In motherhood I have experienced myself as both more virtuous and terrible, and more implicated too in the world’s virtue and terror, than I would from the anonymity of childlessness have thought possible.
—Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother
I resent the pervasive sentimentality often associated with babies and their care. It may the most difficult work I’ve undertaken in my life. The daily minutiae of caring for a baby forcibly reiterates both the power and powerlessness experienced within the maternal role. Elsewhere in her remarkable book Rachel Cusk writes, “…motherhood is a career in conformity from which no amount of subterfuge can liberate the soul without violence.”
Tags: art-making, artist mother, maternity, mother artist
