I’ve always thought of stories of new parenthood as a cross between how-to manuals and cautionary tales. It wasn’t until I read Meaghan O’Connell’s memoir that I realized mothers don’t write their stories for the benefit of those without children—whether their stories scare me or encourage me is irrelevant.
Cusk’s latest novel, the last installment of her much-talked about trilogy, has a deceptively celebratory title.
When Anne mellows into a gracious mother and wife, smiling gently in the background, her hair easily tamed, what comes next is inevitable. By the final book, Anne shrinks to near invisibility, cut from the title of her own story.
Future Home of the Living God has been hailed as the heir to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, mostly because it talks about women forced to carry out pregnancies and dystopian political repression. Those two ideas together, however, are nothing new.
A few days before my son was born, my parents and sister came to Princeton, where my husband and I lived at the time, to witness the birth. They had found a sublet a few blocks away from our apartment, but my mother wanted to spend the first few nights after the birth with us.
When I was pregnant, I felt for the first time in my life that I came first. Suddenly, my needs and desires weren’t mere whims; in the gestation of another being, they mattered tremendously. When this being was extracted from my body, I still felt it crucial to put myself, if not first, than at a very close second.
I read much of Shirley Jackson’s memoir of raising four children, Life Among the Savages (1952), on a weekend when I was caring for three children. For a brief stretch—maybe five pages—we achieved a fragile equilibrium and they were all attached to me as I read.
Elizabeth Onusko’s poems are sharp-edged, sometimes bleak, but also very funny; they feel timeless, but also of the moment in their portrayal of the complicated emotions surrounding infertility, pregnancy and impending parenthood. We caught up to talk writing, editing, parenting, and how that third activity reshapes the other two.
In March 2015, I went off the pill. It was all very well-planned on the surface, but inside I was hesitant, equivocal, terrified. I knew I wanted to have kids, but I didn’t ache for a baby, and I was worried about all the ways it would change my life, which I liked quite a bit.
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