Motherhood: The Sole Reader | nd-aktuell.de

Since motherhood is no longer a destiny in most Western countries, it is often declared a project. Whether, as with the journalist Sarah Diehl, who defends the supposedly stigmatized existence of single women in her book “The Freedom of Being Alone,” it appears as a threat to individual autonomy, or on the contrary, as in neo-Biedermeier life-help guides, it figures as happy self-realization , is secondary. Here as there, motherhood is seen as a life plan that affects the mother (or the parents) and only secondarily the child. The prose essay “Labor of Love”, which the historian and cultural scientist Christina Wessely wrote about her motherhood, differs from most autobiographical, self-therapeutic or socially critical books about the happiness and disadvantages of motherhood in that it avoids the imposition of understanding it as a project. rejects. Although the subject of the book is so-called postpartum depression, it is not a complaint about how difficult it is for mothers. Rather, the book tells with tender clarity, linguistic precision and touching expressiveness that every birth is double: the birth of the being that is born and the birth of the one who brings it into the world.

That the woman who has a child becomes a mother not just through its birth, but rather only through the active, painful and always contradictory process of spontaneous identification with the child, which presupposes the ability to differentiate between boundaries, that is, becoming a mother Wessely makes it clear from the beginning that it is a social and at the same time individual, unrepeatable intimate process. By narrating a subjective experience in the third person singular, she doubles the distance between the mother and the child – the rift that the book describes – in the distance between the self who narrates and the other to whom she relates The story becomes: “She sits there very still so as not to wake him. The legs must not be crossed; even trying to put a pillow under the elbow, under the already sore arm, could disrupt his sleep. If he woke up, she would have to repeat the last half hour, the rocking, the singing, the gentle rocking, always hoping that she would settle down in the right place to give him and herself a little rest.

The book first describes the effort and sacrifice that are the price of that somatic communication between mother and child, which is misinterpreted by opponents of motherhood as evidence of the repressive nature of the mother’s role and by romantics as an index of a natural bond. However, in the formulations with which Wessely describes the mother’s frustrating alienation from her child in a touching and sometimes almost unbearable intensity, there is not a single one in which the child is reduced to an intruder and motherhood is reduced to a curse. As the title states, effort is always one of love; conversely, without effort there is no love. There is no harmonious mediation possible between these two facts; they always appear in the dissonance with which excessive demands and empathy resonate with one another: »She is often tremblingly happy when the screaming has not yet started at 6 p.m. Because it will only stop around eleven, after the child’s father and she have taken it in turns to carry it around, often for many hours, before it falls into a deep, short sleep until the first feeding at night.” By the child moving without intention and without anything to be able to do this, makes one the sole ruler of one’s own life, it becomes uncanny, like a mythical figure that makes the seemingly rational everyday life threadbare. That’s why Wessely repeatedly resorts to analogies to fairy tales, which, in terms of genre history, refer to the bond between mother and child that is similar to a spell: “Like the mermaid in the fairy tale, she retreats into a dark hole. She is afraid of the child, terribly, deeply afraid. This feeling is becoming increasingly clear as the dominant attitude. She is extremely unhappy. She often locks herself in the bathroom, sits on the floor and cries. And when the child’s father knocks on the door and she opens it for him at some point, she screams in tears: “I can’t take it anymore, I don’t want any of this.”

Wessely is not interested in the topic of postpartum depression for reasons of relationship or role psychology, but because it shows a dark reflection of natural history, which appears in the process of becoming a mother through all social mediations and is part of her being. If the mother, when overwhelmed by the child’s feeling of omni-dominance, seems to become a child again, who locks herself in the bathroom and is called back by the father, who is also the life partner, this is not a simple regression; Reminder that adults are never just adults and that something already exists in the baby that goes beyond childhood. In this sense, depression is neither a weakness nor a symptom of the poor arrangement of the world, but something stirring within it that must be acknowledged and brought back into life with tenderness and patience. Even though Wessely describes below how this can be achieved, she never becomes cheesy and conciliatory. Although things get better, neither everything nor the end is good. However, what was previously overwhelming appears in a different light and can be understood as a step on the way to an unknown and perhaps beautiful future: “Regardless of all efforts, all worries and privations, she feels life with the child that she first had to get to know , which loving was such a long and painful process for her than a celebration. Every day is new.«

That’s why Wessely’s book was written neither for the self, nor for the partner, nor for any target group, but “only for a reader”: “It’s barely a year since he recognized that the child in the mirror is HIMSELF, and tried with clumsy hand movements to wipe away the small red sticker that she had placed on his forehead.” So at the end the motif of becoming a stranger is repeated again, the splitting of the subject into itself and another, which is the prerequisite for happy self-knowledge is. The fact that Wessely has also written a document of female experience is so obvious that she does not need to emphasize it: what is described here can only be experienced by a woman, albeit in a genuine way. Men can – like the partner in Wessely’s book – help, sometimes disrupt and hopefully show interest and empathy. But they will never experience it for themselves.

Christina Wessely: Labor of love. Hanser, 176 pages, hardcover, €22.

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