On Watching 'Alone' and Reading 'Aftermath' with Two Under Three
What do you do when you can't just call a chopper and tap out?
News & Reviews Magazine
This article is part of ‘CuskRama’, our May special edition. Read the editor’s letter to see what other fantastic writing has just been published. If you’re annoyed that it’s paywalled, then that means you wanted to read it, which means you value it. These writers get paid for what they do because their work is valuable.
The piece you’re reading now is by Georgina Elliott. Georgina is a secondary legal studies teacher and mother living in Melbourne/Naarm. She is a chronic over-thinker and extrovert, always looking for someone to get on the sesh and talk through ideas with. She’s also the author of forthcoming newsletter,
A good friend of mine once compared childbirth to being in a car accident, and then being told they were ‘needed back at work’ the next day.
This line always kills when I repeat it to women my age, but I get tut tuts from people over the age of 60. Millennials have given themselves permission to whinge about the impact of parenthood and it often frustrates our parents. Perhaps they feel it negates their own choices—or lack thereof. There’s a unique way a lot of millennial readers have latched onto Rachel Cusk’s work. In Aftermath she processes the breakdown of her marriage to the father of her two daughters. It is caustic and honest in a raw and heightened period for the author. She refers to motherhood as the ‘sacking and slow rebuilding of every last corner of my private world,’ and as ‘the Dark Ages on which …the civilisation of our family has been built.’ Mostly, my algorithm feeds me personal essays like, ‘My husband does heaps at home so why do I still hate him?’ amongst listicles on ‘reducing the mental load’. Cusk’s unpalatable frankness resonated with me in a way no other literature had been unable to express.
On becoming a mother, she muses that ‘the soldier going to war for the first time does not know how he will behave when confronted by an armed enemy… Is he killer or coward?’ Car crashes and battlefields; these are the analogies that speak to me. Such baldness in exploration of this identity shift rang true in a way that interviews about ‘not being able to get out of track pants for a year’ did not. At last someone was honest about the stakes.
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