Free A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk

It’s difficult for her to eat. You must feed her with formula milk, commands the health visitor. Begin by offering her a bottle after each feed and within two weeks she will have made the switch entirely. I am astonished by this advice, having laboured under the belief – and indeed under its strictures – that breastfeeding was the religion of the health services. Don’t you normally advise building up the milk supply when the baby is gaining inadequate weight?, I inquire. I am, if nothing else, well informed. Your baby is failing to thrive, repeats the woman. You risk damaging her brain. Do you want to have a brain-damaged baby? I feel it unnecessary to reply to this question.
    The health visitor stays for a long time. The baby and I are braced, unified and silent against her. When finally she leaves I cry. The baby stares at me in amazement. I make an immediate appointment at the doctor’s surgery. My baby is failing to thrive, I tell her, bursting into her office. The doctor replies that she is absolutely fine. In fact, she’s
lovely
, she says. I look at the baby, who is lying on the doctor’s couch kicking her legs and smiling winningly. Can I show you something? I say. I pick her up. Immediately, she roars. I put her down again. She stops. That
is
strange, says the doctor.
    I meet a woman who tells me kindly that one day, when the baby is about three months old, the crying will stop. From one day to the next, just like that. By now the fact of the baby’s crying, if not its hours, has become predictable, although its causes remain unknown. She has cried in her sling on walks, in her baby carriage when I am trying to shop, on the bus, on the subway, at the houses of friends and relations, in mine and others’ arms. She has cried from one end of many dark afternoons to the other, when she and I were alone in the house and there was nothing to do, or it was raining, or I was too tired to do anything but sit with her in a chair while she cried. I have given up trying to contain the crying within a vision of adult normality, of competence. I have run home with her bawling in my arms, pulling the carriage crazily behind us while people stare. I have jumped off buses in the middle of nowhere. I have bolted from cafés. I have ended telephone conversations without explanation. I have cried myself. I have shouted, making her tiny frame jump. I have sat for long evenings while her father paced the kitchen with her, offering advice. It was better when you were doing that jiggling thing, I say; or, try that thing you did the other night when you held her face down, with your other hand on her back. I have put her in a safe place and tried to leave the room, but before I could reach the door her crying has brought me back. We have even taken her to Italy, where for three days she cried beside Lake Garda while boats glided silently beneath the mountains over the pale water and the warm air was filled with the chattering of birds and children.
    One evening, sitting outside in the garden in the dusk, I realise that three months have passed and that summer has come. My daughter is lying on a rug looking at the leaves above her. She wriggles and kicks her legs and laughs at things that I can’t see. She has red hair and bright eyes. I know that in some inarticulable way I have over the past weeks witnessed again her birth; that the sound of her agony, her despair, was the sound of a terrible, private process of creation. I see that she has become somebody. I realise, too, that the crying has stopped, that she has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself. And she has wrought me, too, because although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence. With every cry she has tutored me, in what is plain and hard: that my affection, my silly entertainments, my doting