04/03/2026
More reflections on motherhood - the raw, unpolished and unpalatable version that many women are supposed to keep to themselves.
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Motherhood can feel like walking into a room and realising part of you has been left outside, only you’re not sure where you put her. That’s what Cusk is getting at with that question about where you go once you become a mother, and whether you come back. It isn’t theatrical or a vanishing act. It’s slower than that. You’re still there, obviously. Packing lunch, replying to emails, paying the gas bill. But the centre of gravity has moved, and you didn’t entirely choose the direction.
When A Life’s Work was published in 2001, Cusk wrote about early motherhood with a candour that felt risky at the time. She described boredom, irritation and a claustrophobic proximity to a baby who needed her body in a way that erased privacy. Readers were furious. She was accused of ingratitude, as though acknowledging strain meant she loved her child less. But what she was really describing was the psychological reordering. The way your inner life gets interrupted so often that you stop trusting it will hold.
And that’s where the question of “coming back” starts to feel a little complicated. Because who exactly is meant to return? The woman who could sit in a café alone with a notebook and feel interesting? The woman whose sexual identity wasn’t threaded through school newsletters and orthodontist appointments? Or the woman who made plans without calculating nap times and childcare swaps? If you’ve had decades of adult life before children, you can list her habits. You remember how she filled a Saturday and the shape of her ambition. So when she recedes -it’s personal.
But the loss isn’t clean. It’s tangled up with love. You look at your child and feel a ferocity that shocks you, and at the same time you might feel trapped by the repetition of the days. You can adore them and still resent the erosion of your solitude in the same hour. That contradiction is hard to confess because it doesn’t fit the script. The cultural expectation is gratitude. And fulfilment. A glowing acceptance that this is your highest calling. Adrienne Rich wrote about the difference between motherhood as lived experience and motherhood as institution, and that gap is where many women sway. The institution demands selflessness but the lived reality includes rage, erotic withdrawal, boredom, pride, exhaustion.
What complicates it even more is that the disappearance can be rewarded. You become efficient, reliable and needed. There is praise in being indispensable. And that praise can be seductive. You tell yourself you don’t mind shelving parts of your old life because this new role feels urgent. But urgency can swallow curiosity. Months and years pass. You wake up and realise you haven’t read a book that wasn’t interrupted in a very long time. You haven’t travelled alone or been the most interesting person at your own dinner table because you’re too tired to try.
Some women experience motherhood as expansion rather than erasure. Perhaps the two states coexist. You may feel bigger in love and smaller in autonomy. You may gain patience and lose spontaneity. It’s about whether you still recognise the voice in your own head as yours, or whether it has been diluted by constant vigilance.
Elena Ferrante explored this in The Lost Daughter, where a mother admits to stepping away from her children for a period because she could not breathe inside the role. The outrage around that novel said more about us than about her. We prefer mothers who disappear without protest than mothers who admit to needing air.
And perhaps that’s why Cusk frames it as fascination rather than complaint. She is watching the metamorphosis with curiosity. That you go somewhere is clear. The question is whether you return in original form, or whether the version who comes back is altered beyond recognition. Most women don’t revert. They reassemble. Some pieces are missing, some are sharpened. Some are softened by necessity.
What rarely gets said plainly is that you might mourn the woman you were, even while feeling grateful for the children you have. You might scroll through old photos and feel a stab of envy towards your former self, which is a deeply taboo emotion because it sounds like regret. But it’s not. It’s grief for a life that narrowed.
And maybe the real fear is not that you won’t come back, but that you will, and you’ll discover that the old ambitions no longer fit, that the woman you once were now feels naive or self-absorbed. That can be just as disorienting. Either way, the question remains open. Where did she go? And who is this woman standing here now, holding the same name but carrying a different interior map.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
Image: Hreinn Gudlaugsson
