate, her responsibility both to love and to sort of steer everything in the right direction: I can see it all. The problem is that this vision doesn’t much seem to resemble my situation. The baby’s objections seem both comprehensive and startlingly personal; my own responses random, off-key and profoundly unmagical. It is not only difficult to believe that I am the object of the baby’s desire, an object she is unresting in her attempts to enslave to her own will; it is in fact quite possible that she doesn’t like me at all. I have enough imagination to picture the blur of her world, the fog of herself through which differentiation is impossible, the imperatives of her body and yet its paralysis; I do not believe that she is necessarily composing a list of objections to my conduct. It is merely that when I come looming through this fog I don’t appear to improve things.
    I wake to find her red and rigid on the bed beside me, the room vibrating with sound. It is 9.30 am. I have been up many times in the night to feed her, and at some late point we clearly slumped jointly into an unexpected sleep. Other people have gone to work, to school, while we slept: the world is at its desk. We are in the housewifely slurry of everything that is both too late and too early, of madness and morning television. The day lies ahead empty of landmarks, like a prairie, like an untraversable plain. The baby is