On Reading, Or Not Reading, as a Mother

Preface

I have always defined myself by, and taken pride in, my reading. Since my early 20s, I’ve kept a literal list of every book I have read, which functions sort of like a photo album for me—a record and recollection of life’s moments. There’s the day in 2007 when I conquered Tristram Shandy, sitting under a tree on Boston Common. The period when I borrowed obscure volumes about the Old West from a coworker who shared my niche obsession. The time when I read Speedboat by Renata Adler three times in a row because I loved it so much.

Growing up with elementary school teachers as parents, I’d also read and loved a huge variety of children’s literature and couldn’t wait to share the art form with my own kid. I knew I’d raise her in a house full of books, and I’d read to her every night, like all the parenting books said to.

In short, I thought reading and motherhood would make perfect companions. I imagined blissful afternoons cradling my sleeping baby while I read. I thought I’d feel proud to pass on my own love of books to a new person, proud to share my meaningful reading experiences with her and watch her find her own.

But instead, after Audrey was born, I stopped reading for myself. I stopped believing that stories mattered, and I felt estranged from the past self who thought they did. 

Chapter 1. Losing the Narrative

It didn’t happen right away. In the month after giving birth, I read a friend’s novel manuscript on my phone while nursing Audrey in the middle of the night. I started Lonesome Dove, reading parts of it aloud (with an embarrassing Texas accent) to three-month-old Audrey while we sat under a tree in an unseasonably hot Massachusetts October. But I couldn’t ignore that the act of merely opening a book—one that was for me, not my child—had started to make me feel ashamed. 

Reading became a door into the shame I had started to feel as a mother, the sense that I didn’t know how to do anything right in this new territory, even while other new mothers seemed to fall into it naturally. I knew Instagram could not be believed, but that stream of images—blissful-looking cuddles on neutral linen sheets, rainbows of homemade baby food in Mason jars—worked its dark magic anyway.

If I was reading for my own enjoyment, or even thinking about something not child-related, I felt like I wasn’t devoted enough: I wasn’t talking Audrey through tummy time or mashing vegetables for her to lick once and then disregard. But if I was devoted enough, and not reading, I felt like I was failing myself. I wasn’t the person I had been. I had earned an MFA, making writing and reading central to my professional life. I had no energy for either after becoming a mother, and, shamefully, suspected I no longer cared very much about them. But if I didn’t, what was the point of everything I’d done before having a baby? Who was I anymore?

Chapter 2. Reopening the cover

That baby is now a second grader and my only child, and I still don’t know that answer. Parenting has become less intensive in many ways, but the shame lingers, like the pizza grease that stains Audrey’s dresses even after I try to wash it out. I still feel barely able to do anything with my free time other than watch old seasons of Below Deck and drink wine. The mental space for real thinking continues to evade me. 

I understood not having that mental space a few years ago, when I was starting back at work after maternity leave (corporate communications, plus some freelance writing). My mom-friends and I commiserated about the awkwardness of pumping breast milk at work, with only thin office walls between us. And how tired we were after waking up for nighttime feedings, then signing on for 8 a.m. meetings. But now, that time is far behind us. One mom has since finished a PhD. Another made partner at her law firm. 

And here I am, still trapped in the same fog, still asking: How long does it take to become yourself again? Is it even possible, if “yourself” is a different person? 

I have gotten back to reading a little, but barely. The novel I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins taunts me from my nightstand; I’ve hovered at about 50 pages from the end for months. Maybe I shouldn’t have attempted it because the themes hit too close to home, but a writer friend with two young kids sent it to me with the note, “I can’t wait to talk about this with you,” so I did. And as I began reading, I instantly connected with it.

Vaye Watkins writes about a mother who leaves her husband and baby at home to go on a book tour, then extends the book tour indefinitely and journeys through reconnections with friends, family, and former lovers. When I talked about the book with the friend who sent it, she thought the narrator was a terrible person for abandoning her family. I didn’t care if the narrator was terrible or not. I saw her as funny, flawed, and free, and I envied her. 

Chapter 3. Fragments

I worry that I no longer think stories matter. But I want them to. They formed the basis of my entire previous life: as a writer, reader, and someone who cared about understanding the world. I try to convince myself that stories remain essential: The way we know anything is through stories, right? And isn’t knowledge an end in itself? We can’t live every life, and so we depend on others to narrate the ones we miss. 

More intimately, we only know ourselves through stories. Selfhood is a narrative. As Joan Didion writes in the title essay of The White Album: “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

If reading was a structuring principle of my life, not reading marks a move toward entropy, an inability to make sense out of the shifting images of my experience. And I lost structure at the wrong time. Motherhood has so many narratives, but no prescribed narrative could capture the shattering of a woman’s body and the individual roads that proceed. Without structure, you’re lost in your new world. How can you know if you’re doing any of it right? 

Chapter 4. Reading With New Eyes

Just after Audrey’s birth, I remember riding in a wheelchair to the recovery room, holding my new daughter against my chest. She hadn’t cried yet, even right after her emergence. I knew she’d be a thinker. Her little blue eyes looked back and forth, back and forth, just over my shoulder. How strange, I thought, to see for the first time.

Now Audrey can read. She loves it. She has a book in her hand when I say good night, and she’s carrying a book when she runs to wake us every morning. 

I want her to love reading. I’m proud when her teachers praise her for it. More importantly, I want her to love what she loves with no trace of shame. Why has it proven so difficult to extend the same courtesy to myself—to either love reading, or to not love reading anymore? I’d like for this not to matter.

It’s thanks to Audrey that I find the most joy in books these days. Our three-books-at-bedtime routine is possibly the only time I approach the pre-motherhood focus I used to find in my own reading time. We’ve done it since she arrived, and it’s a ritual that requires all our attention. 

Audrey has grown bigger in my arms, and her books have gotten longer. We’ve moved from Jon Klassen to William Steig to Ann M. Martin and Laura Ingalls Wilder. But the warmth of her body is the same. So is my sense of purpose, holding someone who needs me, connecting us with words. 

Maybe this is the way through the shame: to take pride in connection. I built a life and a reading list that led me here, that made me a person with a house full of books and stories to share. As my daughter grows, whatever words she needs to hear, I’ll know a book where she can find them.