What Will the Literature of Motherhood Look Like After COVID?

A few years ago, New York Times critic Parul Sehgal wrote about the pile of motherhood books on her desk. A vertiginous pile, she wrote, and she wasn’t convinced that it was a positive thing. It was 2018, and I was finishing a book of my own on the subject, a novel exploring adoption, fertility, a longing for and fear of motherhood. I was on the tail end of a movement, I realized as I read the review, and the product of one. I’d spent the last few years reading every writer willing to talk about motherhood, some of the same writers Seghal cited in her review, writers who I felt I had entered into a private dialogue with even though I was not yet a mother myself, and didn’t know if I could be. The review covered the latest book on the vertiginous pile, Jaqueline Rose’s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, contextualizing it against the rest, and I thought: Well, the party’s ending, Sehgal’s flipping on the lights, and here I am just arriving with my unopened bottle of booze.

I’ve since become a mother, and it’s still a subject I feel uncertain writing about, part imposter’s syndrome because it’s been done better, part because after putting my 18-month-old to bed, I no longer have thoughts on most matters except an erotic longing for sleep. Motherhood, it has always seemed to me, is a subject that, unlike love or betrayal, can eventually feel wrung out, overdone, taxed, cliched, especially by white, middle-class women. In most of the books I’ve read—and loved—the primary tension exists between the longing to mother and the longing to write, forces that, like two magnets held at the wrong ends, don’t appear to stick. As much as these books have meant to me, I’ve worried the form has become homogenized. And so I’ve stayed away from writing about the topic myself, in spite of it being this year’s defining aspect.

Recently I revisited that review and was surprised what I’d forgotten: Seghal’s argument was not that there were too many books about mothers, but that too often these narratives existed in political isolation, a point Rose makes in her essay when she says: “Solidarity among mothers, across class and ethnic boundaries, is not something Western cultures seem in any hurry to promote.”

“The real work, the daring work,” Seghal writes at the end, “might be for these mothers to look at each other.”

If this narrative isolation existed before, a long line of singular stories, it now feels even more pronounced, as the pandemic has only widened the divide between race and class, as we slink past the one-year mark of keeping to ourselves. Pandemic life is the only one my child has known and the predominant one I’ve known as a mother, a life without other mothers, without wider perspective, without the people and things that offer relief when days take a shitty turn. Infants naturally counter the idea of lifelessness within, D.W. Winnicott writes, but after this year I remain unconvinced. I’ve begun to wonder what effect COVID will have on my generation of new parents as we consider the domestic sphere we’ve been chained to, as we consider the question of having more kids once this is over, a kind of doubling down the locks. I’m wondering if it will turn the motherhood literature into something else, something less about art and ambivalence and more on the loneliness born of this time. I’m wondering how it might change the shape of the American family.

*

My mistake, I’m realizing now, was not in worrying that I’d be late to the party, but in thinking that it was a party at all—new motherhood, for all its joys, is also one of the most isolating events there is, a small-scale lockdown occurring regularly across American households. We do not have extensive parental leave to support working families in the child’s first year. We do not have universal healthcare, an irony felt in 2020 when, like so many, I was laid off due to the public health crisis and then given the opportunity to pay $2,000 a month to keep my existing insurance for my family. We do not invest in universal pre-K and more affordable childcare programs while we quickly send parents back to work. We separate undocumented mothers from their children at our borders. Our institution of policing threatens the lives of daughters and sons of Black mothers, rather than protect them. We don’t live in a society that promotes mutually beneficial outcomes through collective action. It’s a wonder that we still keep producing new humans at all.

It’s an extremely American thing for a mother’s story to exist in isolation—socio-economically, racially—but how, then, to look at each other?

*

The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Screen (EPDS) is a survey given to women routinely after birth to monitor mental health. The questionnaire was developed in Edinburgh in the eighties over concerns that depression was frequently going unreported in the community, causing distress to the mother, threatening family cohesion, and having adverse effects on the infant. The original version of the scale included thirteen items, including the question: I have enjoyed being a mother, which was later removed. Today’s version is ten questions and includes no mention of mothering specifically; it’s translated into over fifty-seven languages and used in clinical work and research around the world. After giving birth myself, I used to dread these questions week after week at the pediatrician’s office and when visiting my own doctor. Questions like:

Things have been getting on top of me
•Yes, most of the time I haven’t been able to cope at all
•Yes, sometimes I haven’t been coping as well as usual
•No, most of the time I have coped quite well
•No, I have been coping as well as ever

I have been so unhappy that I have had difficulty sleeping
•Yes, most of the time
•Yes, sometimes
•Not very often
•No, not at all

I have blamed myself unnecessarily when things went wrong
•Yes, most of the time
•Yes, some of the time
•Not very often
•No, never

I have been able to see the funny side of things
•As much as I always could
•Not quite so much now
•Definitely not so much now
•Not at all

*

Often I would think: would I have answered these differently at any previous point? Was this the best we could do to monitor postpartum mental health? (I did, at one point, explicitly ask my doctor for antidepressants, but they couldn’t be prescribed without talking to a counselor first, one who was booked for the next two months. I made an appointment for ten weeks later.)

Convinced that this survey could have only been devised by a team of men, I was discouraged to find that two of its three creators were women, top in their field. But it did not change the fact that I did not answer the questions truthfully. I have been able to see the funny side of things: As much as I always could. The doctor would nod and send us home, including my husband, a full-time coparent, who was never screened at all.

*

My son, only a year and a half on this earth, is already able to see the funny side of things. He has a remarkable sense of humor, in my biased opinion, not because he thinks things are funny but because he tries to make us laugh. At dinner, he bats his eyes at me over his tray, knowing that the face amuses me, that I will forgive him all the food he’s just chucked onto the floor with a simple blink blink blink. He loves to dance, often pounding milk while he grinds. Somehow we’ve convinced him that the garage door will open if he uses his powers, and now each time one of us presses the button he sticks his arms out and shakes, partly I think because it cracks us up. There has been so much happiness, I often remind myself, there has been a funny side.

But I can also feel his loneliness, whether I’m projecting or not. He says hiya to every stranger on the street, waving wildly, often calling them auntie and uncle, relatives he knows mostly from FaceTime. He stares longingly at other kids at the park, as troubled as we are when we pull on his jacket to keep his distance. Out of my own lingering paranoia, he has never sat in a swing. When people pass us on the sidewalk he immediately reverses course, ditching us, to chase after fresh blood.

*

Varying statistics exist around the number of women affected by postpartum depression, ranging from 1 in 8, to 1 in 5, numbers that change depending on age and race, according to the CDC. The text I read on the EPDS cites that the frequency of depression was found to be much lower in cohesive island communities such as Malta and in affluent societies with generous maternity benefits such as Sweden.

When the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, the MOTHERS Act was included in the bill, which mandated ongoing research to better understand the frequency and course of postpartum depression, and address different treatment needs among racial and ethnic groups. The MOTHERS Act was the first to introduce postpartum depression into the federal legislative record, and garnered support and interest across political parties. However, none of the provisions were ever activated with funding.

*

There was this period in the first few months of my son’s life where he and I still felt like one body. I still watched what I ate and drank while breastfeeding, an extension of the umbilical cord. In the nights, when he slept, if he slept, my eyes would shoot open moments before he cried out, as if we shared the same screwed up clock. He cried a lot and I did, too. One day I noticed a note from the pediatrician in his online chart: Baby is colicky. Postpartum depression contributing factor.

Is she saying the crying is all my fault? I asked my husband. It filled me with a kind of murderous rage for a day or two, until I started pondering the chicken and egg of our home life. Was I crying because the baby was crying or was the baby crying because I was crying?

I suggest, as you know I do, writes Winnicott, and I suppose everyone agrees, that ordinarily the woman enters into a phase, a phase from which she ordinarily recovers in the weeks and months after the baby’s birth, in which to a large extent she is the baby and the baby is her.

Some days it feels as if COVID prevented a recovery once promised, with the lack of physical separation, our shrunken world. The difference now being, of course, that my son is a toddler, no longer breastfeeding, desiring his own personhood more and more with each passing day. A mature being trapped in a baby’s body, a parenting book tells me, as he throws himself on the floor and screams. Maybe it would all be better, his tantrums, our perpetual COVID grind, if I could only teach him to name his feelings.

For example, in the kitchen:

Can you use your words?

[screaming]

Can you use your words?

[screaming]

Can you use your words?

Putt! he cries, meaning puff, a sweet snack cracker that we take everywhere, a box of putt for the car, putt for the stroller, putt for the floor of his room.

In the hallway:

Can you use your words?

[screaming]

Can you use your words?

[screaming]

Can you use your words?

Shja, he says, meaning garage, because he’s ready to use his powers.

For example:

Can you use your words?

[screaming]

Can you use your words?

[screaming]

Can you use your words?

[screaming]

Here, have a putt.

It’s a tall order, I realize, asking someone to name their feelings. At some point, I quit naming mine. I’m scared, I’m furious, I miss everybody, I no longer say. I also want to scream, I do not tell my son, in my pillow, my car, over FaceTime.

They’re getting so big, I say to friends on the phone.
So much hair, they say to me.

In Safeway, the woman at checkout has a picture of a child clipped to her belt with her keys.

How old? I ask.
Just a few months now, she says.

*

That cavernous divide between the healthy and the sick. Essential and nonessential. Stuck at home and homeless. Kids and no kids. Old and young. As much as I always could and Not at all. How to look at each other from our side of the split. Every day my son takes the same walk around the block, and I watch the interest given to each rock, bird, clump of dirt, cigarette butt, wind-shaken leaf. The happiness resilient. Nothing taken for granted. I try to follow his lead and enjoy the same loop, day after day after day.

*

If I were to write a book on motherhood now it would not be about the fear or longing to become a parent, the changes to one’s body, the erasure of self, of quiet, of sleep, of days. It would fall short of adequately examining the divide between mothers, to elevate one another. Instead I’d draw from this solitary pool of joy and sadness, felt acutely one recent Saturday when my son and I recovered from our tears by sitting on the sidewalk to watch a crop of sparkling pinwheels. I’ve never been more aware of just how much we need other people, in general and once we have kids.

When thinking about having more children, I’m not sure I would want to do this again—am I alone in this, too? Would it have still felt this hard without a global pandemic? My son and I must have watched those pinwheels for thirty minutes, spellbound by an invisible force, whirling them, whirling them, before grinding them all to a halt. Woo-ow, my son would say every few minutes. And maybe it goes without saying, because this is the message behind so many motherhood narratives, but I was so grateful to be stuck in his company. I thought, as I often do: I couldn’t love anything more. But I was also conscious of the cold concrete beneath us, chilling our butts, and what felt like the longest day in the world ahead. The funny side is when this is over, I will miss it.

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Ashley Nelson Levy’s Immediate Family is available now via FSG.