THE GR AND

SHATTERING

By Sarah Manguso

never wanted to be a mother. I

wanted to be a person. My identity
crisis began at age three, when I
wanted to be Popeye but realized
that I had to be Olive Oyl instead. I
remember throwing myself down on
my bed, wondering how Id ever figure it out. I remember exactly how I
felt because I feel that way still.
Bombarded by inviolable stereotypes that distinguished between
Mommy and all other roles, I decided that I would be a boy in the shape
of a girl, a man in the shape of a
woman. My early fantasies were of
fighting with the boys in my secondgrade class and then making out
with them. I wore boys clothes well
into middle school, and even after I
caught on that girls were supposed to
peg their jeans and wear sweaters
with brightly colored triangles and
squares, I wasnt willing to begin that
drag performance. Not yet.
I moved to New York when I was
twenty-three. My friends were already getting married. My plan,
which I didnt mind telling anyone
who brought up marriage, progeny,
or real estate, was to wait until all
my friends got married and left town.
Then Id move upstate, buy a little
house, and seduce my neighbors
teenage boys until I died of loneliness or old age.
A man who used to cuff and
clamp me, and who once cut a hole
in my tights with his coke razor and
fucked me through it, became a
close friend. One month I had an
unusually heavy period. I think I
might actually be having a miscarriage,
I told him. At least you arent having a
kid, he replied, shudder
ing. We both laughed.

or years, I asked writers who were

also mothers how they prioritized
the various components of their
identitieswas Writer below Mother, and if so, would it be possible to
reverse that? One woman told me
36 HARPERS MAGAZINE / AUGUST 2015

that her identity wasnt a ladder but

a pie chart containing slices of variable sizes. That answer sounded to
me like an oblique admission that
she wasnt a writer first. Since I
didnt want to be anything but a
writer first, I dismissed her.
In my twenties, I couldnt imagine
a meaningful life in which I didnt
have as much time for silent contemplation as I had then. I couldnt understand the mothers who assumed
that I envied them or that motherhood was my goal.
I didnt believe that motherhood
could be more joyous than my existing life. To me, mothers were
people who had decided that a life
without children, my life, wasnt
fulfilling enough, wasnt joyous
enough. Before my son was born,
my life was full. There was nothing
missing. There was no reason to
have a child. The longer I sought a
reason, the more remote such a reason seemed.
As the years passed, I came to see
how many serious women writers
were and are mothers, and that my
fearthat being a mother would
prevent me from being a writer
might be irrational. Perhaps having a
child might make me a better writer,
I thought. Or perhaps if I didnt have
a child, I might become a worse writer, or maybe even a worse person.
I didnt want a child. Even after I
decided to become pregnant, I
didnt want a child. I conceived

one as a hedge against

future regret.

efore I became a mother I imagined I would be a writer at some times

and a mother at others, but I cannot
compartmentalize the two activities.
Motherhood has no compartment; I
am always a mother. If the babysitters
car breaks down, if my son steps on a
bee at the park, if my husband needs
to travel for work, I am a mother first.
Im a mother even when Im writing.

My subjects havent changed, and

neither has my form, but the quality
of attention of this new mind, the
mind of someone who is responsible
for a helpless person, is different
more distractible and therefore more
desperate not to be distracted.
Before I became a mother I believed that writing was the center of
my life. Everything else revolved
around itday jobs, relationships,
family commitments. It didnt feel
like a choice; I was in thrall to the
need to write. Some metaphysical
force impelled me. To support my
writing I skipped food and sleep,
kept ridiculous hours, traveled to distant residencies. I always believed
that the point of writing for an audience was to rescue the suicidal and
to console the dying. But the point
of motherhood is to help someone
immediately, to console a person
who is right there next to you. Writing is a choice, Ive learnedfor my

sons helplessness leaves

me no choice.

now look back at my old life,

when I believed myself to be as happy and fulfilled as a person could be,
with the same maternal pity I used
to despise. It seems obvious to me
that my refusal to have a child was a
way to avoid the challenges of extreme love, to avoid participating in
dismantling the stereotypes that had
brainwashed me.
I pre-mourned the end of my writing career and writer-self throughout
my pregnancy, but the crisis I anticipated never arrived. Now I merely
feel like a writer who is a mother, or
a mother who is a writer, depending
on my immediate circumstances.
The fear that Id stop being a writer,
whatever that means, is gone.
I used to believe that maximizing
the number of hours reading, writing, and thinking about writing
would make me the best writer I
could be, and that my friend who
had chosen to have three children
just didnt value being a writer as
much as I did. Then I had a child
and found that the amount of time I
spend writing isnt the only thing
that makes me a better writer. I also
grow by weathering trauma, practicing patience, being seasoned by love.

Women who deride

motherhood as merely an
animal condition have accepted the patriarchal belief that motherhood is
trivial. Its true that motherhood can seem trivial to
women who have been
insulated from the demands of others; they are
given few reasons to value
motherhood and many reasons to value individual
fulfillment. They are
taught, as I was, to value
self-realization as the essential component of success, the index of ones
contribution to the world,
the test of our basic humanity. Service to the
world was understood as a
heroic act achieved by a
powerful ego. Until Id
burrowed out from under
those beliefs, being a writer seemed a worthier

goal than being

a mother.

Before I had my son I was convinced that motherhood would ruin

my writing and cause a profound loss
of self that would never be compensated. My old self is indeed gone, but
I perceive the world more carefully
and more lovingly than before because I am more aware of the effects
of love and of time on an individual
person. And I am more aware of the
limits of love and of time.
The biggest change that motherhood has wrought on me is this:
whether or not Im happy is no longer
the central question of my life. This
disposition is often mischaracterized
as selflessness. But if it is in fact selflessness, it isnt a willed state. I feel the
need to care for my son as an itch, an
urge. This is what people mean when
they describe the rearing of young as
a biological necessity. Lest you accuse
me of wanting only to usher my own
DNA into the future, Ill tell you a
little story.
When my son was almost three,
one of my friends sent me a photo-

graph of her newborn daughter. My

phone twitched and I pressed the little button and saw the face of a baby
in profile, milk-drunk. My breasts
tingled with an unmistakable feeling. They were filling with milk. I
hadnt nursed my son in nearly two
years. No milk had come in all that
time, but now I squeezed my nipples,
and milk came out. If there were an

earthquake, a bombing, I

could nurse the orphans.

hose who are not on intimate

terms with illness, poverty, violence, exile, and war are fundamentally different from those who
are. That difference isnt a choice;
its simply there, a gulf that cannot
be bridged. I cant know what its
like to be an orphan, for example,
and few of my friends know, as I
do, what its like to be seriously ill.
T h o s e w h o h ave n o t p a s s e d
through the gauntlet of motherhood cannot be equal in experience to those who have.

Untitled (Putting on Make-Up), Kitchen Table series II, by Carrie Mae Weems, whose work
was on view last year at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York City
The artist. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York City

he point of having
a child is to be rent
asunder, torn in two.
Years before I had my son I heard
of an artist explaining why she had
decided to become a mother: I
didnt want to reach the end of my
life intact. Imperious, I judged this
to be sentimentalp ermanently
damaged by a chronic illness, I
considered myself already ruined
and misunderstood by the healthy
and normal. And what is more
normal than the ability to give
birth? But motherhood is a different sort of damage. It is a shattering, a disintegration of the self, after which the original form is quite
gone. Still, it is a breakage that we
are, as a species if not as individuals, meant to survive.
I want to read books that were
written in desperation, by people
who are disturbed and overtaxed,
who balance on the extreme edge of
experience. I want to read books by
people who are acutely aware that
death is coming and that abiding
love is our last resort. And I want to
write those books.
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