Early in Claire Kilroy’s new novel Soldier Sailor, the protagonist is alone in a forest glade when she nearly steps upon a creature new born:
Unviably large head, purple body all elbows, bulbous eyelids sealed shut and a yellow beak. The merest membrane of skin. A hatchling.
‘Soldier’, as we come to know her, is a newish mother who has finally cracked. Sleep-deprived, depressed (‘it’s not post-natal depression it’s life-is-shit depression’), and now convinced her baby would be better off without her, she has left months-old ‘Sailor’ on a footpath and come to the forest to kill herself. The blackbird baby, collateral damage of nature’s great impersonal project, sends her running back.
Female artists have long made use of wild creatures to elucidate the pressures and contradictions of life—after all, for much of history, women had no more rights than animals. Examples run the gamut from the various beasts that threaten or accompany women in fairy tales (and their retellings), to, say, Leonora Carrington’s use of animal figures to reveal the wildest elements of women’s psyches. In the burgeoning genre of women’s writing about motherhood, several books make deft use of animal metaphors to conjure some of the blood, gore, and existential shifts missing from our culture’s sanitised image of birth and its aftermath. In Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch (2019), a mother turns into a dog to better face the pressures of parenting. Claire Oshetsky’s Chouette (2021) shows a woman give birth to an owl. And in the memoir Milk: On Motherhood and Madness, which, like Soldier Sailor, came out this spring, Alice Kinsella compares her experience of surgical birth to the process of dehorning industrially-farmed cattle without anaesthetic. If babies are often still assumed to be a woman’s ultimate goal and fulfillment, in each of these books, childbirth does not satisfy, but instead unleashes an inner animal that, once freed, is hard to subdue.
For these writers, to become a mother is to become wild—to be thrown from a place of citizenship and apparent intellectual equality into the wilderness. This is a wilderness of the domestic—the bedroom, the family car, the park—but the veneer of civilisation is gone, and nature is red in tooth and claw. Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor is an exquisite dramatisation of this. The botched suicide attempt of the opening sets the tragicomic tone for the rest of the book. It is presented within a monologue addressed to Sailor some years later: the mother’s run-on, rambling, explanatory, self-justifying, self-castigating account of the events that came to pass, or nearly came to pass. ‘Well Sailor’, Soldier begins. ‘Here we are once more, in one another’s arms. The Earth rotates beneath us and all is well, for now.’ Yet immediately, she takes us back to a terrible Good Friday fight when Sailor was a baby. Classical nuclear family dynamics—the father works while the mother stays home with the child—have upset the power balance and shattered the illusion of equality. While her husband stays late at the office to avoid home dramas, Soldier is thrown into unrelenting domesticity. She looks after the baby, does all the housework, all the laundry, all the cooking. Her mind is restless; she paces like a caged animal. The husband comes home tired and watches TV, sometimes goes golfing on the weekend, resents spending his Saturdays in IKEA, and seems incapable of packing a nappy bag. On this particular evening, Soldier has come to feel the full weight of the gulf of gendered expectations separating them. She careens around the house, seized by a fit of epiphanies:
I was just a woman! How had this not registered before? A woman was of less value in this society than a man. A man’s time was more important, he had more important things to do. It was now time to step back and let the man do his more important things.
Later, another epiphany: ‘My husband. My husband.’ He is ‘the enemy within’, sleeping in the box room because the baby keeps him up, pointing out her deficiencies as a caregiver but never helping out. By morning, Soldier is off to kill herself, leaving her son outside for someone better to find. Despite her obvious despair, the tone remains bleakly comic as Soldier narrates the series of events. The face-off with a mother blackbird, protecting her hatchling. The woman who tries to help, but cannot control her dog. Soldier’s own relentless undercutting of the drama. She becomes stuck in a bush, ‘pegged down like a tent’, and bemoans that ‘the girl I used to be would never have blah blah’, refusing to finish her own predictable sentence. Tragedy averted, it is back to the house, to the miniscule daily dramas of feeding a baby who will not eat, clothing a baby who removes garments as fast as she can put them on, tidying a house that unmakes itself, doing laundry and scrubbing at her husband’s stains.
This monologue is so skillful, so like a torrent of speech, so like a day in which there are still thirteen hours left before the other parent gets home to help—if they help—that the nuts and bolts of its effects aren’t obvious until a second read. The repeated phrases that highlight the nightmarish repetition of Soldier’s days—‘I may or may not have been asleep’; ‘oh, it was all so stupid, my whole life was so stupid’,—; the mock-heroic tone used to describe Sailor’s tantrums (‘he freed a fist from the blanket and held it clenched in the air like a revolutionary’); the asides reminding Sailor not to be a dick in a man’s world (‘Little girls are so much more articulate than their male counterparts. But don’t worry Sailor: you’ll still be paid more than them.’). Here, Kilroy’s style brilliantly evokes what Soldier describes as ‘the usual interminable high drama low-comedy slapstick palaver’ of raising children. In other passages, it warbles with despair and fury:
Sailor, my escalating rage, which would no longer fit inside our home. I was at large now with the roaming pack of wolves who would huff and would puff and would blow the house down. Husband, I bayed at the bay window, you thought wolves were extinct in this land? […] the wolves were never more alive than they are tonight.
Yet the narrative runs into a central conundrum of parenthood writing. Babies at once lend a sense of drama to every waking moment, and yet, as subject matter, are often incompatible with the kind of narrative tension traditionally used to sustain novels. They derail plans, curtail outings, and keep their parents from the social settings in which plot conventionally occurs. Their dramas can be existential—every fever might be meningitis, but a four-hour wait in Emergency will generally confirm that it isn’t. Plot is out with babies. Where fiction develops, babies repeat; the dramas of yesterday are likely to be the dramas of today, remixed. So how can the novel hold the experience of motherhood?
Kilroy chooses to focus on Soldier’s faltering marriage, and the inequality that arises when one parent (here, as is often the case in heterosexual relationships, the father) returns to work and the other (the mother) stays home. This makes for some electrifying and enraging scenes, as Soldier’s husband fails to read the room, fails to help her get out of the house, fails to give the baby his medicine, fails even to accept the mantle of ‘bad parent’ when the baby is lost in IKEA. Though this responsibility imbalance exists in many modern relationships, overall, this seems a portrait of almost caricatured villainy—one that seems to imply that a more helpful mate would remove the suffering from the wilds of early motherhood. At points, Soldier widens the blame to fathers in general. She stands in the darkness outside the family home and watches her husband watch Blade Runner while the baby cries upstairs:
And you know, men, men, men nod solemnly at that Blade Runner speech—tears in the rain and fires on Orion—and they feel themselves part of a noble endeavour, believe they’ve experienced something epic right there with a beer on the couch. Here’s my ennobling truth, Sailor: women risk death to give life to their babies. They endure excruciating pain, their inner parts torn, then they pick themselves up no matter what state they are in… and they tend to their infants.
More than the anti-epic, drudge work of child-rearing, what bothers Soldier is the loss of her own work and of her sense of herself as a creative, intellectual being. For her, to care physically for a baby and a household is to renounce everything else: it is Sailor’s frustrated mind that is the real wilderness. ‘This was freelance motherhood: struggling to contain [the baby’s] screams while struggling to contain my own, which were louder and angrier and scared us both.’
Isolated, mindless, existing outside of time—the arrival of a new life finally brings Soldier closer to death: the death of her younger self; the perceived death of her future self. Lurking behind this is the real death-in-life experience of childbirth, described only in a single line, ‘Birth, death—you only get one shot’. And lurking still further back is the inevitable companion of new life, the death of the older generation. The loss of Soldier’s father is an omnipresent absence in the narrative: seldom invoked, yet clearly of stratospheric importance. In a scene that neatly brings together different forms of familial memory, forgetting, and belonging, Soldier looks down on the wild weeds that grow along the grassy verges of the sidewalk and recalls how her father taught her their names. She relearns them all, and vows to teach her son ‘so you can forget them all again’. It takes a full novel before Soldier is able to look up from the chokehold of her daily life and see the sky once more.
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Though for new mothers like Soldier, the world may seem to contract down to a few rooms, the societal context beyond the family home shapes much of domestic experience. Alice Kinsella’s memoir Milk: On Motherhood and Madness, in many ways a parallel story to Kilroy’s, describes Kinsella’s own experience as a mother who experiences post-natal depression in modern Ireland, but widens the lens towards a broader depiction of Irish motherhood, with all its idealisations and its hypocrisies. In the aftermath of a traumatic childbirth, Kinsella, a long-time anxiety sufferer, is plagued with fears about toxins, food, climate change, the industrial farming of cows. She confronts Ireland’s history of enacting violence on mothers’ bodies, from the Magdalene Laundries and institutions where ‘fallen women’ were hidden away and exploited, to the discouraging atmosphere surrounding breastfeeding (Ireland has one of the lowest rates in Europe) and the long shadow Catholicism cast over access to abortion. Kinsella’s own pregnancy takes place against the background of new laws being written following the 2018 referendum. At one point, she realises that although abortion is now legal, she is one week past the new cut-off date. Her pregnancy is wanted, but this social context brings her towards the complex, sometimes-paradoxical experience of the pro-choice new mother who believes an embryo is not a person but nonetheless feels a kind of personhood when their own desired child is growing inside of them.
Kinsella adeptly examines her conflicted response to the embodied feelings of motherhood. Pregnancy and childbirth reassert the unarguable primacy of the body, which, she hints, comes as a particular shock to women whose identities are wrapped up in the intellectual, the literary. ‘What was my body to me?’ she asks, speaking of her past self. ‘My mind was my real place of residence. As a girl, my worth would be more equated to my appearance. I wanted it to be more strongly tied to my mind, my intellect, my personality.’ Yet following the birth, she discovers how ‘the violence of being so present in my own body, in a way I couldn’t control, reminded me that without the body, the mind is nothing’.
One pleasure of reading these books side by side is in their contrasting approaches to reproducing on the page the effects motherhood has on the structures of the mind, the actual ability to think. Where Kilroy represents Soldier’s thoughts as a frenzied monologue, an endless loop of sleep deprivation, Kinsella’s memoir is structured in poetic fragments, an equally interesting solution to depicting a scattered, lost-the-plot consciousness. Leaping freely back and forth from pre-pregnancy to birth to baby-rearing, Kinsella blends personal impressions and digressions on Irish history with worries about the world as well as the housework. This freewheeling structure allows her to connect past events with present concerns in engaging ways, though the cryptic fragments sometimes slip into something of a kitchen sink of baby-rearing; unrelated digressions on nutrition and whether a baby’s image should be posted online can seem, both for better and for worse, like excerpts from an argument in an online forum.
The book truly shines when Kinsella marries political observations with personal material, as in an ironic depiction of her baby swim class, which takes place in a public pool located in a former mother-and-baby home. Motherhood also changes her relationship to the Irish countryside and particularly the area she grew up in, devoted to beef farming. Raised next to a farm, bucolically grazing cattle formed the backdrop of her childhood. Having a baby causes her to re-evaluate this scene; mother cows are forcibly separated from their calves shortly after birth to exploit milk production to the fullest. The unseen suffering of animals, the constant crises of their lives, industrialised as well as wild, become, once again, a means of evoking the experience of twenty-first century motherhood. Both animals and mothers suffer under the processes of capitalism, and Kinsella astutely reflects on an economic structure that seems designed to keep mothers in the home and decimate their future earning potential.
Neither of these books deal directly with the question of money, though, which is curious in light of the dramatic rise in the cost of living. Their narrators are far from the most economically disadvantaged of modern mothers. Both can stay home with their babies beyond the typical maternity leave period, though this is a mixed blessing and speaks to a context of unaffordable childcare as well as the peculiarities of the writing life, with its peripheral relationship to the world of full-time, salaried work outside the home. Both have seemingly stable housing situations, and partners who can cover the bills, whether or not this pushes their own careers into irrelevance. As others have pointed out, this is the case in many of the recent crop of books that deal with motherhood, which tend to speak the language of the white middle class, showing characters with homes of their own to hoover and the luxury of fussing about healthy food. Too often, considering different kinds of privilege in narrating motherhood can devolve into asking whether the concerns of educated, middle-class mothers are—to use that deadly word so often leveraged against women—selfish. Instead, we might consider how these books show us something particularly shocking in the blow delivered to otherwise advantaged women by this most natural of events: the failures of a patriarchal, capitalist culture to provide adequate socioeconomic, cultural, or personal support.
Not all new mothers are dealt a blow, of course, and not everyone wishes to avoid the blood and gore. Within contemporary motherhood discourse there are those who welcome the wilderness of motherhood, drawing on the wild woman archetype that celebrates the idea of returning to a more bodily and instinctual realm. We might think here of a broader social interest in ‘rewilding’, and of the stories of natural childbirth advocates—or, farther along the spectrum, women seeking wild pregnancy and ‘freebirthing’. But neither Kilroy and Kinsella fall into these categories; they do not wish to dwell in the wilderness. Their anti-Wild Women narrators yearn to return to society, to recover full citizenship there. They are aware that they had something once, and that they have lost it. The wilderness is a source of fascination, in these books, but also a vulnerable, unprotected space. Motherhood inevitably brings a new understanding of the dangers of the world and the reality of death, and with it, a before-and-after severing from the self. Kilroy’s caustic yet funny novel, though it moves through recognisable middle-class spaces, is a reminder of this vulnerability that stands on the periphery of even comfortable women’s lives, amplified by a lack of support. Kinsella looks back through time and between species and sees the many ways mothers and babies have always been trivialised and disempowered.
Other recent books on motherhood, such as Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat and Kate Brigg’s The Long Form, reach beyond the struggle of the early days to show the ways in which motherhood can open up new forms of creativity, awaken new obsessions, push us into new rhythms and new ways of writing and seeing. But these compelling contributions from Kilroy and Kinsella offer insight into the long-suppressed darkness of the transition. They come from the wilderness, the long nights, the monsters that infiltrate the house and lie in wait under the bed. Here, the new mother, whom society expects to be radiantly happy, stands with her teeth bared.