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Why, as a man, I feel that maternity literature challenges me more

2021-01-06T02:01:48.983Z


That may be the key, that parenting literature does not land in the small-large daily dramas that are the true generators of ambivalence, in those intimate spaces where life is cooked


In these times of infinite film and series catalogs, curious things can happen at least.

For example, spending almost an hour browsing Netflix, HBO and Amazon Prime in search of a movie that you have not seen and that is not a slop and tired of not finding anything to end up returning to the origins, even in a modernized version of those origins: the RTVE app.

There I came across a fantastic movie:

Petra

.

I liked everything about this Jaime Rosales film: the settings, the permanent feeling of unease, the documentary aesthetic of the image and, above all, the magnificent performances (Could Barbara Lennie be the best Spanish actress of the moment?).

At one point in the film, when they are already living together, Petra (Lennie) tells Lucas (Àlex Brendemühl) that she wants to leave the city and her artistic career to live in the mountains and dedicate herself to other things.

What things? Lucas asks him.

To be a mother, for example, she answers.

What you are asking me is something very serious.

It's something for life, eh? He answers with a smile that is as excited as it is heartbroken.

More information

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“My entry into motherhood was very direct and conventional, but afterwards it has always been a contradiction: I loved her, but when I entered her I began to see everything that they had not told me about the experience: the fact of not ceasing to be a mother in At no time, if you cannot separate yourself as a person from the figure of a mother ... It is true that it is a very beautiful act of love and that you love your children with madness, but at the same time, at times you feel that it prevents you from expanding ”, I the writer

Marta Orriols said

in a recent interview.

That for life is a weight that one does not measure exactly when being a father is only a wish.

See that I love my children and even so there are days when I wake up fantasizing about the idea that I am not a father, days when I want to flee buried by endless tasks and exhaustion, days when I curse that "procrastination" that it is attached as a complement to the role of father, that not having time for anything, that attending to constant requests that do not let you attend to yours.

Days in which I sink between screams and tantrums from one to the other, between anger from my partner and mine, between responses out of tune resulting from the most absolute impotences.

I look for consolation in literature in those days.

For years I have been investigating biographical, fiction or self-fiction novels, written by men who relate their paternal experience.

There are, but none have questioned me as

Marie Darrieussecq

and her

The Baby

(Anagram),

Nuria Labari

and her

The Best Mother in the World

(Random House Literature), the recent graphic novel

The Meteorite

(Lungwerg), by the illustrator

Amaia Arrazola

and, above all and above all, the incomparable

El knot maternal

(Las Afueras) by

Jane Lazarre

, the already worn pages of so much use, to which I often return as if it were a bible to feel understood, to validate my ambivalence in fragments like this conversation about his children that Lazarre has with Anna, a neighbor and friend.

- I love them, sure, but I hate them, he said.

"I would give my life for him," I stressed.

All those movies about women shooting tanks to save their children are real.

I would certainly rather die than lose it.

I suppose this is love, "I shuddered, and then we laughed," but it has destroyed my life, and I only live thinking about how to get it back.

"I'm looking forward to tomorrow, so you can take care of the children," she confessed, "but I'm terrified of leaving them."

We assumed that sentences would always have two parts: the second apparently contradicted the first, but their unity was always subject to our increasing capacity to tolerate this ambivalence, for maternal love is about precisely this.

You have to love Jane Lazarre.

That's why I look for his heir among male writers, to love him too, but I can't find him, although as I said before, there are in his own way.

Writers who, in their own way, try to peek into the parental experience, I mean.

There is, for example,

Antonio Scurati

, who in his extraordinary novel

The Unfaithful Father

(Asteroid Books) and, through its protagonist, Glauco Revelli, brings us closer to that figure of the father still in transit, disoriented, lost in the redefinition of his role.

“We, neophyte parents in their forties who, among the few trees of the Sergio Ramelli gardens, chased our children in games whose rules we could no longer establish, we were completely devoid of equipment.

We faced the task of educating with bare hands, with no other tools than our virtues and our vices as men, our animal instinct, our naked personality as living beings.

We improvised.

Every time the ball rolled away, we were forced to reinvent, each on our own, the paternal archetype, ”he writes.

There is also Lucas Pereyra, the protagonist of the novel

La Uruguaya

(Libros del Asteroide) by

Pedro Mairal

.

A man as lost or more than Revelli in his role as father and writer, a liberal profession that allows him flexible hours and, as such, burdens him with the care of his son, with that difficult and undervalued task of spending 24 hours a day with a child.

The same days follow one another and Pereyra's complaints follow one another, who is looking for oxygen and a way out of her despair in a double life.

You can see that Mairal is a father, that he knows what he is talking about, although he dislikes his character for so much complaint, for so much frustration.

“Having children modifies something in your brain, it's like post-traumatic stress, you don't sleep well anymore, even when they are 19, until they arrive at dawn for their party, you don't sleep soundly.

The earthquake is intimate, from the skin inward, and also around.

But if I were to live again I would do it again, because it is worth it.

Children destroy your life and that is fine (your capricious life was not so important, anyway), they build their life on top of yours ”, he told me in an interview.

There is the Peruvian writer

Renato Cisneros

and his paternity diary

Someday I'll show you the desert

(Alfaguara), which is an autobiographical inquiry into an old dilemma: Is the job of a writer compatible with the mentally and physically exhausting task of raising a child? ;

but also the vision of a father who is overwhelmed and overwhelmed by the experience at first.

“I doubt anyone is ready for a moment like this.

You can be willing, but ready?

Never.

I know I am not because in these days leading up to the big event, excitement, expectation and curiosity are mixed with fear.

There are days when there is only fear.

And I am not referring to the fear of making mistakes in parenting - being a father, that is, in good account, making mistakes - but a more crude and selfish fear: the fear of losing my autonomy, of losing myself ”, he writes.

And there is especially

Karl Ove Knausgard

, who as Pedro Mairal defined me in his day, speaks in

Un

man in love

(Anagrama), the second volume of his huge autobiographical project

Mi

lucha

, "about how taking care of children makes him feel asexual, out of the running, empty, pushing the baby carriage".

Perhaps only some of the fragments of that volume have questioned me as the pages of many maternity novels did.

There are fears, there are insecurities, there are yearnings, there are feelings and there is ambivalence in Knausgard because as a member of a socially advanced country he is also an advanced person, a man who lived and lives a paternity more similar to the one some of us already live today in Spain: with sincere involvement, enjoying and suffering in equal parts, spending enough time with our children to get to experience in our flesh and our brains (even if it is still only in a very primal way) the ambivalence that mothers have narrated so well.

But Knausgard, as Marta Orriols pointed out to me very well, hardly exclusively dedicates some 100 or 200 pages of the more than 3,000 that make up his autobiography to that facet as a father.

Sometimes, in other volumes, he returns to it, but already in a residual form.

It is a significant piece of information.

Orriols also gave me the key to explain a question that I have been asking myself for a long time: why as a man I feel that maternity literature challenges me more.

“The paternal experience in literature is always approached with great grandiloquence, as if it speaks more of the human condition than of paternity itself.

More novels are needed that talk about fatherhood from the doubts and nuances that make this experience real, because the writers who address the experience do not land on those small, everyday things that are always present in maternity novels, "Orriols replied. to one of my questions.

That may be the key, that parenting literature does not land in the small-great daily dramas that are the true generators of ambivalence, in those intimate spaces where life is cooked, in the apparently insignificant daily moments (changes of diapers, tantrums, washing machines, showers, races to get to school, chaotic breakfasts, couple arguments about who does this or that) that make up the experience when one tries with more or less success to be co-responsible as a parent and also in all those other facets of domestic life that carry our backpacks and end up affecting upbringing.

"It is known that mothers carried more responsibility on their shoulders, while paternity, sacred, protected, childish, did not change in the least," wrote Jane Lazarre in 1976.

It may be that almost 45 years later the experience of fatherhood has begun to change something for men, but in the literature it is clear that this "something" is still not enough.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-01-06

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