{"id":139074,"date":"2019-08-28T11:00:06","date_gmt":"2019-08-28T15:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=139074"},"modified":"2019-09-03T11:09:03","modified_gmt":"2019-09-03T15:09:03","slug":"i-was-dilapidated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/08\/28\/i-was-dilapidated\/","title":{"rendered":"I Was Dilapidated"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

\u00c9mile Bernard, Mother and Child<\/em>, 1898, oil on canvas, 15″ x 18″. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWhat did you have?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA boy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCongratulations.\u201d<\/p>\n

If your first child is a girl I\u2019m told people say: \u201cHow nice.\u201d How nice. My child is of course wonderful but I am also\u2014embarrassingly\u2014slightly proud that he\u2019s a boy. Childbirth is full of such pitfalls, where the wish to be congratulated overrules common sense. I don\u2019t find the standard notion of the good wife very compelling. But the pressure to be \u201ca good mother\u201d according to the prevailing definitions is practically irresistible. I can keep my head when David Holbrook, in his most recent outburst against \u201cart, thought and life in our time,\u201d warns that it is a failure in mothering that produces intellectuals and other pornographers: it\u2019s less easy to steer a clear course through all the varied strictures of the psychoanalysts themselves. Worse still, it\u2019s by no means adequate to try to behave like a good mother, because that involves an act of will: goodness itself is supposed to emerge. Before Bowlby, you had only to keep your children clean and set a decent moral example. Now ordinary selfishness is thought somehow to be expelled in the moment of delivery, or sooner: it\u2019s selfish, you\u2019re told by the masked figures gathered expectantly around you, if you can\u2019t manage without forceps. Better mothers don\u2019t need them. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s logical enough. Since having children is a matter of choice, or, some might say, a deliberate self-indulgence, there is an obvious obligation to do the best one can by them. What worries me is that logic is so seldom invoked: naturalness, spontaneity are the mots d\u2019ordre<\/em>. Which hardly takes into account the fury one may feel at an infant who rages when he should be feeding, and indeed would like to be feeding if only he could stop raging. On the other hand, I find little consolation in the knowledge that if on these occasions I were to act on what I take to be my \u201cnatural\u201d inclination and batter my baby, the law would return a verdict of diminished responsibility and I wouldn\u2019t go to prison: I\u2019d rather go to prison. But why is \u201cnatural\u201d taken to be a synonym for \u201cgood\u201d?<\/p>\n

I accept that much of what I\u2019m saying could be ascribed to puerperal paranoia, with the proviso that the form the paranoia takes derives from current attitudes. According to New Society<\/em> it\u2019s a rare father who can change his child\u2019s nappy. Until children reach an age where they can be reasoned with, the only notices fathers get are good ones. I like changing my son\u2019s nappy\u2014foolish of Freud not to pay more attention to Jocasta\u2019s part in the relationship. But sometimes I wonder why I\u2019m thought to have a special scatological aptitude. People ask me eagerly if I enjoyed feeding him myself: I didn\u2019t. The first weeks of feeding were often very humiliating (I\u2019ve never felt so sympathetic to men\u2019s fears of impotence), particularly when the humiliation was repeated every three hours. Now I\u2019m proud of being a self-sufficient life-support system\u2014farmer, wholesaler, restaurant, and waiter\u2014but initially I felt as if I\u2019d been pinned to a conveyor belt serving a remote and self-obsessed baby. Eager to cram something into my own mouth, I took up smoking; a friend in the same situation started biting her nails.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d read plenty of articles about mothers getting upset when their children grow up and leave home, but it seemed a bit much to resent his leaving the womb. Still, he\u2019d been mine before and now I was his. I couldn\u2019t sleep without his permission, I ate for his sake rather than mine, I felt guilty if I took an aspirin, and if I was late home it was as if I was capriciously denying him his means of existence. If I got upset his provisions were threatened, and if the provisions were threatened I got upset. In addition, he was admired and I was dilapidated. Child-rearing manuals have a section on the importance of the mother making the father feel that he, too, has a relationship with the new child\u2014but it was six weeks before I felt I had a relationship with the child myself. My husband was the supervisor, a position that left him free to enjoy the child. \u201cFor Dockery a son,\u201d I thought, with uncharitable memories of Larkin\u2019s poem.<\/p>\n

In short, I didn\u2019t get depressed because I couldn\u2019t cope, as the books said I might: unless things are really bad you can always grit your teeth and make yourself cope. I got depressed because instead of maternal goodness welling up inside me, the situation seemed to open up new areas of badness in my character. Perhaps pediatricians believe in the power of positive thinking: I\u2019ve always found it harmful. There\u2019s nothing magical about a mother\u2019s relationship with her baby: like most others, it takes two to get it going. Once the baby begins to enjoy feeding, once it starts responding to situations in a way that you can understand and smiling huge smiles and playing and \u201ctalking\u201d and watching, then you begin to feel the famous warm glow. Before that you\u2019re on your own, and the least \u201cnatural\u201d thing in the world is suddenly to change your character.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mary-Kay Wilmers cofounded the <\/em>London Review of Books in 1979 and has been its sole editor since 1992. After a childhood spent in the United States, Belgium, and England, Wilmers went to Oxford to read French and Russian. Initially planning on a career as an interpreter, she instead found work as a secretary at Faber & Faber in the time of T.\u2009S. Eliot, then moved on to <\/em>The Listener and the <\/em>Times Literary Supplement, and contributed to the <\/em>New Statesman, before cofounding the <\/em>LRB. She is the author of <\/em>The Eitingons: A Twentieth-Century Family, a book about her family and their Cold War deeds and misdeeds, which the <\/em>Telegraph called \u201ctransfixingly readable.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from<\/em> Human Relations and Other Difficulties: Essays<\/a>,<\/em> by Mary-Kay Wilmers. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 27, 2019. Copyright \u00a9 2018 by Mary-Kay Wilmers. Essay originally published in <\/em>The Listener on May 4, 1972. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the perils of early motherhood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1832,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-139074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nI Was Dilapidated by Mary-Kay Wilmers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On the perils of early motherhood.\" \/>\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\/2019\/08\/28\/i-was-dilapidated\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I Was Dilapidated by Mary-Kay Wilmers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" 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