À la carte (May 27, 2024)
Some books, a stressful movie, and a relaxing show.
Some books
These last two weeks, I’ve had to surrender to my other roles—mother and lawyer. Between work deadlines, preparing for an international trip with a baby (by the time you get this, we will be en route to the UK!), and managing two work days without childcare for the first time, I’ve been overwhelmed. But by staying up too late, I did make time to finish reading Lucy Jones’s new-in-the-U.S. release Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood, which quickly skyrocketed to the top of my list of favorite books of all time. Matrescence is my generation’s Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born—a paradigm-shifting, foundational text. À la carte isn’t the right space for me to gush over how profoundly affected I was by Jones’s stunning researched reflection on becoming a mother, or how relieved I am to have stumbled upon such words describing and reflecting on the life/mind/body/soul-altering experience of matrescence—while I am still very much in the midst of this transition. How lucky I feel to have been handed this book during this precise juncture in my life.
One of Jones’s many talents is epigraph selection and juxtaposition. (I’m sure there is an amazing Google doc somewhere where she has been saving treasures for years.) My breath was taken away by one, by the American playwright and poet Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, at the beginning of a chapter titled “Recombobulation.” I don’t know if she herself was speaking to motherhood, but her words are perfect anyway: “Finally, I came to the thought, All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow. And then I could breathe.”
I suppose I lied when I said I surrendered to my other roles this week. I don’t think surrender is the proper word for the level of distraction and stress I felt when I was with my daughter, and the yearning and guilt I felt when I was not. I didn’t do very much breathing—further evidence of my failure to surrender. But there are moments—moments when my daughter commands my full attention, when I must close the laptop, put down the phone, sit on the floor, and let her climb into my lap, where she stands to give me a full slobbery kiss on the mouth. In those moments, I feel, more than I think, you win, you will always win. And my shoulders relax. I am a new self, one that hasn’t yet figured out its relationship to the old one.
For a different perspective on motherhood, there is Cold Enough For Snow by Jessica Au, which I read in a few sittings over the course of Mother’s Day. An adult daughter takes her mother to Japan. The daughter treats her mother to new experiences—an art gallery, a meal—and finds herself disappointed by her mother’s laconic responses. It is a quiet novel, a novella really, presenting and exploring the distance between mothers and daughters that exist against the backdrop of intimacy.
A show
I lasted about 25 minutes into Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s film adaptation of the novel by the same name by Martin Amis. The film follows the family of the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz, who lives adjacent to the death camp. Death is in the periphery—in the shots of the smoke rising from chimneys, in the fur coats tried on by the commandant’s wife, and in the screams of children getting off of trains in the distance—as we watch the German family tuck into bed and admire the blooming summer roses in their garden. Friends, I just couldn’t do it. Motherhood has me still so…activated…my PPA still flaring….I shut off the TV when a subtitle captured a child screaming for his father. I think I got the point? And didn’t need to watch the entire movie? But I’m open to being convinced otherwise.
To wind down, I tuned into something that was about as far from Zone of Interest as you can imagine without resorting to children’s television: The Dog House UK, a British reality program following the staff of an animal shelter as they match rescue dogs with families. Friends, it was better than Xanax. The staff are utterly uncharismatic—dog people through and through—as are the families, who have yet to reveal the sort of quotidian charm that we’ve grown accustomed to on the Great British Baking Show. But the dogs! Oh the dogs! I wish I had known about all FIVE seasons of this show during my first trimester. Thank you
for the recommendation. We may have to detour on our way to London from Scotland…