When the woman finishes her story, the narrator reacts, and her reaction does not restore the old narrative. How many other things, after all, have I obtained only to abandon them? How many other times have I gotten what I wanted only to discover that I’ve been wrong? And why, after all, should I really expect motherhood to be qualitatively different? On the basis, I wonder, of what hard evidence? But once I began to think about it, the idea seemed terrifying in its insistent straightforwardness. And because I had no such stories, this was a potentiality I struggled to contemplate. Before this, my world didn’t have any stories for women who had children only to discover that really they didn’t want them. It revealed a possibility I had never before considered. The woman’s story was so unfamiliar as to be seemingly impossible.
When I first discovered Popkey’s book, which teems with insight and artistry, it was this chapter that I read over and over. Toward myself as a mother I had no feeling.The hardest part of this to admit, the part that feels the most shameful-the reason I don’t tell anyone-it’s the fact that I don’t feel guilty. It was not, she says, that mothering was too hard, that she lost her mind or her senses or both. And so she goes out of her way to be clear, to convince the narrator of her consciousness, her utter surety. That it is, in contemporary society, perhaps one of the few remaining taboos. The woman recognizes that what she’s admitting to is uniquely monstrous. But then the baby came and though everything was-perfect, so much better than almost anyone in this country, in any country, can expect, I didn’t. “I didn’t think about having children because I had myself been a child.
The narrator, who has a child herself, listens to the story impassively, and her lack of reaction-the conversational, existential void she leaves-enables the woman to penetrate, in the telling, to the truth of her own experience.Īnd the truth of that experience is this: “After all,” she admits, “I did give the baby up.” She begins her story by telling the narrator that she usually elides the truth she usually tells people that she “gave the baby up.” When they assume she means for adoption, she says, “I don’t bother to correct them.” “It’s not a lie,” the woman continues.
#Popkey replacement series
Toward the end of her book, the unnamed protagonist-who mostly exists to relay the conversations she has with a series of female interlocutors, like a literary cousin of Rachel Cusk’s Faye-meets a woman in a grocery store who confesses to abandoning her child. Writer Miranda Popkey, in her novel Topics of Conversation, offers interesting food for thought. And what if she’s the opposite of the woman I expect? Motherhood would make of me someone I don’t know yet. The newness of such transformation would be its own kind of death, but perhaps in focusing unduly on the self that I would lose I have avoided confronting the fear of who I would be. Perhaps, when it comes right down it, motherhood is actually as individual as personhood itself, so that becoming a mother will not so much erase me as replace me with someone new. I cannot know who my children might be, nor how I will serve or fail them. There’s no way of anticipatorily mapping the universe that is a new life in the world. There is, of course, really no way of knowing what kind of mother I will be in advance. It’s only as I get older and closer to deciding what I will do-as motherhood instantiates itself more fully in the lived realities of my peers and friends-that I realize this presumption of mine is far from a certainty. I’ve never before looked askance at its inherent essentialism, its reliance upon a reductive gender dynamic that I have, in other areas of my life, already thrown off. It’s never before occurred to me to consider the extent to which this assumption is unexamined and uninterrogated. I assume, I suppose, that I will fall hopelessly in love, and that even when I don’t feel moved by love I will stay, burying myself in motherhood’s mundanity through the force of innate biological compulsion, or irrepressible animal instinct. I somehow know that I would empty myself out for my imagined future children, am so convinced of this projection that I feel compelled to guard against it in the childless here-and-now. The orientation of this entire inquiry springs from the sense I have of myself as a natural caretaker-prone to accommodation and self-abnegation sensitive to duty and guilt. I do not ask myself what kind of mother I expect to be.īut my unspoken supposition is that I will be a good one, a loving one, a veritable martyr on the minefield of motherhood.
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