Claire Dederer’s Selfish Sacraments
Art and babies are made from the same stuff: ourselves.
I’ve recently come to believe that my mother is the only human being on earth who cares for my unconditionally. It’s hard to describe what I mean by this exactly, as I know there are many other people who love me—my father, for one, and my siblings and friends. My fiancé, of course, the most recent addition to the crew.
I know that those people love me, and probably even love me unconditionally. But despite the love I know they have, my relationships with all of these other people feel more coequal than the one I have with my mother—more like meetings on level footing, where care is traded back and forth on the basis of need, a metaphorical game of hot potato.
With my mother, by contrast, I feel her care as a birthright, a sun that shines on me and requires nothing in return. In the same way it would be pointless to try to meet the sun in the sky, it would be pointless to try to repay my mother for all she has done for me—its multitude is a universe, infinitely expanding from the point-of-origin that was giving me life. And so, because of this impossibility, I have stopped trying. Stopped trying to repay; to love back as deeply; to meet her where she is. I know that I will never approach her. Indeed, I have rarely thought it necessary to try. I accept my mother’s care without thought of debt or reciprocity, and I know that she bestows it in the same vein.
Though I know that my mother loves and appreciates the person I am, I also know that she loves me despite and outside and beyond and without regard for that person. She loves me not just because I am me, but because I am hers.
I am lucky to feel this way, I know. Not everyone does. Not everyone has the mother I do; not everyone will experience motherly love the way I have. Nevertheless, I’ve come to believe that this orientation I have toward my mother’s love is natural, easily anticipated—springing, somehow, from the order of things, from the reality that my mother carried me inside her and is the person with and against whom I became a person myself.
I’m working out a theory, I guess, that my mother’s original care for me was an outgrowth of her care for herself, and thus that her persistent care escapes the reciprocal bounds of equitable adult relationships. Even though we are today separate people, adults who respect and treat each other as so, it doesn’t take that much to strip away the veneer.
Though I know that today my mother loves and appreciates the person I am—the character I have developed, much of it at her tutelage—I also know that she loves me despite and outside and beyond and without regard for that person.
She loves me not just because I am me, but because I am hers. When she loves me, she loves herself. And the love she gives me? It, like lifeblood, is comprised of self.
As a child (and even, to a lesser extent, today), I wanted my mother—greedily, guiltlessly—to give me her self. And I know that I would have settled for nothing less.
This call for selfhood is, I think, what makes the mother-or-monster inquiry evergreen. Childbearing, like artmaking, asks that we give of ourselves. And the self, as expansive as it may sometimes be, is a limited resource.
Even the sun does not shine everywhere at once.
*
I think of the connection between motherhood and selfhood when I read Claire Dederer’s Paris Review piece on the art of monstrous men.
Dederer is a wife and mother, and her memoir Love & Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning, could be considered an entry in Kim Brooks’s “literature of domestic ambivalence.” In it, she explores the problems and contradictions of her forty-something domestic life, among them the labor of motherhood. Of her marriage, she writes,
“You and your husband’s love for each other is based on profound reciprocity: What can you do for me? What can I do for you? This is considered a healthy marriage; you think about each other’s needs. You cover the bases.”
Of her family and children, more broadly, she continues,
“Your family isn’t some kind of chore . . . It’s the whole deal, the great love, the thing in this life that was supposed to happen to you. Even so, your family members certainly require a lot of work. From you.”
Her memoir was published in 2017, just six months before the Paris Review piece. And so it is not difficult to imagine the conditions revealed in the book as the background for the insight she presents in the article, which, roughly summarized, is that there is something inherently selfish about being an artist, some seed of self-regard that’s liable to grow monstrous under certain conditions.
Even now, respect for my mother’s separate selfhood sometimes feels like the most unnatural trapping of civilized life; to act with it in mind remains a conscious effort.
For artists who are also women, those conditions are necessarily met if they become mothers. Dederer’s thinking is this: if both childrearing and artmaking require a person to give of herself, and there is only so much self to go around, then every creative act is also necessarily a deprivation of caretaking—a bit of self that was poured into one vessel rather than the other. As she puts it,
“When you finish a book, what lies littered on the ground are small broken things: broken dates, broken promises, broken engagements. Also other, more important forgettings and failures: children’s homework left unchecked, parents left untelephoned, spousal sex unhad. Those things have to get broken for the book to get written.”
Dederer’s words remind me of something I read in Brooks’s piece, the essay that, in many ways, lies at the epicenter of the entire M-o-M debate—the original offering that launched a thousand responsive thinkpiece ships. It’s an anecdote that Brooks recounts, a story that fellow mother-writer Zoe Zolbrod tells her about writing and parenting. She says,
“The truth is that I think I’m a better mom when I’m not writing. . . . I’m better at home when I’m writing less.”
But, what does she mean by “better”? “Better” in what way? The explanation, when she gives it, reeks to me of selfhood. When she’s working on a project, Zolbrod says, her daughter can tell that some part of her is alienated, unavailable:
“My eyes glaze over or something when I’m going off into that other place, and my daughter notices it and doesn’t like it. Like we’re sitting on the floor coloring together. And I’m getting in my zoned-out space and she’s always watching to see when I do that. ‘Don’t make your face like that,’ she says. She just watches me really closely, and she’s less satisfied with what I can’t give her. She senses that I’m keeping something to myself. It never feels like it’s enough.”
When Zolbrod has a book in the works, her daughter can feel that there is some part of her mother’s self being held back. And, being innocently narcissistic as all children are, she revolts. As a child, what she wants is nothing less than dominion—nothing other than full access to her mother’s entire self at all times. Of course, such self-centeredness is something most of us outgrow in time; eventually children relinquish claims of sovereignty over anyone other than themselves.
But with mothers, it seems, we do so begrudgingly. At least, it’s been that way for me. When Zolbrod described her daughter’s affrontedness, something in my heart flipped. Because, even today at 33, I can empathize: respect for my mother’s separate selfhood still sometimes feels like the most unnatural trapping of civilized life; to act with it in mind remains a conscious effort. In my preconscious brain, my mother’s self still feels indissolubly tethered to my own, like a thing that should be mine, whenever I want it.
And so Dederer’s zero-sum reading feels true to me. And it makes me wonder whether the mother/monster divide actually has the entire thing wrong: maybe, in the end, all mothers are monsters. Maybe the only way to avoid becoming monstrous is to forgo motherhood entirely.