Bad mothers, lost daughters and forbidden dreams

“What do we need dreamy mothers for? We do not want mothers who gaze beyond us, longing to be elsewhere. We need her to be of this world, lively, capable, entirely present to our needs.”
- Debra Levy

Over Christmas I had a couple of days with just me and the baby at home, while my husband took my daughter to see his mum. I anticipated that it would be lonely and boring and hard to fill the time, but in reality it felt relatively easy and quiet and much-needed. I missed the absentees, but the simplicity was welcome - of the lower volume, of having only myself and the baby to look after, with no conversations needed to decide what would happen and when and no requirement to fit my desires around any competing ones. 

Sometimes it is hard to be with people.

I purposely didn’t make any plans for the few days I had alone, because I had suspected that I wouldn’t want to tie myself into anyone else’s schedule. I didn’t feel lonely, really, except  when I went out and saw other people - when I chatted to someone in a shop and it felt like I’d already forgotten how to talk to other humans. And when I saw people socialising together, I suddenly wondered if I should be doing that too, or if the fact that I was alone somehow reflected on my success or popularity or something like that.

It reminded me of certain aspects of mothering, where you are absolutely fine and happy doing your thing until you find out someone else is doing something different. Sometimes I think that us humans would actually get along better if we didn’t have each other to refer to, but perhaps, if that was the case, we wouldn’t really be human at all.

We are social animals, variously sociable depending on our personalities. I found out recently that being extroverted doesn’t mean, as I previously thought, that you’re more confident around others, but that you get energised by being around others. Introverts are the opposite, more easily drained by interaction and requiring more time to recover. Lots of us, of course, are somewhere in the middle, or sometimes one thing, sometimes another. 

But even if being with others fills us up, everyone needs to be alone to recharge sometimes. And being alone is a rare experience as a parent. I want to remember how much I enjoyed that time alone, because I often assume that I need others when I’m really just used to being with others. 

One of the many taboos of motherhood is expressing the desire to be by yourself, to have time away from those you love. I hungrily soak up stories of mothers who do this - the rebels, the defectors. A teacher of mine who goes to a cabin in the woods by herself once or twice a year to write; a friend who went away for a week-long yoga retreat when her daughter turned two; a mum on a what’s app group who had a whole day and a night in a hotel by herself when her baby turned one. Without spoiling Maggie Gyllenhal’s masterpiece in case you haven’t seen it, The Lost Daughter is so compelling to most of us because we understand profoundly the stigma of craving space away from our children. 

It’s even more frowned upon to perceive a life without children, to imagine what it would be like if you had never had them. I suspect that the fact that these harmless daydreams are taboo at all is down to how much we struggle, culturally, to feel more than one thing at once - both happy with what you have but also a little enthralled by what you don’t. I imagine it’s also to do with the pain so many women experience because they cannot have children and/or experience a traumatic struggle to conceive. I don’t want to minimise this pain in any way. But it’s also true that whatever life you choose or is served to you, there will be some gain, and some loss.

You can deeply love your family but also fantasise about a life where they do not exist. The whole point of fantasies is that they are not realistic: they leave out the bad bits. In reality, by the time I had my first child, I was pretty sick of my child-free life. I felt unanchored, and I had watched all the weekend daytime films I needed to (or thought I had. Thought I’d had enough lie-ins too. Ha!) 

But these realities - the knowledge that I wanted this - does not feature in my fantasies. Instead there are quiet mornings reading in bed with the sunlight dancing on the wall. There are long, wintry walks beside hedgerows or on empty beaches where no one moans or ruins the vibe for you. There is some kind of studio where I go to write, possibly at the bottom of the garden. I think my house, and maybe my whole life, looks a bit like Olivia Laing’s. There is a lot of cinema, meals in neighbourhood restaurants, short breaks to places like Reyjavik, Stockholm, Sicily.

The life I will never have is a thing I sometimes feel a healthy grief about, just like a grief I would feel for my life now were I not living it. I sense that - outside of the fear of sounding ungrateful - lots of us feel afraid of naming what we long for and what we find hard, because we fear that admitting it would make the ache worse, that it would make living without the thing, in the way we are currently doing, more unbearable. But actually I think the opposite happens. 

When you tell a story about yourself - like when you add detail and colour to a fantasy - it has the effect of (re)defining who you are as a person. Some of us feel more whole when we become mothers. But lots of us feel subtracted, lost, unmoored all over again. A story - a tale of another life, one you will never live - is a reconnection with forgotten parts of yourself.

It is a journey we might go on guiltily. But we come back as a more rounded person. I suspect in some ways our children - who so often seem to need all of us, entirely oriented to their needs - also require us to be 3D, technicolour, nuanced, messy, full of longings and contradictions and joys and sorrows. This subtly models for them that they too can be this. I know I have seen my daughter light up when I light up; I know we’ve had moments of pure connection after a rupture that stemmed from my frustration of feeling trapped in a house with bloody kids, of - to be really honest - feeling trapped in a life with bloody kids.

Our refusal to live any element of the life we desire to live in order to be there for our children paradoxically leads to more suffering - small people sniff out a resentful mother very quickly. That's why it is also necessary not just to have dreams but to indulge them, not in the old way - that is gone - and the life you won't live, that is gone too - but in some other fashion, perhaps in small, interrupted chunks, or infrequently, or somewhere along the line, or through irresponsible fantasies.

I recently had a day without either child and it made clear, as it so often does, that I need/want more of this, something I hadn't let myself admit. I feel at peace with the books I have not written, the countries I have not travelled to, the people I have not hugged because I was at home hugging my children. But the pedant in me feels it’s disingenuous when people say "but I wouldn't have it any other way" because a part of them, at some points would, they really would. 

It would have been ok, it would have been not ok. It would have been unbearable and so much easier. Here we are instead: certain dreams are dashed and we are also blessed with unaccountable luck. I see it all as signs of a life lived, of feelings felt, of a heart beating, and longing, and loving.