Up Amongst The Men

By Anne Manne

Mothers today are made to think that our only real social contribution is done through the workforce. Could it be that the opposition of motherhood to serious work and thought, the supposed contradiction between art and life, is wrong?

When my second child attended school for the first time, some people expressed anxiety at the change ahead for me. One acquaintance, after emphasising the huge changes about to occur at my transition from being ‘down among the children’, said, ‘I’m sure you’ll be able to …’ she paused making a small gulping sound, and then gave a strangled gasp, ‘manage something. Perhaps helping out at kindergarten…’

Another peered at me, as if trying to divine whether any  mental life after motherhood might conceivably be left. I had a sudden image of my mental apparatus, lying like old machinery, a disused harvester perhaps, in a farmer’s field somewhere in a rural rust belt, long since left to seize up and decay. She actually used the word rehabilitation. It was clear people thought this would be an arduous, lengthy process.

Actually, it took about ten minutes. I had settled my younger daughter in on her first day of school, carefully concealing my sadness that this period of our lives together had come to an end. I wept briefly on the way home. But I was also rather happy. I was absolutely ready to write. I had waited long enough. When I got home I settled my coffee cup in a firm, decided gesture, cracked my knuckles a few times and sat down to write. That first school term I wrote the first essay of this book. I have been writing ever since.

However, the central themes and related connections between things that spring into life whenever something is deeply thought about, has been shaped by that time. Being a mother led me to deep reflection on so many parts of human existence that would not have come to life had I not had children. If mothering is a reflective enterprise, and maternal thinking is distinctive and different, then it is not opposed to philosophical thinking, but energises and informs it. It was motherhood which made me search out less conventional feminist voices who wrote about the ethic of care and took me in new intellectual directions. It made me see freshly the power and depth of our attachments to one another and opened for me a new, fascinating area that forms the theoretical scaffolding of the second part of the book.

I found resuming work — the work itself — a great pleasure. And now in a different place to when I wrote my first essay, I believe with Annie Roiphe that when that period of life comes to an end it is as well ‘not to have the sum of one’s worth in the bank of motherhood’. There was an irony. My writing about family work — the realm of what Nancy Folbre calls the invisible heart — was valued far more than the family work I did.

I am very glad I wrote that essay on early motherhood, because with one adult daughter and teenage years for the other, I am light years away from the emotional place where I wrote that. I could not write it now. Psychologists quite aptly describe it as a period of ‘holding’ — holding the wellbeing of another in one’s head. The intensity of that time fades and one is beset with different preoccupations, but more deeply it fades because some fundamental process of psychological separation has occurred. I am still very close to both my daughters, that is, as Helen Garner says, ‘the most precious thing’. And it is part of life’s greatest pleasures to see whom one’s children become. But it is quite different to the early, aching anguish of love. When I read that first essay again, I feel astonished by it, and uncomfortable with the person I was. Splinters of memory needle and bring a flash of something into focus and then it is gone.
 

With separation there is loss and relief, sorrow and joy. My most vivid memory of my ‘letting go’ phase was when I took a train to the Sydney Olympics. (It’s an old eccentricity from childhood that I adore trains.) As the train rattled forward I became aware of a sensation spreading over and suffusing me. It was oddly familiar but also strange. Then I realised. Like an old snakeskin I was re-inhabiting, climbing back inside an older youthful self who had so often travelled alone. The weirdest part was realising that a certain unconscious, deep order readiness — to jump up and answer a need, or laugh with or give comfort or counsel or talk, to give attention was absent. That capacity to change whatever one is doing and respond, openly and freely to another, to shift whatever state you are in or where one’s thoughts are and be attentive, to share another’s emotional state. One does not achieve that perfectly of course, ever, and as children get older, they are more and more capable of withstanding and understanding times of preoccupation — after all, they have such moments of their own. Here I was, hermeneutically sealed in a silver bubble spearing its way to Sydney, and that underlying readiness to give attention, that ‘holding’ of another in one’s head, was, for the moment, completely gone. In that intimation of what they call the empty nest, I felt both a dizzying sense of freedom but also an aching sense of loss. In the steady, thrumming rhythm of wheels upon steel, I could hear the sound of the future. 

One friend sent her beloved son to a new secondary school and said how she had wept when she saw ‘his tender little neck’ strangled, for the first time, by the noose of a tie. A lot of people made disapproving, clucking noises at her revelation. Although many feminist scholars still solemnly maintain that we are barely scrabbling our front hooves into the turf of freedom, our back hoofs forever being dragged down by the weight of a patriarchal culture into the old cult of motherhood, I have to say that it is more often that people frown or look queasy when I express the emotional, connected part of motherhood that is about maternal desire and love. Their faces lighten considerably if I speak of freedom on leaving motherland, and into the terrain of the sovereign self. There is a look of fleeting satisfaction, as if the world has been put right again.

We are more likely to tut-tut over ‘sentimentalising motherhood’ than living a ‘motherhood lite’ — a kind of affectless motherhood. In the elite discourse we are more comfortable with the expression of motherhood’s dark side of rage and frustration. Cynicism about mothering is especially popular. This disdain of sentimentality is interesting because sentimentality is about a distortion, a prettifying of feelings, but cynicism is really, as De Marneffe astutely notes, the flip side of sentimentality because it is a distortion too. The prevailing mood of cynicism goes much deeper than the black gallows humour that women use to diffuse and get through the bodily discomforts of pregnancy or early motherhood.

Cynicism’s sin is not distant from the great moral hazard of envy — the puncturing, spoiling impulse, to make everything ugly, to drag things down into the quagmire of resentment. 

I sometimes think motherlove is like sex used to be:OK for procreation purposes in the missionary position, all jolly and healthful like a hike in the woods, but making us uncomfortable if seething feeling or pleasure leaks out too visibly. And there are certainly those who would like to discipline and punish transgressors who, they consider, display too much emotion, or allow it to go beyond an orderly affair within a neat compartment which does not interfere with more appropriate, respectable enterprises, like paid work. ‘Oh, motherhood can be managed, you know,’ said one friend airily, as if talking about a well-run business meeting. ‘It’s just a matter of keeping your boundaries intact, and organisation.’ 

The mysterious pleasure of everyday life

I heard a woman say flatly at a dinner, amongst all the Supermen and Superwomen boasting about their work schedules, ‘I am not an energetic person.’ I felt like hugging her. Deep down I think most of work is as C.K. Chesterton described it: ‘The average man has to obey orders and do nothing else. He has to put one dull brick upon another dull brick, and do nothing else; he has to add one dull figure to another dull figure, and do nothing else.’

I agree with Caitlin Flanagan when she says, ‘I come from a family that considered home life one of the great rewards and pleasures of life. …Look at the great books—what does Odysseus dream of? Going home. If you don’t have a really great home life—if you’re not loved and cared for and wanted at home—you don’t have anything at all. …work is hard and draining, and home should be a pleasure. People are so confused about this—they think work is the pleasure and home is the burden.’

I remember when kith and kin were expectant that I would have an academic career and my heart quietly sinking. I remember, as an apprentice academic at a university staff meeting, looking out the window at brilliant sunshine to a sky shot with blue while they had moved onward from the photocopying allowance and onto the placement of the coffee urn, and thinking I can’t bear this! And later, having morning tea amongst the tweed jackets with leather patches in the History common room, listening to bright men talk about their dull books, while excitedly waving sticky buns in the air and thinking, I can’t bear this.

Stravinsky’s Lunch is a wonderful book. It is a remarkable achievement because it is a long, truthful meditation on women and art and life — or the ethic of care — but is not distorted by that corrosive acid of the emotion of resentment. I often wondered whether my book was the better or worse for being done slowly, over a long time, crammed in between amongst the logjam and muddle of everyday life. Several men who had wives who took care of the ‘everything else’ advised me to adopt the male pattern of work, just go off for six weeks or months alone somewhere and get it done. Should I have ‘worked like a man’, as Simone De Beauvoir might have approved?  

As I finished this book I had a chance to experience Stravinsky’s lunch. First both my husband and I were, through accident, both working frantically finishing major bits of writing. That is not how we normally do things, usually only one of us is working intensely, balanced by the other one who is not, to look after the ‘everything else’. Usually he does more work and I do a little more of the ‘everything else’. But he finished his deadline and we swapped places. He did the driving, picked up and washed and shopped. My elder daughter came home to stay for a while to help out and began cooking me lunches far more delicious than I’m sure Mrs Stravinsky could manage.

In a curious way, if ever I had fantasised whether I wanted to live the life of the male artist, like Stravinsky, working all hours and having my meals brought in on a tray and people tip-toeing and shushing around me, it was answered during this time.

I hated it. I don’t want to work all day every day till all hours. I don’t mind a short-term panic over a newspaper deadline but hate being under unrelenting pressure, long term, from work. I like a varied life, where work is balanced by the humble, deep and pure pleasure of everyday life. I longed to look out over the hills in the morning, sit in the garden or take a stroll or watch the animals eating their breakfast. I longed to pick up our daughter from school and hear what her day was like, to shop and cook and linger over a meal. I yearned for the spontaneity and pleasure of shared plans with my daughters. I longed for escape from the austerity of industrial time, to spend a little while doing absolutely nothing, for that blissful calm, the emptying out feeling from which a thought, an idea begins to take shape and gain momentum, as slowly, slowly, creativity begins out of nothingness and spins into the kernel of what I will write next. Nothing seemed convivial. It was working out on a treadmill compared with taking a walk in the beautiful countryside. My agent, Margaret Connolly, says she loves coming home after a Writer’s Festival rubbing shoulders with the famous, sorting out socks and thinking about dinner because she feels grounded again. I felt out of touch with everything, and only kept going by recourse to a potential self who would reclaim the mundane but mysterious pleasure of everyday life. 

The point of Modjeska’s beautifully written book is to both see the tension between art and motherhood, and what women do in the domestic realm, but also to show how that creativity can come also out of a female way of being in the world. In my brief Stravinsky’s lunch period, I noticed with interest, my writing got rather worse.  

Sometimes our ‘work family balance’ — to use the rather precarious sounding contemporary phrase — hummed along very nicely. But there were times, actually every time we got close to the contemporary ideal of the ‘dual career couple’, of feeling scattered, closer and closer to chaos, life crowded out by a too muchness. There was pleasurelessness, too, in the sensation of finishing one task only to begin another, all over again. 

One day I found myself kneeling in the mud by our ancient water tank, wiggling the plug with the special tweak that it needed to make our creaking water system work. It was Thursday and I had a Friday deadline and writers’ block — I very rarely experience that horrifying freeze, except if I don’t have enough time to do something — and I felt I didn’t have enough time to do justice to the story. My daughter’s laptop had blown up, two days before a crucial university essay, losing all her work; my younger daughter had a music exam. My husband finished university teaching and took over the laptop drama, my editor gave me two more days, I worked furiously to finish the piece, cut several thousand words, then took over the various family crises (they had multiplied), while he wrote a newspaper column on Sunday. I forget what, or how we ate.

When my knees were in the mud, fingers wrapped around that plug, I bitterly reflected that, from the outside, our life together had never been this good. Our income was higher, and we had reached the apotheosis, the veritable pinnacle of favoured contemporary family patterns, the ‘dual career couple’. (Actually it felt more like a quadruple career family, as our daughters’ lives had expanded too.) Everybody who felt earlier I had been doing ‘nothing’ now purred with contentment; I was finally, properly, doing ‘something’.
But in this outwardly satisfactory state of affairs we often felt stretched and strained, sometimes beyond endurance.

And as I knelt I had a memory.
It was from a time when we had very little money beyond essentials. When I had no idea what the future, après motherhood might hold.
I went to the old box of photos that I now had no time to order properly, and rummaged until I found it.

It was a photo of one of our daughters, near the spot where I had knelt. She is about two and a half, dressed in an old T-shirt of mine, just one small bare shoulder poking out. She is beaming, radiant with joy and triumph. The source of her pride is the flat wicker basket she holds of freshly harvested baby peas. The peas were the first from a vegetable garden she has helped make with her father. And I ached for that period in our lives when we had time. Time to grow peas.


Excerpted from Anne Manne’s recently released book Motherhood; How should we care for our children? Anne Manne is a writer and social commentator, who has been a columnist for The Australian and The Age, and feature writer for The Age. Prior to writing full time she taught in the Politics Departments of Melbourne and Latrobe Universities. She lives in Melbourne and is a mother of two.

Published in byronchild/Kindred, issue 16, December 05