As novelist Samantha Hunt
points out, when you become a parent, no one ever says, “Hey, you made a death. You made your children’s deaths.”
“Meanwhile, I could think of little else,” she continues. “It’s scary to think of mothers as makers of death, but it sure gives them more power and complexity than one usually finds.”
These lines inspired the title of both this newsletter and Claudia Dey’s incredible 2018 essay for The Paris Review.
Mothers as Makers of Death went viral, and it’s easy to see why. In it, Dey explores motherhood, death and other taboo topics in ways that deeply resonate. Some choice cuts:
On small talk instead of real talk:
“Every conversation I had was the wrong conversation. No other mother congratulated me and then said: I’m overcome by the blackest of thoughts. You?”
On the ever-pervasive fear :
“No one had warned me that with a child comes death. Death slinks into your mind. It circles your growing body, and once your child has left it, death circles him too. It would be dangerous to turn your attentions away from your child—this is how the death presence makes you feel. ”
On (non-existent) alone time:
“I had not been alone because I am a mother, and a mother is never alone. When she is washing, sleeping, raging, she is not alone. For a mother, this is the state of things. Children hang from your clothing. They pummel you with questions. Like a gunfight, like the most consuming love, like an apocalypse: they take up all of the available space.”
On losing “autonomy of the mind”:
“The private actions of the mother’s mind—her scholarship, perversions, miscellany, narcissism—are swamped by the bureaucracy of parenting. A ticker tape hurtles across the mother’s brain listing all of the things she must remember: spoon, bathing suit, milk, booster shot, sign-up, pickup, 3:15. These lists are a form of paying attention, which is a form of love.”