Miranda Popkey’s Sense of Surety
There’s no way to know you’ll be a terrible mother until you are one.
I do not ask myself what kind of mother I expect to be.
But my unspoken supposition is that I will be a good one, a loving one, a veritable martyr on the minefield of motherhood. The orientation of this entire inquiry springs from the sense I have of myself as a natural caretaker—prone to accommodation and self-abnegation; sensitive to duty and guilt. I somehow know that I would empty myself out for my imagined future children, am so convinced of this projection that I feel compelled to guard against it in the childless here-and-now.
I assume, I suppose, that I will fall hopelessly in love, and that even when I don’t feel moved by love I will stay, burying myself in motherhood’s mundanity through the force of innate biological compulsion, or irrepressible animal instinct.
It’s never before occurred to me to consider the extent to which this assumption is unexamined and uninterrogated. I’ve never before looked askance at its inherent essentialism, its reliance upon a reductive gender dynamic that I have, in other areas of my life, already thrown off. It’s only as I get older and closer to deciding what I will do—as motherhood instantiates itself more fully in the lived realities of my peers and friends—that I realize this presumption of mine is far from a certainty.
There is, of course, really no way of knowing what kind of mother I will be in advance. There’s no way of anticipatorily mapping the universe that is a new life in the world. I cannot know who my children might be, nor how I will serve or fail them. Perhaps, when it comes right down it, motherhood is actually as individual as personhood itself, so that becoming a mother will not so much erase me as replace me with someone new.
How many other things, after all, have I obtained only to abandon them? How many other times have I gotten what I wanted only to discover that I’ve been wrong?
The newness of such transformation would be its own kind of death, but perhaps in focusing unduly on the self that I would lose I have avoided confronting the fear of who I would be.
Motherhood would make of me someone I don’t know yet. And what if she’s the opposite of the woman I expect?
*
Writer Miranda Popkey, in her novel Topics of Conversation, offers interesting food for thought. Toward the end of her book, the unnamed protagonist—who mostly exists to relay the conversations she has with a series of female interlocutors, like a literary cousin of Rachel Cusk’s Faye—meets a woman in a grocery store who confesses to abandoning her child.
She begins her story by telling the narrator that she usually elides the truth; she usually tells people that she “gave the baby up.” When they assume she means for adoption, she says, “I don’t bother to correct them.” “It’s not a lie,” the woman continues. “After all,” she admits, “I did give the baby up.”
The narrator, who has a child herself, listens to the story impassively, and her lack of reaction—the conversational, existential void she leaves—enables the woman to penetrate, in the telling, to the truth of her own experience.
And the truth of that experience is this:
“I didn’t think about having children because I had myself been a child. It’s as simple—as stupid—as that. A woman had given birth to me. I was a woman. I would give birth to someone else. But then the baby came and though everything was—perfect, so much better than almost anyone in this country, in any country, can expect, I didn’t . . . I didn’t love her. My baby. My daughter. I felt, toward her—I felt nothing. No hate. No resentment. Just—nothing.”
The woman recognizes that what she’s admitting to is uniquely monstrous. That it is, in contemporary society, perhaps one of the few remaining taboos. And so she goes out of her way to be clear, to convince the narrator of her consciousness, her utter surety. It was not, she says, that mothering was too hard, that she lost her mind or her senses or both. No—nothing so dramatic as that. It was just, she continues, that,
“As a mother I did not—recognize myself. Toward myself as a mother I had no feeling. . . .The hardest part of this to admit, the part that feels the most shameful—the reason I don’t tell anyone—it’s the fact that I don’t feel guilty. I don’t regret it. The decision I made. I feel certain it was the right one.”
When I first discovered Popkey’s book, which teems with insight and artistry, it was this chapter that I read over and over. The woman’s story was so unfamiliar as to be seemingly impossible. It revealed a possibility I had never before considered. Before this, my world didn’t have any stories for women who had children only to discover that really they didn’t want them. And because I had no such stories, this was a potentiality I struggled to contemplate. But once I began to think about it, the idea seemed terrifying in its insistent straightforwardness.
How many other things, after all, have I obtained only to abandon them? How many other times have I gotten what I wanted only to discover that I’ve been wrong? And why, after all, should I really expect motherhood to be qualitatively different? On the basis, I wonder, of what hard evidence?
When the woman finishes her story, the narrator reacts, and her reaction does not restore the old narrative. She does not affirm the woman’s monstrousness but instead envies her surety. “I was thinking,” she reflects, “about the last time I had been as sure of a decision as she had been of hers.” The implication is that the narrator is drifting, letting herself be led by the stories and scripts of others. And, of course, the other woman’s sense of surety does seem to be uncommon.
It does take, after all, a great deal of self-confidence to reject a narrative as deeply ingrained as the one about the naturalness of motherhood. Most readers will relate more to the narrator than to her conversational companion.
But the subversiveness of the admission has nevertheless made an interesting point: just because a story is popular doesn’t mean that it is true.
Perhaps we are not all meant to be mothers. Perhaps some of us would actually not be good at it.