BECOMING a mother has made me both a worse and better reader.
Worse, in the sense that I now find it impossible to sit down and flick through a magazine without getting up every two minutes to prevent, say, my 19-month-old from biting his five-year-old brother.
Better, because I now feel the full force of certain novels I would not have appreciated had I read them as a slip of a girl.
Last week, I dug out a copy of Beloved, the 1987 novel by African-American writer Toni Morrison. It was the movie tie-in edition, trumpeting its star, Oprah Winfrey, on the cover. For a long time, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book had languished on my shelf, a review copy I received as a books reporter. I knew it by reputation, of course.
Years ago, some friends had moaned about having to study it as an O-level text in their schools. Perhaps it was this that had put me off reading it.
However, after writing an academic paper on the trauma of race on female sexuality, I was intrigued: Beloved was constantly cited in relation to the subject. So I started reading it.
What I found was a beautiful, powerfully written tour de force (you see, I am reaching for cliches here), about the lengths a mother would go to protect her children. Of the bond between mother and child that transcends the barrier between living and dying. And of the supernatural desire to be loved and hurt; to hurt and to love.
The story begins with a haunted house at 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati, Ohio. A baby ghost plagues the mother Sethe, and her daughter, Denver, who live there.
Without giving too much away, for those who haven't read it and want to, let's just say I was riveted for a day and a half by the narrative of slavery, pain and humanity. Of white boys with mossy teeth holding down a black woman to nurse on her by force, stealing the milk she was carrying for - and to - her runaway children.
Had I read it as a schoolgirl, the themes of milk and motherhood would have passed me by. Instead, as I tried to ignore my two sons clambering all over me, I cried at the revelation of the terrible act that Sethe committed. I winced. I empathised.
There is an ethical dilemma at the heart of Beloved: When is it possible for a mother to go too far? But those who have to ask that question, I suspect, are usually not mothers themselves.
I now understand how easily mums can revert to an almost- animalistic rage when their offspring are threatened. And even if that decision, made in a split second as danger loomed, is one that she rues later, a woman can blame herself for only so long.
For the sake of others who need her - as a sister, wife, daughter, mother, friend or lover - she has to find the strength to forgive herself and move on.
Come to think of it, many of the most excruciatingly glorious books and films about maternal resilience riff on the same theme.
There's Dancer In The Dark, Danish director Lars von Trier's 2002 film with Icelandic diva Bjork playing a woman who commits murder to prevent her young son from going blind. If you've seen it, you'll probably not want to watch it again, but it would have been seared in your memory anyway.
Then, there's What I Loved, American writer Siri Hustvedt's 2003 novel about art, loss, friendship and family. Apart from a poignant passage about a woman trying to get pregnant, sobbing after she finds her menstrual blood on the toilet bowl, there is a heart-shredding chapter break - the space of a blank page - during which a child dies.
I watched Dancer In The Dark and read What I Loved when I was single. If I did so today, I doubt I would be able to recover.
After I finished reading Beloved, I dashed to hug my children, planting big kisses on them. Morrison's novel is one of the most painful, yet brilliant books about mothering that I've ever read, and it made me glad to be alive - with the biological ability to bring forth more life, and the means to love and raise those young lives as I see fit.
[email protected]
For more my paper stories click here.
