EXQUISITE SUFFERING
THE LONELINESS AND FEAR OF EARLY MOTHERHOOD TOOK Megan Hunter AWAY FROM HER LIFE AMBITIONS. UNTIL SHE FOUND NEW WAYS TO VIEW THE WORLD AROUND HER
Megan Hunter opens up about the juxtaposing emotions that young motherhood can bring, and how a period of darkness transformed her outlook on life
when I was 28, I lived in a mouldy Cambridgeshire flat with my husband, three-year-old son and tiny daughter. Breastfeeding the baby through her first months, I streamed a lot of Girls, her damp head resting heavily on my shoulder. On the screen, other women in their twenties deliberated over boyfriends and internships, their lives glossed with alien qualities: freedom, carelessness, a sense of infinite time. But I also saw similarities between us: a sharpness of energy, an untargeted, expansive sense of ambition. I couldn’t stop watching them, as they stumbled through their fictional lives, making mistakes no longer available to me. I had always rejected the ‘pram in the hallway’ argument against creative aspirations and parenting but, with the bulk of a double buggy looming in the garage (no room in the hallway), I began to have my doubts. The winter that year was long and harsh. Some days, the buggy’s pneumatic tires got stuck in slush; on others, my feet slid on ice. Spring didn’t come when we expected it: winter just carried on, through February, then March. The trees were bare, frosted; sometimes we couldn’t go out at all. I lived around the corner from where Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes once lived in Cambridge, and I couldn’t stop thinking of the winter of 1963, Plath alone in her London flat with a toddler and a baby, unable to see a way out.
Looking back, it is easy to stick a label on that period of my life, to summarise it neatly with a diagnosis. And it’s true: I was depressed. But using that word doesn’t explain how it felt to be me during those months. It says nothing of the condensation that rolled down our windows, of the way my husband came in and wiped away the moisture, laying an old muslin cloth along the sill to soak it up. It doesn’t describe the warm roses of my baby’s cheeks blooming in the darkness during night feeds, the apricot roundness of my toddler’s skin as he lay against me in the mornings.
My sensory experiences were so acute, I likened them to fire, an ecstatic warming that burned through the cold of a morning in the flat, ice forming on the insides of the windows. I thought about the words used by the poet Adrienne Rich, in her 1976 book about motherhood, Of Woman Born: ‘My children cause me
“THE EXHAUSTION OF MY DAYS SEEMED TO GIVE ME MORE ENERGY FOR WRITING, THOUGHTS FLOWING THROUGH MY FINGERS ONTO PAPER”
the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience.’ Exquisite suffering: this seemed exactly right, each word essential to qualify the other. This was suffering, without question, but it was beautiful and delicate, easily broken by a gummed smile from my son, my daughter’s chubby wrists under my fingertips.
Rich wrote about feeling ‘weak with rage’ as a young mother, and this seems perfect, too; there were moments when anger would rise through me like a muted superpower, when I would hit pillows or bang doors away from the children, my feelings achieving nothing but noise. Before children, I’d been a graduate student in literature, exploring the beginnings of various careers. My life now was no less profound, but it was so confined, tethered to the needs of these bodies. If I ran away, my daughter would not be able to eat. My life had never been so high-stakes, so maddeningly essential.
Because I had children young, my mother was young for a grandmother. She still had a demanding job, and couldn’t be there all the time, as I wanted her to be. When I gave birth to a daughter, my longing for my own mother took me by surprise. I felt close to my childhood, to moments when the desire for my mother to be with me – not to leave me at nursery or go to work – felt almost overwhelming. I thought of my grandmother, too; she’d never had a career at all. And of my greatgrandmother: a divorced suffragette who set fire to a department store and escaped across London rooftops. I imagined her, flames at her back, skirt flapping against her legs as she ran, grinning. Apparently, she read all day, and disliked housework. Her daughter, my grandmother, remembered her as useless. I thought she sounded like me.
As I stared at my daughter’s face, I wondered what path she’d take, if things would be easier for her. The women in my family seemed to be defined by what their mothers had done, making choices – or being forced into situations – where suffering, ambition and motherhood pulled in opposite directions.
reading, in this time, was my salvation: I hungered after narratives of women like me, loving and hating motherhood, trapped and adoring, rageful and devoted. Now, there are so many more of these stories: in film, TV and literature. But back then – just eight years ago – the few that existed were hidden, difficult to find. I was shocked by the extent to which motherhood – unlike, for example, romantic love – was deemed to be a niche interest, unworthy of literary attention.
But it was here, in books, that I found a path away from the isolation of mothering young children, and towards my own ambitions. I’d always wanted to be a writer, had nurtured the desire without quite possessing the determination that was needed to make it a reality. Now, I had more determination than I knew what to do with. As I emerged from the fog of the first months, my rage – this pent-up energy, this fearful force – began to seek a shape, a means of expressing itself in a world that had become hazy and undefined. It started at the simplest level, with single words; on the advice of my therapist, I began naming everything around me, as though I was the toddler. I pushed the buggy, and said the words, for my children, for myself: grass, house, bird, tree.
In time, words became phrases written on receipts, in baby groups, on the floor with endless toy train tracks. The exhaustion of my days only seemed to give me more energy for writing, frustration making my thoughts flow through my fingers onto paper. Slowly, phrases became paragraphs, the beginnings of a voice. There was, at first, no decision, no discipline: I had to write. In this way – eventually – I gave narrative back to my own life. I wrote about my children, their beauty, their births, the way they astonished and frustrated me, the feeling of the flat as it darkened around us each evening. I wrote about myself, and things that had nothing to do with any of us. I continued to seek stories of motherhood – finding them in libraries, secondhand bookshops – and I started, tentatively, to write my own.
Now, I’m both a writer and a mother. In pre-pandemic times, I had hours of my own time, something that would have felt like an unbearably distant dream to my 28-year-old self. The suffering of motherhood has not disappeared – there is still frustration, fear and irritation – but it has changed: my children are older, and now, unlike then, my husband and I have work that enables us to share childcare more or less equally. The ‘exquisite’ is still there, too, although now I experience it differently, from the perspective of a separate person; I can see my children, their loveliness, humour and joy. I enjoy their presence: radiant, both routine and continually unexpected.
I also realise now that my ambitions were achieved through motherhood, not despite it. Both of my novels have the experience of being a woman with children at their core, and draw on the existential starkness of physical transformation and creation. At times, I find myself recalling the early days with something like nostalgia. I remember the thick air, the rich, viscous grace that seemed to surround us. We were not separate then: we were together, wrapped in a cloud of beauty, enclosed in ourselves.
In wordlessness, I was lost, overcome by sensation. But what extraordinary sensation: a smog of mouths, skin, laughter, wailing, tiny arms pushed through tiny sleeves. When we at last threw away our ancient double buggy, I was shocked to feel a jolt of grief, to see it as a old friend, an ally that accompanied the three of us as we rolled through the streets, naming the world around us. The Harpy by Megan Hunter is out now