## Metadata - Author: [[Rachel Cusk]] - Full Title: A Life's Work - Category: #books ## Highlights - Childbirth and motherhood are the anvil upon which sexual inequality was forged, ([Location 134](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00S55V7IG&location=134)) - A feeling of social anxiety, of terrible, private unease dogs me on the way home as I fight in the swaying taxi to stem my daughter’s grief, the breathtaking geyser of it as if from somewhere deep and dark and without limit. These two trains of thought do not disturb each other. I am surprised to discover how easily I have split in two. I worry; I console. Like a divided stream, the person and the mother pay each other no heed, although moments earlier they were indistinguishable: they tumble forwards, each with its separate life, driven by the same source but seeking no longer to correspond. ([Location 607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00S55V7IG&location=607)) - The vision of myself that I briefly glimpsed in the park – unified, capable, experiencing ‘the solidarity of life’ – is one that I will continue to pursue over the coming months. It proves elusive. Its constituents, resolutely hostile, are equally unruly. To be a mother I must leave the telephone unanswered, work undone, arrangements unmet. To be myself I must let the baby cry, must forestall her hunger or leave her for evenings out, must forget her in order to think about other things. To succeed in being one means to fail at being the other. ([Location 611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00S55V7IG&location=611)) - The break between mother and self was less clean than I had imagined it in the taxi: and yet it was a premonition, too; for later, even in my best moments, I never feel myself to have progressed beyond this division. I merely learn to legislate for two states, and to secure the border between them. At first, though, I am driven to work at the newer of the two skills, which is motherhood; and it is with a shock that I see, like a plummeting stock market, the resulting plunge in my own significance. Consequently I bury myself further in the small successes of nurture. After three or four weeks I reach a distant point, a remote outpost at which my grasp of the baby’s calorific intake, hours of sleep, motor development and patterns of crying is professorial, while the rest of my life resembles a deserted settlement, an abandoned building in which a rotten timber occasionally breaks and comes crashing to the floor, scattering mice. ([Location 615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00S55V7IG&location=615)) - 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. ([Location 650](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00S55V7IG&location=650)) - Sometimes I manage to read, or work, or talk, and am enjoying it when she wakes up unexpectedly and cries; and then the pain of moving from one life to the other is acute. ([Location 693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00S55V7IG&location=693)) - Motherbaby is designed to be an entirely sustainable unit. The baby is born installed with the ability to suck. The mother, meanwhile, has received notice during pregnancy of a Change of Use. Her breasts are requisitioned, deprogrammed: work is carried out on glands, on tissues. By the time the baby comes they are like two warheads on red alert. The baby sucks; the machinery springs into action; milk is magically produced. This milk is entirely sufficient to feed the baby for the first six months of her life, until she is able to sit up and eat food. It is designed to give the baby every nutrient she might need. It is sterile and emerges at the correct temperature. It can be given anywhere and at any time. As the baby grows, the mother shrinks. The reserves of fat she accumulated during pregnancy fuel the work of the breasts. Her uterus contracts; hormones circulate and are discharged. Her body is writing the last chapter of the story of childbirth. It has the beauty, the symmetry, of a dance. By its end, motherbaby is ready for life as mother and baby. The paint has dried; the joins no longer show. Ingenious, no? ([Location 975](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00S55V7IG&location=975)) - By day I feel a burden of social anxiety in the baby’s presence, like a hostess. We await her reviews of the theatre the world has become for her. When she sleeps I read the books again until I know some of their passages by heart, and because my daughter changes but they do not their meaning never quite penetrates, the connection with the real is never made. Like schoolwork their pages refuse to spring to life and so I learn them by rote, cribbing for some assessment only I apprehend and fear. ([Location 1234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00S55V7IG&location=1234)) - You and your wife are like people in a war, people trying to pilot a tank through battle. You give each other curt orders, your faces sideways. Every now and again one of you loses control and shouts violently, and when this happens the other shows no reaction. He or she has seen it all before. Neither of you has had an unbroken night’s sleep in five years. You are aware, vaguely, that there must be a reason things are like this, that other people would say you’d chosen it, done it to yourself, but if that’s true you certainly can’t remember doing it. You are like someone wrongly in prison, someone in a Kafka novel, fielding your punishment without knowing your crime. ([Location 1314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00S55V7IG&location=1314)) - No matter how much I try to retain my self, my shape, within the confines of this trial, it is like trying to resist the sleep an anaesthetic forces upon a patient. I believe that my will can keep me afloat, can save me from being submerged; but consciousness itself is unseated, undermined, by the process of reproduction. By having a baby I have created a rival consciousness, one towards which my bond of duty is such that it easily gains power over me and holds me in an enfeebling tithe. ([Location 1368](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00S55V7IG&location=1368)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - I had discovered, too, that those hours I had purchased back were damaged and second-hand. They were cramped and unsatisfactory; they were hours whose crazy ticking could be heard. Living those hours was like living in a taxi cab. Working in them was hard enough; pleasure, or at least rest, was unthinkable. I couldn’t fit my world into a space carved, as it seemed to me, from my daughter’s own flesh. ([Location 1628](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00S55V7IG&location=1628)) - The business of looking after a child possesses a core of unruliness, a quality of continual crisis, and my version of motherhood lacked, I saw, the aspect of military organisation with which such a core should be approached. I do not use the word ‘military’ lightly: conscription to the world of orthodox parenthood demands all the self-abnegation, the surrender to conformity, the relish for the institutional, that the term implies. ([Location 1705](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00S55V7IG&location=1705)) - The world of things was her unresting opponent, her wilderness, and she took the risk of its instability, its unpredictability. ([Location 1730](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00S55V7IG&location=1730)) - Singing seemed rather an intimate thing to do with people I hardly knew, but it was, at least, preferable to conversation. ([Location 1779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00S55V7IG&location=1779)) - a confederacy of vacillators and fools, of which I am a member. The night comes on like a storm over a desolate sea, upon which we sail in an uncaptained ship deploying measures by turns drastic and sentimental. We are heroic and cruel, authoritative and then servile, cleaving to our guesses and inspirations and bizarre rituals in the absence of any real understanding of what we are doing or how it should properly be done. ([Location 1902](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00S55V7IG&location=1902))