Black Milk - Elif Shafak [88]
I know I need help but it never occurs to me to ask for it.
I think of Doris Lessing—a remarkable writer and pursuer of ideas. Born in Persia in 1919, the Nobel laureate spent her childhood on a farm in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). She was raised by a domineering mother and sent to a Catholic school, where she was taught to be a proper and pious lady. She remembers much of her colonial childhood today as a time with “little joy and much sadness.” Lessing dropped out of school when she turned thirteen, ran away from her home and from her mother two years later and basically had to raise herself.
She was a girl-woman who mothered herself.
When she turned nineteen, Lessing got married and had two children, a son and a daughter—a revolutionary experience that she talks about in great detail in her two-volume autobiography, Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade. She writes candidly about the conflicting feelings she had during this period—a longing to spend more time with other new mothers, talking about babies and mashed food, and an equally strong desire to run away from them all. Lessing is highly critical of the ways in which many capable women seem to change after giving birth. She believes such women are happily domesticated for a while, but then sooner or later they start getting restless, demanding and even neurotic. “There is no boredom like that of an intelligent young woman who spends all day with a very small child,” she says. Looking back at the early years of motherhood, she is surprised to see how hard she worked and how tired she was all the time. “I wonder how I did it. I swear young mothers are equipped with some sort of juice or hormone that enables them to bear it.”16
The triple role of housekeeper, mother and wife did not make Lessing happy. In 1943 she left her husband and two children to get married to Gottfried Lessing, a Communist activist. They had a son, Peter. The marriage ended in 1949. By this time she was unable to bear life in Rhodesia, particularly the racism of the white ruling class. Taking her son, some money and many ghosts with her, she moved back to Britain. It was a big, painful decision and one that required her to leave her two children with her first ex-husband. She came to England with the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing. The book was published a year later and henceforth Lessing dedicated herself fully to writing.
A cauldron boils in my mind. What if I fail to become a good mother and a good wife? I do not want to betray myself or to pretend to be someone I am not. What scares me most is the possibility of an adverse chemical reaction between authorship and domestic responsibilities. Novelists are self-enamored people who do not like to draw attention to that fact. Mothers, on the other hand, are supposed to be selfless creatures—at least for a while—who give more than they take. Perhaps I am worrying too much, but worrying comes with thinking.
How can I tell my brain not to think?
Eyup calls whenever he can between field exercises. The line is always crackly and there is stomping and marching, shouting and yelling, in the background, which is the complete opposite of my life in Istanbul, where I watch Baby TV and listen to the rain fall on the begonias.
“Hello, sweetheart,” Eyup says.
“Hi there,” I say. “How’s it going, my love?”
“I lost eight pounds,” he says, “but I’m surviving. We do a hundred push-ups, a hundred lift-ups and run two miles every morning. I now have biceps like Chuck Norris and my face is so tanned from exposure to the sun that I would stand out even in a dark alley.”
I smile—as if he could see me.
“I’ve missed you sorely,” he says, his voice wavering a little.
“I’ve missed you, too.”
“What were you doing when I phoned?”
“I was putting ten droplets of gripe water onto a spoon for the baby’s hiccups and thinking about Doris Lessing.”
“Does it help?”
“Not really, perhaps it makes it worse.”
“Which one? Gripe water or Doris Lessing?”
“Both,” I say.
There is a brief silence at the end