I Almost Put Our Book Down
On unlikeable women, impossible timing, and what fiction is actually for
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On unlikeable women, impossible timing, and what fiction is actually for
Same As it Ever Was, Week 3
If Same As it Ever Was hadn’t been a Middle Book Club pick, I likely wouldn’t have finished the book. Fifty pages in, I wanted to pull our heroine, Julia aside (or maybe to Claire Lombardo herself?) and say, Women have always struggled in motherhood. What makes you so special?
Am I terrible?
I didn’t quit, though. Mostly for the reason I’ve already stated, that reading the selected titles comes with the job of hosting a book club. But I also read on because, like Julia, I once felt lost in motherhood—caught for years in a spin cycle of inadequacy.
I had been married two years when our first child came along. Enough time, theoretically, to have developed confidence, my own sense of self as a homeowner and a wife. And yet I hadn’t. Instead I compared myself to my mother and my in-laws, members of the Silent Generation raised on colloquialisms like “You can sleep when you’re dead,” and “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.”
Every night that I went to bed with dishes on the counter or a ring in the toilet I lay there feeling as if I’d failed the day. Silly, I know. Even then I knew it was silly. But I found the guilt impossible to live without and it took years to break the habit.
Julia, it seems never did. So I understood the anguish she felt as a mother, the weight and confusion that arise when a small person suddenly needs you to be certain about everything you say and do. What I struggled with was Julia herself.
