Mothers and fathers of babies: I know from my own experience that it may sometimes seem freakish to imagine your children big, and entirely separate from you, and to thusly imagine yourself big (by which I mean oldish), and separate too. Early parenthood is, among other things, a time of merging, to use therapeutic parlance. Skin meets skin, sensual pleasures abound, the family bed is the nerve center of the household. My husband and I used to lie in bed with our baby and say to each other: One day this baby will come swaggering into this room on his own steam. We laughed out loud at the absurdity of this fantasy, and all we could picture was a gigantic baby, like Diane Arbus's "Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents"—someone who was exceedingly tall, yet still sweet-skinned and peach-bald — hulking into the room. Truthfully, we could not really picture him changed, partly grown. We could not imagine time passing. We could not imagine a later.
But there was a later, of course. There was, it seemed, a ten-years later. The baby lost that babiness and did walk, then swaggered. And all the other babies in my midst did, too. And along with that, some of their mothers began to think about their own lives with more focus than they had in years. What's next for me? asked some of them, women I knew who had stopped working, or had put aside their work ambitions for a while, or who had realized, partly through the powerful experience of motherhood, that they had never been passionate about the corporate world they had once given so much of themselves to. Watching all of this — paying attention to the period of time between when your child is born and when he or she is solidly out in the world — the idea for my novel The Ten-Year Nap slowly formed.
It seemed to me that in choosing to write a novel about a group of women who stop working after their children are born — and who suddenly, in a "Sunrise, Sunset" moment, find that ten years have passed and they're now experiencing varying degrees of ambivalence about returning to work — I understood that I was entering territory that was volatile and strange but highly familiar Novels took a lighthearted (if mean-spirited) look at overzealous female executives who had kids they spent absolutely no time with.to many readers. Everyone I knew had had strong and sometimes strongly-worded conversations about their own lives and the lives of others. Everyone had a very specific story to tell. And some of their stories had been told in non-fiction books that took a stand on the issue: yes, women ought to go back to work because of the following reasons, or else: no, it was no one's business but their own, and so forth. But I had not seen these stories written about in fiction form, except in the kind of novels that perhaps had illustrations of a stork carrying a briefcase on the cover, and took a lighthearted (if mean-spirited) look at crazy stay-at-home mothers and overzealous female executives who had kids they spent absolutely no time with. Everyone in those novels would probably be slightly mocked. No one would get a fair shake.
I decided, when I was writing The Ten-Year Nap, that it wasn't my place here to take a stand about work, or to make fun of anyone. Instead, I would try to write what I had seen, would try to distill some of the conversations I'd had with other mothers about work and money and love and passion and ambition, and put them in a novel that would take motherhood and work seriously and treat them as topics of worth. I knew it was not fashionable to write in a literary way about mothers and children. Right away, it was as though you were putting a hex sign on the cover of your novel, saying, in essence: Men, Stay Away! Read books by Cormac McCarthy instead! But it galled me that while both men and women would read about the lives of men, only women, it seemed, would read about the lives of women. Of course,what goes on in the home is as essential to learning about a culture as what goes in the workplace.
©2008 Meg Wolitzer and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Meg Wolitzer's novels -- in addition to The Ten-Year Nap -- include
The Position and The Wife. Her short fiction has appeared in
The Best American Short Stories. She lives in New York City with her
husband and their two sons. |
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