{"id":132277,"date":"2018-12-28T09:00:28","date_gmt":"2018-12-28T14:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=132277"},"modified":"2018-12-20T13:29:01","modified_gmt":"2018-12-20T18:29:01","slug":"mothers-as-makers-of-death-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/12\/28\/mothers-as-makers-of-death-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Mothers as Makers of Death"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re away until January 2, but we\u2019re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Stages in pregnancy as illustrated in the nineteenth-century medical text\u00a0Nouvelles d\u00e9monstrations d\u2019accouchemens<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

I wrote the first draft of my novel\u00a0Heartbreaker<\/em>\u00a0in a ten-day mania in August 2015 with a fist-size bandage over my left ear; beneath it, a track of dark-blue stitches. The smallest bone in the human body, my stapes bone, which is charged with conducting sound in the middle ear, had stopped working. I now had a thin hook of titanium fluttering in my head, and in the on-switch manner of miracles, my hearing returned.<\/p>\n

My husband had taken our two young sons on a road trip to a small cabin on the east coast of Canada. I could not lift anything heavy. I had to keep my heart rate low. I could not wash my hair and wore it in a knot shined with grease on top of my head. I turned off my cell phone, unplugged our landline, and disconnected from the Internet. This was my plan: to be unreachable. Didn\u2019t Jonathan Franzen pour cement into his USB port and work in some kind of carpeted hell-mouth of a rental office to finish\u2014which one was it now? Ah yes,\u00a0Freedom<\/em>?<\/p>\n

My husband could see I had a novel inside me, and it was a commotion, and the only way to settle it was to write it, and the only way to write it was to be alone. I had not been alone in a decade. I had not been alone because I am a mother, and a mother is never alone. When she is washing, sleeping, raging, she is not alone. For a mother, this is the state of things. Children hang from your clothing. They pummel you with questions. Like a gunfight, like the most consuming love, like an apocalypse: they take up all of the available space.<\/p>\n

Read more >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On motherhood, deafness, death, and trying to finish a novel. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1472,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44292],"tags":[35051,35072,12043,7793,2824,35050],"class_list":["post-132277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2018","tag-john-prine","tag-leila-slimani","tag-rachel-cusk","tag-samantha-hunt","tag-sheila-heti","tag-the-tree-of-forgiveness"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMothers as Makers of Death<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On motherhood, deafness, death, and trying to finish a novel.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/12\/28\/mothers-as-makers-of-death-2\/\" \/>\n<meta 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