How awful is it to become a mother

If years ago we lamented the almost complete absence of books that addressed exclusively female issues such as motherhood, menstruation, perinatal grief, or menopause, now, so to speak, we can complain of the exact opposite, because everywhere you look there are a dozen that deal with them. I say this to provoke, obviously, because "feminizing" literature was absolutely necessary.

Regarding the experience of being a mother, the theme that dominates each and every page of My job by Olga Ravn (Copenhagen, 1986), opened the floodgates Motherhood and creation, the valuable collection of reference texts by some twenty authors – from Adrienne Rich to Annie Ernaux—which Alba Editorial published in 2007. Today we have a splendid harvest of narrative, poetry, essay and theater, with examples such as Mothers don't of Katixa Agirre, The history of vertebrates by Mar García Puig, Amoeba by Anna Gual and Mother tongue By Lola Arias.

After surprising everyone with her dystopian take on the world of work. The staffRavn embarks on the equally fantastical adventure of motherhood, which, however earthly it may seem, can be paranormal depending on how you look at it. My job This isn't about redefining the maternal role, acknowledging the gap between mothers of yesterday and mothers of today, nor is it about glorifying the creation of life as a miracle. Rather, this novel is a stark portrait of the effort and alienation a woman experiences when becoming a mother and, on top of that, realizing she will be one forever. "How horrible it is to become a mother," the author writes. "It's like waking up from a sweet dream where men and women are equal."

A Exhausting Daily Life

Because at the root of this all-consuming and tyrannical task of caring for a baby who bursts into a house overnight lies the biological yoke that binds mothers to their children, a world apart from the yoke that binds them to their fathers. Anna, the protagonist of this novel, who is a writer, already suffers during her pregnancy from the fear of not being up to the task. She arrives, therefore, at childbirth—described here with surgical precision—with that nagging feeling in her head. And the birth of the child confirms all her fears, to which we must add that she ceases to be herself and becomes someone else: "The child, who until then had been part of her body, is no longer there, but remains within her consciousness." Then she understands "that she could not be with the child nor without him and at the same time continue to be Anna."

To the account of the exhausting daily grind, we must add one more element: the protagonist's frustration at not being able to write and the need to do so. She experiences something similar to Alice Walker—the author ofThe color purple—, who, when she became a mother, spent a year "without writing anything that didn't sound like there was a crying child in the background." And she asks herself: "Why can't I get rid of the idea that writing about motherhood is shameful, when I know that creating life where there was none, creating flesh where there was no flesh, is one of the most radical and incredible things you can do?"

Moving away from the nineteenth-century narrative style, which we have long rejected and which we may soon yearn for, the author blends narrative and poetry, letters and reflections, as well as diary entries. Different languages to address the same issue and thus reveal the complexity of something seemingly so ordinary. Because although all motherhoods share the pain of childbirth, milk, urine, feces, lack of sleep..., each motherhood is unique depending on the cruel equation that results from the combination of reality and expectations.