Free A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk Page B

puritanism, as if dark thoughts were being kept at bay. I am told to sterilise everything with which the baby comes into contact. This can be achieved either by boiling it in water for
at least
ten minutes, or by soaking in sterilising solution for half an hour and then rinsing thoroughly in boiled water. The environmental consequences of such procedures are brushed aside. Maintaining the sterility of my child, my home, myself, is paramount. Germs and evil are everywhere. I overhear a conversation concerning the difficulty of safeguarding the sterility of rubber nipples as they make the perilous journey from boiling pan to mouth. Although you can’t see it happen, apparently germs, or Germans as E. Nesbit called them, land by the thousand in a matter of seconds. In the supermarket I see little jars of baby food and they are like jars of processed, denatured love. It is love that is vacuum-packed and sterilised. Sealed bags impregnated with strong fragrance are provided for its disposal after use. It is love that can make no connection with other loves, with the contaminating world.
    Mary Lennox, it seems, has been sterilised by
lack
of love. Her friend Dickon tells her to get some fresh air, to get outside and watch things grow, to get dirty. In the newspaper I read what claims to be a counterblast against the clean, an article suggesting that children who are not exposed to germs are in fact more vulnerable to them. The article is not a counterblast at all. It merely transposes the subject to a shriller pitch. It lobbies for the creation of cleanliness within dirt, for dirt not to be avoided but to be encompassed by, converted to sterility. Bad dirt, dirty dirt, exists on the margins of love. It suggests neglect, failure and lack of care. Obsessive precautions against bad dirt may hint, it now seems, at a certain proximity to these margins. To own good dirt is to proclaim the superiority of your care, your love; its fearlessness and flexibility, the purity of its thought and deed, its distance from hate.
    D.W. Winnicott, the eccentric but revered pediatrician and psychoanalyst of the 1940s, famously proclaimed that all mothers hate their babies ‘from the word go’. He didn’t mean that they didn’t love them; just that they hated them too. The ‘good’ mother is in part the projection of this hatred, sterilising away her ambivalence, her feelings of violence and displacement, keeping her urges to abandonment in tiny, vacuum-sealed jars. What’s more, says Winnicott, ‘the mother hates the baby before the baby can know his mother hates him.’ It is a situation quivering with the possibility of cruelty, and of regret. Winnicott also thought that there was no such thing as a baby. The baby exists only as part of the mother. While the baby has no personality, and no independent existence, what is there to love, what to hate but yourself? Freud, more conventionally, wrote that ‘in the child which [mothers] bear, a part of their own body confronts them like an extraneous object to which, starting out from their narcissism, they can give complete object-love’; and indeed everywhere in the culture of maternity one can see the difficult precedence of motherly emotion, its one-sidedness, the lonely fantasy of its frilly bassinets, its tiny snow-white garments, its angelic cribs and insignia of stars and teddy bears. Like a teenager in her postered room dreaming of pop stars, a new mother’s love exists in the mind and in the regalia of her material devotion. I see in the evolution of this regalia the promise of the tables being turned at some future point: in the next aisle at the supermarket things with helmets and weapons and cone-shaped breasts have replaced the angels and teddy bears; packets illegible with additives filled with things that look like small road accidents or explosions have superceded the tiny, perfect jars. The extraneous object clearly gets his own back.
    I