Mothers as makers of death

“The Need belongs to a growing body of surreal speculative fiction that uses horror tropes to capture the panic, self-doubt and pressures that new mothers face. The exhaustion that verges on hallucination. The feeling that your body has become a food source and no longer belongs to you. The endless chores and monotony of caring for small children, punctuated by adrenaline spikes that emanate from a constant, creeping dread. What if the fever in the middle of the night is a sign of a life-threatening illness? What if the boiling pasta water falls on the child who’s clinging to your knees while you frantically cook? What if you can’t keep them safe?”

“…writing about a supernatural threat felt like the most accurate way to explore the treacherous emotional terrain of motherhood and the lurking feeling that even the most mundane situations are freighted with peril.”

“I was hungry for fictional representations of a woman using a breast pump [….] I mean a breast pump is from like science fiction, and it’s also this symbolic thing, bridging the gap between a working identity and a mothering identity via a machine, so it feels like this metaphor for what motherhood is like right now.”

 “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?” 

“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. ”

 “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.”

“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.”

“Becoming a mother involves an identity shift, and is one of the most significant physical and psychological changes a woman will ever experience. Yet when a woman gives birth, society puts pressure on new mums telling them it should be one of the most joyful moments of their lives. Of course, it is, but the struggles of parenting are hard and can at times overshadow the joys. These unspoken challenges mean that women often struggle through this in isolation, ashamed to admit how they feel.”

“Saying you don’t like or don’t want to be a mum is still a taboo. It has nothing to do with the love for our kids, but most women will never admit it, fearing that their kids will be taken away from them. In my wildest dreams I’m hoping to start a movement where women from all over the world complete the sentence ‘I didn’t want to be a mum….’”

“Sometimes I start to pull away, sometimes I cry out and my eyes fill with tears. Sometimes without thinking I will say, “Why do you hurt me? You are so cruel.” But it’s not fair for me to say those things. It is her right. She must take those things. She must take from me what she needs.”