nightbitches and motherhood

which mothers get to have a literary crisis?

On young motherhood, writer Heather O’Neill described it as feeling like a kid who got her homework out of the way.

I’ve returned to O’Neill’s essay from Chatelaine magazine so many times that I’ve memorized parts of it. I knew there was something nearly cosmic in how she wrote of motherhood, in its constellation of the ugly, grotesque, charming, and nearly imperceptible moments. “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” I ask myself many times over.

I knew there was a cyclical element to entering motherhood at the time that my nana passed away. But I didn’t anticipate becoming a petri dish under a microscope, my every move monitored for its proximity to purity and morality. I was clearly far from virginial! How can you be a perfect, modern mother when you’re 23 and working for tips as a host at a vegan restaurant?

There are such deeply woven complexities in the idea of being a mother (of being a parent, but I am speaking solely to my experience here as a mother), and the projections of society lap up tropes in this wake. Motherhood is not a monolithic experience, and yet there doesn’t seem to be space to talk through its many variations. I am sure this is to everyone’s detriment.

I don’t tend to like writing on mothers, simply because it feels too eye of the storm. But here we are, in a weird cultural space for mothers and non-mothers, once again. Mothers, classed as miserable by Chappell Roan. Mothers, further dousing themselves in the flames of vitriolic conversations online: “Yeah mother of three here, we’re miserable,” or “I’m not a mother, but I see they’re miserable, I mean—the iPads at the restaurants!” or “I would love to be a mother, but despite being a successful CEO of a skincare company, I don’t think I can be a mother because it is simply too expensive and you cannot be one without money, darling!” All slapping voices against each other in a nebulous echo.

I’ve been reading into mothers for as long as I’ve been one: in my first pregnancy, I took notes on what to be and not be through Instagram captions, rewatches of Juno and Gilmore Girls, and noticing the worlds I was allowed into or not. From what media I chose, I think it’s clear I knew what I would eventually become: a single, young mother. The books that made their way into my lap confirmed which worlds were allowable, and which were definitively coded outside of the mainstream. These books allowed for pathways to be explored, but contemporary fictional writing on mothers has become so narrowly-defined in the mainstream. So here, my unsolicited thoughts on motherhood, through contemporary written work on mothering that has elicited some form of emotional response in me.

conventional white women divorce lit

There is a genre of writing that has, for more than a decade, fixated on the plights of the middle-aged white woman and her desire (or lack thereof) to have children. Stories I file in that category include Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, Sarah Manguso’s Liars, Leslie Jamieson’s Splinters, and Sheli Heti’s Motherhood (a note: it is a twisted thing to gift a 23 year old girl a copy of this book that questions the entirety of motherhood when she is about to become a mother, and knows she will likely be a single one).

The narratives contained in these books are stories of mid-to-upper-class white women navigating mediocrity in their partners, but coming from a financial privilege that allows them to conceptualize. To make a reality into a theoretical for the sake of bringing the women writer back to the artistry. These are women hungry for their own neoliberal successes. They want a room of their own and 500 a year to write, and goddamn it, why can’t their husbands bathe their perfect, beautiful, precious son (always a son) to their exacting specifications? Heti’s book aside, these are books that dig their heels into the divorce-lit trope. Heti asks the question more directly, with the rest following in their own ways: what is gained and lost if women were to become a mother, and what happens to the artistry?

Sheli Heti on The Question in Motherhood:

“It suddenly seemed like a huge conspiracy to keep women in their thirties - when you finally have some brains and some skills and experience - from doing anything useful with them at all. It is hard to when such a large portion of your mind, at any given time, is preoccupied with the possibility - a question that didn't seem to preoccupy the drunken men at all.”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood

Others ask it in their own ways, through the narrative of middle-aged motherhood.

“If writing was my great love—and I was starting to believe it was, perhaps more than any man would ever be—I often wondered if it was ultimately a form of self-love, a kind of poison.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story

“A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I'd always known that. But I'd never suspected how easily I'd fall into one anyway.”
― Sarah Manguso, Liars

“Because her husband paid for their lives, paid for the privilege she had of staying home each and every day devoting herself completely to motherhood and nothing else, she had felt, ever since she stepped down from her position at the gallery, that she was in no place to demand anything. He worked all week, and she felt it was too much to ask him to lift a finger on the weekend, because she had automatically devalued her work from the start.”
― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch

I am not suggesting, in any way, that these questions aren’t of value. They are worth considering, and yet they have also been considered at length. If anything, the circumstances upon which women experience heteronormative and white motherhood is only gearing up to be more limiting in the fascist era. I say limiting, because there will always be affordances given with whiteness when it comes to abortion, childcare, and healthcare, that many mothers of colour, and many low-income mothers may not find so readily in the current landscape.

For Bookforum, Hermione Hoby warns of these divorced patterns in modern literature persisting, even while the idea of divorce itself has become less stigmatized. Hoby argues that “a professional writer before her divorce, she remains one afterward. She belongs, in other words, to one of the demographics whose members are least likely to be socially punished or economically penalized for getting out of a marriage.”

In Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, Jacqueline Rose questions what is being asked of mothers when endless love and devotion are expected for them. These types of love are reflective of Shakespearean suffocating mothers, the ones where “the demand to love crushes its object and obliterates itself.” Rose evokes the mothers of Roald Dahl stories to further the point, where situating their children “to believe [they] are a miracle is not an act of love, but a form of cruelty.” In so doing, mothers are painted as selfless, and stripped of identities beyond mothering.

To be anything but a good and doting mother, a white and middle-to-upper-class mother, is not virtuous is these scenarios. Yet, as Rose sees it, a site where women are asked to “conspire in cutting the world off from self-knowledge.” Being good becomes a demand, and one that is only achieved in constrained circumstances that remove themselves of broader and more inclusive feminisms.

The last I will say on this type of divorce-lit is that the motherhood writing that conceptualizes the frustration around the idea of who a mother is, and what her role and relationship with a child is. It is one certainly born of narratives made by a middle-class white woman looking to understand her professional calling before and after a divorce. And not once do any of these stories unravel the cultural expectations mapped onto white mothering.

Not once do they begin to look at the suffocating nature of the genteel mother, the expectations of what “good” mothering is. Certainly, these writers all seem to call for a desire to be more primal, to tap into the scream that sits under the surface of the fancy white marble kitchens. But what we get is that fluffy, cute Nightbitch dog in the movie version: adorably trotting along in the suburbs just to feel something.

The Nightbitch Dog

deviant mothers

Consider, in relation to the above, the experiences of the deviant mother in contemporary literature: still largely white, but much more unstrung. Much less scripted to the performance of a suburban mother in a matching linen set and aviators, her kids adorned in beige and sucking on their Sophie Giraffes. These are books like Claire Vaye Watkin’s I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, Rufi Thorpe’s Margot’s Got Money Troubles, Jael Richardson’s Gutter Child, Tlotlo Tsamaase’s Womb City, or Rachel Finley’s Nobody Ever Told Me Anything. Fiction, auto-fiction, and memoirs cascading around the idea of ugliness in motherhood and life, in some form or another.

These are women who understand societal fabrics, because they have been rejected outright (or slowly) by them. They are not the perfect doting mother-wife, they can’t be. They do not get maternity leaves, or stay at home while their husbands work bland corporate jobs, or while their bland corporate husbands cheat on them with vaguely defined blondes that are untethered to children.

Their deviance is more exploratory of the very idea of western and white motherhood, because they abandon being a mother altogether (Watkins), have affairs themselves (Tsamaase), quietly navigate the threats of losing their motherhood to their adjacencies to substance use (Finley, Thorpe), or lose out on love entirely from the start because of structural racism (Richardson). I get these mothers, because they accept or allude to the very truths that the conventional mothers refuse to see: that parts of the game are rigged from the start.

“When they talked about the opportunities she would be missing, she’d thought they meant a four-year college. She hadn’t understood they meant that every single person she met, every new friend, every love interest, every employer, every landlord, would judge her for having made what they all claimed was the “right” choice.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Margo's Got Money Troubles

“When I drew pictures of Mother and me, I used Peach for her and Chestnut for myself. ‘Why is your skin named after something soft and sweet and mine is something hard and bitter?’ ‘Because you are so much tougher,’ she said. I thought that was a very good answer. And maybe it's true. But I am forced to be tough.”
― Jael Richardson, Gutter Child

“I learned that it was honestly a chore to answer these questions, because the answer is never the right one. I saw their wincing, concerned looks, could stare into their disbelieving open mouths and practically see the wheels turning… I didn’t have the answers or emotions that they were hoping for, and was fully aware that it was a drag to be a drag.”
― Rachael "Steak" Finley, Nobody Ever Told Me Anything

“For it is only the materialism of this flesh and the laws of this world that muddy the true calibre of our souls.”
― Tlotlo Tsamaase, Womb City

These are often books that get bad Goodreads ratings (which to me is a sign of goodness, if the main characters are so unlikeable and the story is so “random” or “odd”). But the western (and implied white) concept of a mother is so flattened that it takes a lot of work to dredge up something that sits outside of that, let alone explore it as unwaveringly as these authors do.

To be honest about experiences, that there is stigma, there is shame, there are endless expectations thrown onto women—whether they have children or not, to set the pace and tone of morality for our times. This takes shape in how we pit ourselves against each other because Chappell Roan says something inflammatory in a podcast interview, rather than draw our attention to the very men that dictate the economic and racial and climatic trajectories of our planet with their violent whims.

All I’m really asking here is to unpack motherhood a bit more. Question who gets to write about mothers and why (on being poor and writing food, andrea bennett draws attention to how much money it takes to get published, in conversation with me for their book Hearty).

The expectations thrust upon women are tenuous, and it is boring to see the miseries of divorce lit play out on endless loops in a safe suburbia. It is also infuriating to see the emotional appeals to society entrenched in mothers, without considerations of the very structures that initially failed to support them, their children, their families, their own parents.

Hell, would it kill us to think about community as a complex, multi-perspective, dysfunctional and yet necessary thing? If mothers were portrayed beyond frustrations with being good in relation to mediocre husbands? What would happen if we started treating that idea as fact rather than elusive hypothesis?

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