I Speak for the Housewives

I first took issue with something the literary critic Merve Emre said when she wrote an intense and in-depth pan of Minna Dubin’s book, Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood, for The New Yorker. Because I used to have a podcast called Mom Rage, people had alerted me to this review and, surely I read it with more personal investment and degree of bias than other casual readers might have.

I wanted to write about how the review had frustrated me. How Emre’s arguments seemed to be adding another layer of bricks atop this wall that separates one’s feeling-self from one’s intellect, that separates the idea of the stay-at-home mom with all of her softness and invisibility from the one who works outside of the house with all of her sharpness and three-dimensionality. Not only that, but Emre seemed unyieldingly on the “side” of the intellectual. She was using her precise language and dexterous mind to take down a book she had found sloppy and overly emotional.

The review is titled “The Mother Trap” and below it, the little teaser in italics particularly grated. “Everyone’s talking about ‘mom rage,’ but what is it?” it asked. My own feeling-self was activated. My heartbeat picked up along with a desire to ask Emre a few questions. Most pressingly: How much time did / does Emre spend with her young children?

But I hadn’t read Dubin’s book and didn’t want to. So, how could I make a case for defending it? Secondly, it seemed like a lot of work and I didn’t have the bandwidth. Lastly, I wasn’t super eager to publicly criticize a fellow mother and writer. I didn’t want to get into the kind of argument where I have to carefully state that I am not trying to pit one type of mothering over another, but rather point out that we’re all missing the mark in one way or another.

But then, in February, Emre forced my hand. She gave an interview with the writer Sara Fredman on Fredman’s Substack. The post’s title is a quote from Emre: “You Don't Have to Write an Essay About Your Marriage and Your Divorce.” It’s meant to provoke and, well, provoke it did. At the same time, the introduction to the interview also seemed to affirm my instincts that Emre’s literary criticism work keeps her at a distance from much of everyday motherhood. Of course, I have no way of knowing what Emre does or doesn’t do in terms of domestic labor, but in the words of the interviewer Sara Fredman, Emre has:

a version of that romanticized writer’s life long enjoyed by men with wives willing to tend to their earthly needs. She has two young children but somehow writes for nine to 12 hours a day and travels extensively [for work].

Again, my intention is not to criticize a mother who works outside of the home. My intention is to point out that this experience of writing for “nine to 12 hours a day” is very different from not only my own experience of being a writer and mother, but also many of the other writer-mothers I know. My intention is to point out the simple fact that the more time one spends with any family member, the more opportunities there are to rage at them. And, if you’re a writer, the more you might find yourself spending what little time you have to write, writing about this very phenomenon.

I asked my literary agent if we could try and get this essay published in The New Yorker and she very kindly told me, “Uh, I don’t think they’re gonna take it.” So these little illustrations are my best attempt at New Yorker-style prose-breaks.

When this interview with Emre first came out, I saw it but didn’t read it. I was in the midst of a deep-dive analysis of the novel, Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai, a book about a seemingly bored housewife. And ironically, this—literary criticism—is the Merve-Emre approved way of writing about your personal life without “betraying” the privacy of your actual children or other family members, which is the main reason she gives for admonishing the practice of parents writing about their children. Specifically, in the interview with Fredman, she says:

You can just write a piece of [literary] criticism that's about a book like Liars [by Sarah Manguso], and you can betray so much about yourself and still not be exposing or betraying others.

The reason I was in the midst of a deep-dive analysis of Mild Vertigo was because women writing about motherhood and domesticity is a favorite topic of mine and I very much wanted to understand what Kanai—via her novel—was saying about housewives. (Was she on the side of the sharp, intellectual-mother or the squishy, transparent one?) And while the cover of the book touted an afterword by Kate Zambreno, whom I thought might help me to understand what Kanai was saying, I wouldn’t let myself read it until I’d synthesized the book myself first.

When I finally did read the afterword, I had even more to say. It wasn’t that I was let down by Zambreno’s interpretation. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed her essay. She has fun with it—approaching the piece kind of like fan fiction. But it’s an overall stressful read. Zambreno latches on to the issue of class differences as well as the vertigo-inducing drudgery that’s portrayed in Mild Vertigo. Zambreno is a mother-writer herself and throughout the piece, she describes not only the mounting list of tasks she must perform as a caretaker but also the emotional weight of it all as well as the problem of how to pay for the needs of her family on an artist’s salary.

Around the same time, I came across, via The New Yorker, a personal essay by Leslie Jamison. The title “The Birth of my Daughter, the Death of my Marriage” drew me in immediately. I read the whole thing right then and there.

It’s exactly the kind of personal essay Emre says people “don’t have to” write as it covers the dissolution of Jamison’s marriage and the early years of motherhood, but similar to how Emre admits in the interview with Fredman that reading Dubin’s book helped her to clarify her opinion on the ethics of writing about your children, so too did Jamison’s essay help me clarify some thoughts on the tricky business of writing about motherhood.

Which is that these essays often become a kind of beautifully-crafted ode to the domestic to-do list and/or accomplishments that no one can truly appreciate but the primary caregiver. Here’s Jamison describing what it was like to take her three-month-old baby along with her on book tour. “Four weeks, eighteen cities,” she writes and then goes on:

We ticked away the flights in silent rosaries. Praying she’d nap on the plane. Praying the flight attendant would let me keep her in the carrier. Praying she’d nurse on the final descent so that her ears could pop. Praying we’d remembered the shusher. Praying we could find a hardware store with the special screwdriver we needed to replace the dead batteries in the shusher. We needed that noise to survive.

This is not meant as a criticism of Jamison’s piece. I do this exact thing and have done this exact thing when writing essays about my kids and/or motherhood. And am positive that this kind of thing shows up in my novel as well.

But what I’m realizing, maybe only now—ten years into being a mother—is that what I really want from writing on motherhood is for someone to tell me or show me that motherhood, all on its own, is fascinating. Both emotionally and intellectually.

That having a baby and raising that baby is the most interesting thing that’s ever happened in all of humanity. So interesting that of course you have to write about it. Yes, it’s also mundane. But even the monotony of it is fascinating, if you’ll allow it to be. Which, in a way, could be the one-sentence version of what I took from Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo.

In her memoir, A Life’s Work, Rachel Cusk writes: “In motherhood a woman exchanges her public significance for a range of private meanings.” This has definitely been my own experience. A mother in public is just a mother. And personally, when it has come to finding outside (public) employment, being one has only hurt my opportunities. In fact, if I’ve had any public significance as a mother at all it would be because I’ve tried to write about this “range of private meanings.”

Emre, on the other hand, as a mother and literary critic for a prestigious magazine like The New Yorker and specifically as a critic for them on a book about motherhood seems able to opt out of this frustrating exchange. Or, put another way, she gets to have both.

Part of the reason I write about motherhood publicly is because I think it’s so significant. But would I do this if I’d been able to find significance elsewhere? Would I do this if I felt the job—the basics of which are mired in emotions—received any respect beyond lip-service from the public? From intellectuals?

Another thing I find frustrating about Emre’s stance is that she’s tapping into the age-old concern for the children. Oh, the children! In the interview, she makes the observation that “so many books about motherhood… are written by people who have very young children” and she points this out because she thinks:

it gets much more complicated when your children are older and when they're able, among other things, to create competing narratives to the one that you've created about them.

There’s nothing to disagree about here. She’s correct. And as a grown-up writer, this is exactly what I’ve done with my writing: written competing narratives to the ones that I grew up with, to the ones my caregivers (the word “care” used loosely here!) served me when I was a dependent child.

But to me, this point from Emre feels all too similar to the ones that emerge when debating the ethics of abortion. Is an embryo a human life? Is a fetus a baby? Does the experience of pregnancy belong to the woman or is that the baby’s domain? What about breastfeeding?

In my experience, so much of the drama of motherhood is in this attempt to raise someone who can be / will have to be independent one day. My children are eight and ten, and we just signed them up for sleep-away camp for the first time. I felt so proud of myself for doing this, for taking this step, and then, as I fell asleep that night, I had this haunting voice asking me the question: “But what if Isaac needs you?” I imagined my youngest son far away at camp feeling homesick and me being unable to do anything about it. How long will I be asking myself this question: what if he needs me? It may not always be valid, but I suspect I’ll be asking it, in some respects, for the rest of my life.  

Sabrina Orah Mark’s essay, “The Silence of Witches,” found in her collection, Happily: A Personal History-with Fairy Tales, opens with the following:

I have a dream my mother is standing at my front door crying. Her hair is wet and tangled in seashells. She’s read a story I’ve written. “How could you,” she says. “Your own mother.”

Soon, the author’s whole family is there, her husband and children included, and they’re all asking her this same question: How could she? Mark answers:

I’ll stop writing. I’m sorry. And I do. I stop forever, and instantly my lips and hands are dotted with mold. White threads spread across my face where mushrooms begin to swell. I grow wild with silence.

Like the title of the book alludes, Mark’s collection deals in fairy tales. And in this essay, she references “The Little Mermaid,” both the Disney version and the Hans Christian Andersen one. I haven’t read the latter, but it sounds like the versions are similar, both involving a sea witch who turns the little mermaid into a human in exchange for the mermaid’s voice.

Later in the essay, a writing student asks Mark if she thinks writing about the self and one’s interpersonal relationships—with all of its ethical problems—is really worth it. Mark responds:

“If I stopped writing, I’d go sea witch.”

“But shouldn’t certain things be left sacred?” [the student] asks. “Like your children?”

The word children floats above my head like a magnificent cloud about to burst. And when it bursts, I will be drenched by them. All day I am drenched by them. A holy water. Why, I wonder, should the sacred be unsayable?

I’ve been joking to myself (and to my therapist) that the bulk of my fate was sealed when a professor in medical school expressed his annoyance that he was even teaching my mother. “You’re taking some guy’s place,” he apparently said to her, “and you’re just going to have babies and not practice.”

In this tale, the male professor is the sea witch. Because like the little mermaid, my mother will go on to make a trade, too. She will take the route of public significance. She’ll become a pediatrician. She will dodge contending with the insignificance of motherhood; when I’m in third grade, she will move away from me and my brother. She will spend her days taking care of other people’s kids instead of her own.

When I knew I was going to write about this I called my mom, who lives across the country, to ask her about that memory. I wanted to know exactly what the male professor said to her, but, are you ready for this? She was at work, seeing patients. (She’ll be seventy-six in April.)

I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that this is the story of my life: reaching out to my mom and her being unavailable. Growing up, I had her work number memorized. (I can still recall it right now!) Also locked into memory are the tone and cadence of the nurses, always female, who answered the phone: “Your mom’s with a patient. Can I take a message?”

When I was little, I was never mad at my mom for not being available. No, the anger would come much later. Anger and then, eventually, sadness. And then, much much later: acceptance.

But even now, at age forty-two, though I’ve accepted that this is who my mother is, when I call her and she’s not available, I can still feel a quick swirl of emotions. A flash of rejection. A reminder of the mathematical equation I grew up with: Mom’s work > me. (Dad’s work was also > me, but well, the acceptance came earlier and more often with him.)

When I became a parent, I always knew I was overcorrecting for this. That more than anything, I wanted to make myself available to my kids. And I was. I am. I’m a housewife who writes when she can. And for the most part, I write about what I know.

Reading A Life of Meaning by the Jungian psychoanalyst, James Hollis, I got an even clearer understanding of what I’ve been doing as a parent ever since I became one for the first time ten years ago. Hollis writes:

Jung repeatedly noted, that the greatest burden any child faces is the unlived life of the parent.

My mother’s unlived life? Being available to her kids. Maybe one day my kids will write about me and what they perceive to be my “unlived life”? But if I didn’t write at all, I suspect they’d have much more to say.

In “The Silence of Witches,” Sabrina Orah Mark’s stepdaughter is old enough to push back. She confronts her stepmother and asks her why she wrote about her. Mark writes:

I want to say something about repair. About fixing us. About love, and fear, and hard work. About wanting to help her. But instead I say, “This is my life too.”

It’s impossible to know exactly how you’re impacting your kids, but right now, if I imagine either of my parents having written about me, my body relaxes. My dad died a decade ago, and even in his will, my name didn’t come up.

Imagining either of my parents having written a book and dedicating it to me is to imagine a completely new sense of myself. To know that they’d taken the time to consider me and/or to consider their role as parents. But also, sure, maybe not. Maybe in this alternative timeline, it would have felt like a breach, a violation. Alas, I can’t say.

And in terms of my own children, only time will tell. But also, in terms of my own children, I feel like we’ll be okay. I feel like I’ll be able to explain: This is my life, too.