Sunday book pick: In ‘Soldier Sailor’, the horrors of being a mother to your child (and husband)

A scene in Claire Kilroy’s novel Soldier Sailor looks something like this: young mothers have gathered at a local nursery with their toddlers for playtime. While each is busy keeping an eye on their ward, they get talking about the unnatural shapes of their babies’s skulls in their early days. Some are “flat heads” while others are “cone heads”. Total freaks of nature. One mother confesses how the shape of her baby’s head “really damaged” their first moments together. These are the dialogues that follow the confession:

“They should tell you that stuff to prepare you. Why don’t they tell women that stuff?”

“Would you have  a baby if they told you that stuff?”

Most women probably wouldn’t. The frank conversation about the burdens and blemishes of motherhood is a critical absence that no amount of women’s liberation seems to have corrected. Motherhood is terrifying, yes, and yet, every woman is left to herself to discover just how terrifying and life-altering it can be. Childbirth might just be the easiest bit – because what follows is a never-ending cycle of exhaustion, negligence, and losing your sense of self.

A freelance mother

Written as a monologue to her baby Sailor, the mother – Soldier – tells him of their early days of togetherness. She tells him of his refusal to eat, soiling himself at the most inconvenient hours, the times he fell sick, and her husband’s nonchalance about it all. In this story, only the mother’s voice matters – she has little control over anything else in her new life but being a “freelance mother” is an experience that belongs exclusively to her. She is trapped at home with the baby – doing what every mother does – while her husband (at one time sarcastically addressed as the “Professor of Paediatrics”) on rare occasions “contributes” by changing the diaper or advising the mother on how she should better look after the baby.

When the mother complains about not having enough time in the day to do everything she needs to or simply get some amount of sleep, the father recommends she should wake up at five in the morning to make time! When the mother recalls how during her recovery from her caesarian – she was in diapers, lactating and bleeding at the same time – the father made her make soup and tend to him as he remained cooped up in the bed with a cold! When the parents lose the child briefly at an IKEA, the father makes the mother fetch the baby from the security staff while strangers stand in judgment around her!

The father’s – and indeed many men's – refusal to partake equally in childrearing duties is described in excruciating detail. What results is not just fury and amusement at men conveniently being bystanders in a situation of their own making but also grief at the realisation that women, for many thousand years, have shouldered this immense responsibility alone. New medical and social infrastructures have helped women create a vocabulary for these experiences and yet they are left wanting for a more thoughtful world where car seats, medicines, and baby food are designed for the ease of the mother who’s almost always responsible for the baby’s well-being. The heart also grieves for the foremothers who did not have these few advantages and were forced to give up their youth to rear multiple children.

The father’s incompetence – comical to the point of feeling exaggerated – on the other hand, is to his benefit. He fudges up – perhaps deliberately? – every task he is assigned, even those he has apparently willingly taken on. And to such a great extent that the mother has no choice but to relieve him of his duties and do what needs to be done quickly and with perfect efficiency. The father does not know what his only baby eats and forgets to give him his antibiotics. The days at home are his “days off” while “big days” have become regular occurrences at the workplace. The mother slaves away on his behalf – she is no longer a woman, or a self, but a mother to the child she has birthed and the one she has inherited from her husband’s mother. A scene all too common in every home.

A mother for life

Active discrimination at the workplace is compounded by family structures that unfairly repackage women’s physical and emotional labour as the sacred duty of motherhood. The exasperation that the mother feels – by now also exhausting for the reader – is summed up neatly by Kilroy when she writes, “I’ve no time for my career, but you’ve more time for yours than you did before becoming a father, back when we were equal.” The mother’s clear-eyed realisation is a truth for many women.

The gaps in narration, the uneven narrative voices point to the mother’s agonising mental state. Is she suffering from postpartum depression, often called the deceptively adorable “baby blues”? We aren’t told. Moreover, a medical diagnosis is immaterial. The mother – unreliable though she might be – is a narrator of this story, of her story. Of how she remembers being a new mother was like, her resentment of her husband, her blinding devotion to her child, the rapid breakdown of her marriage. She only has her mushy brain and her unrecognisable body to tell this story. It is almost as though she had to enter this altered state of being to warn the rest of us about the true reality of motherhood.

The mother-daughter predicament is eternal. As Bonnie Burstow put it succinctly, “Often father and daughter look down on mother together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not as bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.” But what about the son who will eventually grow up in his father’s shadow? Perhaps agreeing with Burstow, Kilroy adds, “Our child’s going to grow up to think I’m a nag, same as I grew up thinking my mother was a nag, because it would be so much easier if the mothers shut up and did everything without perennially protesting about it.” The mother, as soon as she is released from the role of the primary caregiver of the child and reassigned to the role of the caretaker of the entire household, knows she is doomed for life. The son will follow in his father’s footsteps to uphold a culture of paternal negligence while the daughter will merge into her mother as she offers up her life in thankless service to others.

This will be replicated for many years, in every culture.

Thus we will preserve the hallowed institutions of marriage and family.

For which, a woman’s sanity is a small price to pay.

Soldier Sailor, Claire Kilroy, Faber and Faber.