The messy bits of motherhood that we still don’t talk about
DON’T FORGET TO SCREAM by Marianne Levy
240pp, Phoenix, £14.99, ebook £7.99
There’s a moment in Marianne Levy’s debut essay collection, Don’t Forget to Scream, where she drags herself to a family party three weeks after giving birth: “I didn’t know how to say that I was bleeding, everywhere; that everything between my legs was stitched together, that my daughter was too small and I was too stunned; that something terrible had happened.” She spends the afternoon, stunned, “agreeing that I was lucky, that my daughter was beautiful, that it was all totally worth it, and wondering whether I was actually going mad”.
The subtitle, “Unspoken Truths About Motherhood”, may be slightly overstating things. In the five years since I’ve become a mother, I’ve read memoirs like Sophie Heawood’s hilarious and poignant memoir of accidental single motherhood, The Hungover Games, Candice Brathwaite’s guide to black motherhood, I Am Not Your Baby Mother, Francesca Segal’s gorgeous account of having premature twins, Mother Ship and Emma Jane Unsworth’s dive into postnatal depression, After the Storm; novels, like Sheila Heti’s maddening yet startling meditation on whether to have a child at all, Motherhood and Helen Phillips’s terrifying thriller, The Need; poetry, from Liz Berry’s searing The Republic of Motherhood to Hollie McNish’s riotous Nobody Told Me; and polemic, like Eliane Glaser’s provocative Motherhood: Feminism’s Unfinished Business.
There has been a drive for honesty, for realism, for mess, for rage. And yet, when Levy writes that instead of being honest, she has found herself “protecting and reassuring” people, censoring herself, questioning her experiences, and silently fearing for her sanity, I recognise it. I recognise it all. And I welcome her urge to “invite other women backstage”.
Levy is as aware as anyone that motherhood is an ordinary miracle, but she also knows that it is still a miracle. That she is lucky. Lucky compared to the two friends due to give birth on the same day, expecting their boys to be like brothers, except only one lived. Lucky compared to the friend who miscarried. Lucky compared to the friends who want children and can’t have them, and the friends who don’t want children and are constantly asked why not. But being lucky doesn’t mean it’s not difficult. She worries at the question of whether having a baby makes all the difficult bits “worth it” or whether, in fact, this phrase is used as “a plug to render me swiftly and efficiently silent”.
What is it we mothers are not talking about enough? The way “baby comes and the front door swings shut and suddenly it’s 1954”. The endless advice; in a chapter called “A Quick Word of Advice”, she lists all the (conflicting, annoying!) advice she’s given in one mad jumble. And the scuzziness of it all; in “Filth” she categorises the dirt of motherhood, snot to scum.
And we don’t talk about the way time warps and flips, Levy says: “It is 8am. You play peek-a-boo with your toddler for six hours. It is now 8.02am. Explain.” I also enjoyed her incredulous anger at the mothers who say they work better now they have less time: “Really? Few are the acts of concentration that gain from too little time and constant distraction. No one wants surgery or even their car repaired in 30-second bursts by someone who is simultaneously frying sausages and fielding messages on their class WhatsApp.”
Don’t Forget to Scream becomes really interesting when Levy wonders – usefully, intensely – why we don’t talk about such aspects of motherhood. Is it because we are conditioned to smile and please? Or because there are parts of motherhood feminism can’t (or can’t yet) reach; stretch marks are “a badge of honour… fine, silvery, eminently Instagrammable lines that attest to the great power of the human body, tributaries flowing to the great mother river within”, but incontinence and uterine prolapse, not so much.
Amid all the rage and the wit, however, Levy – who has written five books for children and teens – writes with great tenderness about her children, and the “whole minutes of honeyed joy” she has with them, however hard-won and conflicted that joy might be.