This crescent of Cape Cod beach, down a dirt road from the cottage Paul and I are staying in for the weekend, is nearly empty. Waves slosh against the pebbled shore. The clouds, when they pass, take their time, drifting in languorous wisps. In my lap are a notebook and Thoreau’s Walden, which I’ll be teaching this fall in my eleventh grade American literature class.
I read some paragraphs—watch foam swirling around rocks, a mother pulling a child through the water on a boogie board—and contemplate how I’ll make Thoreau matter to a room of twenty-first century teenagers. It’s been years since I read Walden in my own high school English class.
Was it Thoreau, or was it Emerson, who wrote about following your own drumbeat? I scan the pages, searching. “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” Yes. I underline this sentence, remembering how it sung to me when I was seventeen, and feeling so chronically off-tempo.
Paul has gone fishing for the morning, but I’m not technically, in this moment, alone. Under my cotton cover-up, beneath the stretched fibers of my bathing suit, below the rounded skin of my belly, is our first child. She has been inside me for sixteen weeks now.
Recently, I’ve started to feel her: she is the nudge of a rowboat against dock, the ripple of seaweed in water. But mostly, she is still. I can read for long stretches, burying my feet, feeling little pyramids of sand spill from my toes as I lift them out again, and forget entirely that she’s with me.
I look up from my book. There, again, are the mother and child. She’s a young mother, stout and athletic, and her child is maybe three or four—a girl. She lies belly-down on her boogie board, kicking and paddling. But this effort is pure pretend. It’s the mother who pulls her through the water, her face immobile, her wrist through the loop of the cord, her calves stamping through surf as she moves from left to right across my field of vision.
I can feel my energy waning, as it has so easily since I’ve been pregnant. I tip my head back against my beach chair. When I get back to the house, I think, I’ll make myself a toasted cheese. Or maybe a tuna sandwich? Seagulls squawk and the August sun glides over my legs. It’s possible I fall asleep.
When I open my eyes: mother and child, moving from right to left. Trudge, trudge go mother’s legs; paddle, paddle go her daughter’s hands. How long, I think, can this go on? The mother hauls her daughter all the way down to the jetty, and then back they come, rope taut, board bouncing, the mother’s gaze in front of her.
The girl is happy, chattering. The mother is—I cannot tell what the mother is. Devoted, clearly. But devotion isn’t exactly an emotion.
Do I have the sense, as I watch this woman, that I am seeing into my future? Or is it only later, after our daughter is born, and then our son, and then our younger daughter—when our floorboards bang with feet, and our walls climb with toys, and from upstairs or the next room or the rug at my feet a child is calling Mama, Mama, come here Mama, watch Mama, open this Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama—that this memory starts to shimmer like an omen.
The sand, the clouds, the water. Thoreau in his wooded hermitage. The boogie board, the rope. The mother with her shackled wrist, trailing a child behind her.
*
When our daughter is born, my husband cuts the cord, but there are other yokes between us. I know from reading my baby manuals that newborns arrive ready to feed, but nothing has prepared me for the sheer animal force of my daughter’s appetite, the damp insistence of her body, rooting at my bare chest in search of nourishment.
As I watch her mouth lock onto my breast, as I feel the rhythmic tug of her sucking and my body’s dormant powers stirring awake, I understand she has only partly loosed herself from me. I look at Paul and begin to cry. My daughter is in me and I am in her, and I cannot tell where she ends and I begin.
If only awe were sustainable and I could tap, perpetually, into this sublime togetherness. But by the time we’re home from the hospital, something in me has shifted.
Before, when breastfeeding was a picturesque activity I occasionally glimpsed on planes and park benches, it had seemed like a brief and pleasant respite in a woman’s day. I’m stunned to discover how long a feeding takes: twenty minutes on one side, followed by twenty on the other.
Newborns, the postpartum nurse informs me, eat every two hours, which seems half-reasonable until I learn the clock resets at the start, not the end, of each feeding. A new mother spends a third of her day with a body in her arms, a mouth on her skin, her baby’s heat and hunger pinning her down.
My husband is not pinned down. He’s so good, so helpful, with his mobility. He hustles to fetch me burp cloths, glasses of water, slices of toast. How, I wonder, do so many women do this alone—women without eager partners, or partners at all?
Then, two weeks later, his paternity leave ends. He heads out the door and does not return until my sweatpants are sagging and the evening news is flashing, and I am not sure where my day or life has gone.
What’s hardest about these hours isn’t the breastfeeding, or cycles of laundry, or on-and-off of diapers, or even the urgent na na na! of my daughter’s cries. It’s the way these things together fill all time and space, spreading into the corners of our little apartment, rising to my knees, thighs, groin, and then up under my ribcage, until something essential inside me has been crowded out.
My aunt calls to talk, but the baby is fussing. I need to pee, but the baby is spitting up. The moment I follow the trail of my own longings—reaching for a book, or sinking into thought as I stare at the flowered couch pillows—I am jerked backward, my daughter’s needs yanking me from myself.
There are products to help with this, bouncers and swings and an egg-shaped contraption called a Mamaroo I nearly buy that mimics the movements of the womb. But in the middle-class child-raising culture of which I’m now part, a culture lorded over by Dr. William Sears and other attachment parenting theorists, these aids are all a little suspect—corner-cutting and possibly baby-ruining substitutes for the very best bouncing, swinging, shushing thing, which is me.
Nothing, Dr. Sears warns in The Baby Book, can replace the ministrations of an ever-present mother, so attuned to her baby’s gestures that she can respond to them immediately, laying the groundwork for a happy life. And so I buy products that bind my daughter and me closer: a sling that hangs from my neck so I can wear her, a bassinet that affixes to my bedside so I can sleep with her, a monitor that clips to my waistband when I slip out for the mail.
The cords between us are wireless, or cotton, or nylon with plastic buckles. They wind around our bodies and click snugly into place, fastening us together.
My daughter is so beautiful, so perfect, with palms that curl like little moons. Her smile is a window into the hugeness of the world.
And yet it’s not easy for me, all this she-and-I-ness, the constant relational orbit that is our life. How many times, when I was pregnant, had I been warned about the isolation of being home with a baby? Join a moms’ group! Make time to connect with friends! But it’s not communion I lack, or loneliness I feel. I cannot yet name what I feel—even to myself.
When my maternity leave ends, I leave my teaching job, which I love, and accept a work-from-home curriculum-writing job, which I do not love, so I can remain with my baby as much as possible. How can I not, I think—as many American mothers doing the grim math have thought—given that my salary would just barely cover the cost of childcare?
I count myself lucky to have found a way to both work and be with our child, and when I tell people so, I’m not lying. For I’ve never loved anything as intensely as I love our daughter, who has moons for hands, and the world in her smile—and from whom part of me longs just as intensely to flee.
*
Thoreau devotes a full chapter of Walden to the allure of solitude, describing the pleasure of escaping the “wearisome and dissipating” company of others and entering into deeper communion with the self. “Not till we are lost—in other words, not till we have lost the world—do we begin to find ourselves,” he reflects.
For I’ve never loved anything as intensely as I love our daughter, who has moons for hands, and the world in her smile—and from whom part of me longs just as intensely to flee.In his quest to “lose the world,” Thoreau was following the long line of real and fictional retreaters and “rugged individuals” who have shaped America’s cultural psyche. When Daniel Boone ventured into the frontier wilderness; when Huck Finn escaped from his “sivilizing” guardians and “lit out” on the Mississippi; when Ishmael set sail aboard the Pequot onto the “mystical ocean”—each, in his way, was heeding the call of solitude.
Aloneness permeates the poetry of Walt Whitman, where freedom of the self is achieved not through solitary adventure but leisurely solitary reverie. “I loaf and invite my soul/ I lean and loaf at my ease…observing a spear of summer grass,” begins “Song of Myself.”
The twentieth century produced a new solitary hero, the cool and distanced outsider: James Dean, following his own drumbeat in a leather jacket; Johnny Cash in head-to-toe black crooning, “I’ll be what I am. A solitary man.” And it produced a fresh crop of wilderness escapists, like Christopher McCandless, whose Jack London-inspired retreat into the Alaskan backwoods was captured in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. Not to mention Krakauer himself, who describes in this same book the impulse that has lured him, over and over, up the world’s tallest mountains.
Since becoming a mother, I’ve become driven, almost obsessively, to grasp what, precisely, solitude is, so that I might understand why I crave it so voraciously. I’ve tunneled into the work of experts, such as philosopher Philip J. Koch, who suggests that while relationship offers its own gifts, only alone can we experience certain restorative virtues.
Solitude allows “freedom of action,” the leeway to fill each moment authentically, spontaneously, released from others’ demands. It awakens our creativity. It provides the pause we need to achieve “reflective perspective,” that deeper understanding of the experiences that bombard us.
In The Call of Solitude, psychologist Ester Schaler Bucholz maintains that time alone isn’t just a virtue but a deep human need with origins in the womb. The calm, contained safety in which we awakened into consciousness is stamped onto our psyches, beckoning us home. Fulfilling “our wishes to explore, our curiosity about the unknown, our desires to escape from another’s control, our will to be an individual,” solitude, she argues, is the very “fuel for life.”
When I was seventeen, sitting in Mr. O’Connor’s American Literature class discussing Thoreau and Whitman, drawing asterisks in my books with chipped-polish fingers, writing five-paragraph essays on solitary contemplation, it never occurred to me that these writers’ sacred space could not forever be my sacred space, their life fuel, my fuel.
When I was in my twenties and thirties, leading class discussions of Emerson and Melville, assigning essays on self-sovereignty and wanderlust, it never occurred to me that these authors’ journeys could not be all my students’ journeys—their discoveries, all my students’ discoveries.
Only after I’ve had children does it hit me that the solitary seekers who forged the pathways of my imagination, shaping my understanding of a life well-lived, of human destiny, of my destiny, were all men. Only after I’ve had children do I realize that motherhood and selfhood might be entirely incompatible callings.
*
“The first year is the hardest,” people say. And in ways, they’re right. The nursing wanes; the straps of the sling loosen once and for all. But always, there are new cords binding me to my daughter, and then her brother, and later their sister.
The cord is my worry, pulling me after each sprinting toddler. The cord is my arm, gathering up each tired preschooler. The cord is our schedule, with its flurry of appointments and commitments. The cord is my guilt, insisting, always, there’s more of myself I could be giving, tugging me home when I’ve lingered too long on an errand, or strayed too far on a run, even as the sky above me pulses orange and the dusk air is like a cold drink in my throat.
Time, once I’m a mother, is never fully my own. It is pooled time, communal time. When I seize it for myself, it is stolen time.
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone,” wrote Thoreau. What does this mean for mothers, I wonder, who are increasingly expected—even as fathers are more involved than ever—to leave nothing alone when it comes to their families?
In her landmark 1989 book The Second Shift, sociologist Arlie Hochschild revealed that mothers, even when employed, spent at least twice as much time as fathers on housework and childcare—a statistic that still holds true. And while it’s easy to think of Betty Friedan’s “happy housewife heroine,” confined to hearth and home, as an emblem of a bygone era, American mothers today actually spend more time—nearly double—caring for children than they did in the 1960s.
This care work has also intensified. Tending to kids once meant ushering them outside to play unsupervised, or plopping them, for stretches, in front of cartoons. (I rarely played with my own mother as a child, except the occasional game of Mastermind or Old Maid.) Instead, I ventured on long walks with the dog. I slipped a dollar in my pocket and strolled to the convenience store to buy Fun Dip.
Now, more often, it means sustained, mutual engagement in hands-on activities: reading, crafting, baking, practicing sports, doing STEM projects. A 2019 study revealed that extreme child rearing style has become the standard not only for the upper-middle-class “helicopter” parents who can most easily afford it but for American parents generally, regardless of income, education, or race.
To make room for all this child-centered togetherness, something needs to give—and what has given, overwhelmingly, is mothers’ autonomous time. Between 1975 and 2000, mothers’ time to themselves dropped by seven hours a week. By 2011, according to a paper in the American Sociological Review, American mothers had approximately thirty-six minutes a day to themselves.
A 2008 study revealed that most mothers’ uninterrupted time lasts, on average, no more than ten minutes at a stretch. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant school closures, those ten minutes, The Washington Post reported, shrank to less than four.
Three minutes and twenty-four seconds, give or take.
*
One evening when our kids are eight, five, and three—after my husband and I have herded everyone upstairs and tickled their arms and read them one last story please—I burrow into bed and belatedly listen to a voicemail. It’s Jessica, one of my oldest friends, telling me in her gentle way that she’s hurt I haven’t returned her call from yesterday. Am I okay?
I feel bad that I’ve let her down, that I’ve been a negligent friend. I am bone-tired, the kind of tired that makes even speaking hard, but I call her back. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “It’s been crazy with the kids and I haven’t had a window.” I can sense, as these words leave my mouth, how disingenuous they sound, so disingenuous that I suspect myself of lying. Really? No window at all?
But it is true: no window. Fragments, shards, scattered splinters of time and space, yes. But nothing expansive enough to make meaning with. My remorse morphs into frustration. Jessica doesn’t understand what it’s like, I think, because she doesn’t have children.
And then I have a thought that’s been nagging at me lately—gathering, mounting—which is that what it’s truly like, hour to hour, minute to minute, to be a mother, isn’t something frequently exposed in its purest form, and therefore, I suspect, not generally understood. I did not, before I had children, understand it, and so I’ve spent the past eight years wondering why no one told me about this relentless quotidian frenzy, this near-perpetual geyser of frenzy that cannot be stanched.
A few years later, listening to a podcast, I will encounter for the first time the German word zerrissenheit, sometimes translated as “torn-to-pieces-hood,” and I will think, thank god. Thank god I finally have the vocabulary to describe this geyser that won’t stop erupting, blasting me every day into thousands of far-flung pieces.
There are times, and this moment on the phone is one of them, when I wish I had video footage of a typical day with my children so that I could simply press play and say, “Here. Here is what I mean.”
I might cue up, for starters, the very day that was just now ending—an unremarkable Friday in February. I’d headed with Nora to pick up her siblings at school, and as we arrived home, snow began falling. I envisioned the cozy afternoon we’d have together, drinking cocoa and making Valentines. As they got to work with their glue and doilies, I thought, I should post a photo of this on Instagram! It was just the sort of harmonious family tableau Instagram loves.
Even my most plaintive cries land, on my own ears, like whispers—too soft, too vague, to capture what simmers below the surface of my maternal skin.But I never actually took this photo, because the moment I turned on the stove, our kitchen became a triage area, frenetic with needs. Leigh wanted three scoops of chocolate powder in her mug. Jacob wanted two, but each from a different brand. Nora, once hers had been poured, decided she didn’t want cocoa after all, but raspberry tea.
She marched her mug to the sink in protest, trailing milky splatters that I couldn’t wipe up because Jacob was calling me over, beseechingly, now: to examine a papercut, uncap a pen. And then Leigh: to find a scissor, spell a word. At some point, a fight broke out, and I quelled it. As sparkles spilled and paper clippings fell to the floor, stomachs grew hungry.
I brought over bowls of pretzels, and then asked the kids to clear their emptied bowls, and then asked so many times that the asks became yells, and then the yells coalesced into a single, guttural howl. Jacob began to cry, because he is exquisitely sensitive, and because truly, I shouldn’t howl at my children.
I wanted to talk with them about this, to redeem myself, to debrief. But I saw on the microwave clock that it was closing in on dinner time—and there were still baths to do—so instead I grabbed green beans from the fridge and started furiously snapping off the ends, furious at myself, furious at my kids for making me furious with myself. My legs throbbed and the corners of my eyes burned with anger and shame, and suddenly, I felt so cramped, so hot, and I realized that I still hadn’t taken off my jacket.
There was a time when I would have made from this episode a redemptive story. I would have known the exact moment in the denouement where I was meant to summon beauty, and I would have summoned it. I would have said, Sure, mothering can be hard, but it all goes so fast! And seeing my kids’ heart-shaped doily creations lying cheerfully on the counter that evening reminded me how the magic makes everything worth it.
I don’t say things like this anymore. More often now, I say things like “Why do I live hundreds of miles from my mother?” and “Humans were meant to live in kinship clans!” and “The nuclear family has been terrible for women” and “This country needs quality, affordable childcare.” But even my most plaintive cries land, on my own ears, like whispers—too soft, too vague, to capture what simmers below the surface of my maternal skin.
“Anger,” suggests Ester Schaler Bucholz, “may simply be the alone need asserting itself the only way it can.”
______________________________
Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson is available via Chronicle Prism.
