It is not love that troubles me when I leave the baby, like a rope and harness paid out behind me wherever I go. It is rather that when I leave her the world bears the taint of my leaving, so that abandonment must now be subtracted from the sum of whatever I choose to do. A visit to the cinema is no longer that: it is less, a tarnished thing, an al

I have the curious feeling that I no longer exist in synchronicity with time, but at a certain delay, like someone on the end of a transatlantic phone call. This, I think, is what it is to be a mother.

As she leaves, she tells me that whenever the baby cries to remember to do something for myself before I do anything for her.

To be a mother I must leave the telephone unanswered, work undone, arrangements unmet. To be myself I must let the baby cry, must forestall her hunger or leave her for evenings out, must forget her in order to think about other things. To succeed in being one means to fail at being the other. The break between mother and self was less clean than I

Brief pauses begin to appear in the score of motherhood, silences like the silences between album tracks, surrounded by sound but silences nonetheless. In them I begin to glimpse myself, briefly, like someone walking past my window. The sight is a shock, like the sight of someone thought dead. As my daughter grows more separate from me, so the sile

It is in some ways profoundly relieving, the development of her preferences and moods, the slow emergence, like another birth, of her character. Her self, for so long a mystery we attempted to solve, a space we filled with guesses, is taken from us like a worrying charge. Now she has arrived to claim herself, to take herself from us, and this separ

The question of what a woman is if she is not a mother has been superceded for me by that of what a woman is if she is a mother; and of what a mother, in fact, is.

Love is more respectable, more practical, more hardworking than I had ever suspected, but it lies close to the power to destroy.

I remain surprised by how proximate the mythology of motherhood is to its reality. I needed to be her mother more than she needed my mothering. The perfect regard with which I wanted to arm my daughter is still joined to me and I cannot cut the cord.