Motherhood is Daughterhood is Childhood
Tell me if you know this one: a woman is born with all of the eggs she will have in her life. Every egg a woman will ever possess is inside of her the moment she is born. This means, then, that inside of the mother are infinite daughters; actually, not quite infinite. There are approximately one million eggs inside of a baby girl at birth. At puberty that same baby girl will have approximately 300,000 eggs. Her egg count will plummet in her mid-to-late 30’s, that once-near-infinite pool of daughters shrinking to 25,000, vanishing to 1,000 at age 51.
One of my favorite reads from 2020, Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, distills this idea concretely in a passage that I still think about:
On the verge of sleep, I wondered how many more times I was going to get my period. How many more? How many times had it happened already? Another month, another egg. The words floated before my eyes like a speech bubble in a manga. I stared at the words. Another month, another egg. That’s right. Nothing this month. And nothing next month, or the month after that, or the one after that. It’s not going to happen, not in this lifetime, I told the speech bubble, setting it straight. But soon the feeble voice inside of me receded, and I fell back asleep before I realized.
Inside of the mother is the daughter. Inside of the grand mother is the mother is the daughter. Even when we think our answer is no, the call is coming from inside the house. Maybe we don’t answer, and maybe it stops ringing. For me the phone has been ringing for centuries.
I know you’ve heard the discussions lately of the ‘monster mommy’ protagonist, the one having a moment in the contemporary stacks at every indie bookstore. Books like I Love You, But I’ve Chosen Darkness, Motherhood, Nightbitch, books in which the female-identifying protagonist is shown to be an unabashedly ‘bad mother.’ I appreciate these books, and I especially love the way they help give shape to the amorphous reality that is my own future identity as a mother. I want to see women disgusted with their needy children, women so tired and hungry, sloppy. These books say what’s been whispered forever: motherhood can be miserable. Motherhood can require a relinquishing of the self. It can demand a form of protection that outsiders cannot understand. I remember finishing The Golden State by Lydia Keisling (it’s one of my favorite books!) a few years ago and exhaling one giant, sustained sigh. So women can be messy and be mothers; so there are moments of dark-pitted loneliness; so there are moments of tremendous, glowing joy.
Maybe these books are indeed having a ‘moment,’ as I’ve read on Twitter, as I’ve heard from friends. And it’s true, I’m seeing the same shiny-covered books with capital letters and a bold type-face. It’s true that after reading The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan and then watching Maggie Gyllenhal’s film adaptation of The Lost Daughter, I felt a little bit hopeless. But it’s not the motherhood depicted that makes me feel this way; it’s the fact that these raw displays of raising a child, of nursing a baby, of the body in labor are so vacant from the canons that we now have to shit out every story possible of a woman developing an addiction to cigarettes instead of a love for her newborn baby. It upsets me that there are writers out there trying to turn these abhorrent anti-abortion laws into satire so that the world is more open to talking about it. Put more eloquently: it upsets me how little respect the stories of pregnant women and mothers receive.
It seems to me that motherhood and maternity might be the only story there is. In Petite Maman, Celine Sciamma’s new film, eight-year-old Nelly gets the magical experience of meeting her mother, Marion, as her eight-year-old child-self. Through the magic of imagination and the magic of place, Nelly is able to play with her mother as a child. Adult-Marion and Nelly have returned to Marion’s childhood home after the death of Marion’s mother. They’ve come only to clean and empty the house; adult-Marion doesn’t even have time to show Nelly the hut in the woods she grew up playing in. Nelly struggles to comfort Marion’s adult-sized grief, but she is not unfamiliar with her mother’s sadness. Nelly eventually tells child-Marion who she is. She tells child-Marion that as a 30-year-old mother she is often sad, often seems unhappy. Marion asks Nelly: Do you come from the future? To which Nelly responds: I come from the path behind you.
She means this literally, and it’s a beautiful moment of childhood purity that speaks adult metaphor. The path behind where child-Marion is standing is literally the place Nelly comes from when she meets Marion in the forest; but we, the audience, know that the path Nelly comes from is more mythic than that. Petite Maman is a film about mothers and infinite daughters. Nelly is named after her great-grandmother; Nelly mourns not getting to say goodbye to her grandmother before she died; Nelly fears that she is not the daughter her mother wants. These pains go back generations, passed down through the eggs of the Mother.
I wonder how much of motherhood is a reparenting of the self. I find myself daydreaming about the connection between motherhood and childhood; I share Nelly’s curiosity for stories of her parents as children. Nelly grows frustrated with her parents in the film for not telling her enough about themselves as children. She’s too young to know that so much of childhood is forgotten in the growing up, in the running away from or running toward the future. One day we are bored eight-year-olds in overalls with umpteen twilit hours to fill and the next day we are thirty-year-olds in blazers and four coffees a day as our form of play.
Why is it so hard to remember what being a child was like? Why are the memories I try to recall hazy and haloed in impenetrable light?
How lovely it would be to relive and see myself at eight, her white-blonde hair and dirty hands. Her bookish turning away. Her desire to be seen. Her fear of being seen.
When Nelly tells child-Marion the truth about who she is Marion accepts it relatively easily. She trusts Nelly. And this trust is reciprocal, an earned trust that enables Nelly to share her fears with child-Marion. She tells Marion that adult-Marion has left, and when child-Marion asks Nelly if she’s afraid she won’t come back Nelly responds: a little. Nelly sees her mother’s unhappiness and her exhaustion. She tells child-Marion that she doesn’t think adult-Marion enjoys being a mother most of the time.
Child-Marion responds with curiosity. She asks Nelly how old she was when she had Nelly (23). We see child-Marion calculating how many years are between now and then, a tallying that tells her she’ll have fifteen years before meeting her daughter again. Child-Marion asks: Did I want to have you? It’s a startling and direct line that speaks to how aware girls are of the heaviness of womanhood. Eight-year-old Marion is already aware that some mothers do not want to become mothers. She’s afraid of that fate, as I remember being, as all girls are. Nelly responds: Yes. And Child-Marion delivers the first line to make me weep in the movie: I’m not surprised. I’m already thinking of you.
When I was a girl I played hard. I spent hours in the woods behind our house, picking black raspberries or making up a story I’d force my brother to act out with me. There were moments throughout my childhood when I’d see a glimpse of the girls my mother and grandmother once were. They’d chase me and pick flowers with me and my play brought them closer to who they once were. Once, on a swing set with my grandmother, her laughter echoed as it must have before her father touched her with his drunken, predatory hands. Sometimes, if my mother wins a game of HORSE at home against my dad she’ll talk shit like she must have before her three miscarriages.
There’s another loaded line in this scene with the two girls. Nelly continues to reveal just how much guilt she’s feeling for her mother’s sadness. She doesn’t know how to comfort her mother’s loss (a loss she can’t even imagine it’s so painful); nor does she know how to make her mother less unhappy, less tired. In a moment of catharsis child-Marion tells Nelly: You didn’t invent my sadness.
You didn’t invent my sadness.
My grandmother was fifteen when she gave birth to my mother. Did she want my mother? Yes. She wanted a baby and a family to replace the one she’d been born into. Fifteen is only seven years away from eight and already my grandmother bartered away her childhood; but what is a childhood when the play is ruined, the trust is obliterated, the magic is toxic?
At 20 she had two daughters under five and a husband who’d left. Her mother, my great-grandmother, was trapped in a loveless marriage and a messy house for most of her life. Did she know, somewhere in her bones, that her monster of a husband was abusing her only daughter? Was escape all my grandmother had?
My mother struggled with pregnancy. She and her first husband divorced due to his not wanting children. I find it brave that she wanted me so badly that she blew up her life to get me. She had three miscarriages before I was born. I want you to reread that sentence, but slower. Maybe read it again. That word, miscarriage. It doesn’t contain the bigness of the life that was lost. The pain that the mother’s body has endured, the rage that it’s for nothing, for more pain. I don’t know a bigger heartbreak than birthing a child without a heartbeat.
My IUD is supposed to come out next August. My eggs are, as they say, depleting. There are less daughters inside of me than there once were.
But I can feel You anyway. The You of this path I’ve come from; the one my grandmother’s feet knew, and I have her feet, too, I memorized the shape of her big toe before she died; the same path of my mother, that path she ran to get to me. One day You will walk to this path and I will meet you. I will want you, and want you, and want you.
Watch these films about motherhood that I love:
Tully
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Lady Bird
Petite Maman
20th Century Woman
Read these books about motherhood that I love:
Beloved: Toni Morrison
Nightbitch: Rachel Yoder
Crying in H-Mart: Michelle Zauner
The Chronology of Water: Lidia Yuknavitch
Fight Night: Miriam Toews
Transcendent Kingdom: Yaa Gyasi
Motherhood: Sheila Heti
The Golden State: Lydia Kiesling