The Bleak Houses

Sometimes the sadness comes just from the inability to say the right thing, or to stop saying the wrong thing. Such as Alison, an Irish student in an American college, whose inability to communicate with their Chinese dorm-mate ends unfortunately. Often grief comes in the form of physical or mental illness, affecting the entire family and sometimes lingering on even after the sick person has died. In 8220;Honey8221;, a woman tries to deal with the long, painful end of her mother by escaping for illicit sex and a hotel weekend, but finds that she cannot escape her loss. In 8220;Little Sister8221;, a girl tries to come to terms with the slow disintegration of her anorexic sister8217;s life, and with the effect it has had on her family: 8220;So she died. There is no getting away from something like that. You can8217;t recover. I didn8217;t even try. The first year was a mess and after that our lives were just punctured, not even sad 8212; just less, never the same again.8221;

In Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, a memoir of bringing up her two children, Enright wrote about the other side of motherhood which is ignored in the bouncy prose of pregnancy manuals. In the essay 8220;My Milk8221;, she summed up the mystery of it all: 8220;A child came out of me. I cannot understand this, or try to explain it. Except to say that my past life has become foreign to me. Except to say that I am prey, for the rest of my life, to every small thing.8221;
In these stories, Enright writes in rich, textured detail about everything that motherhood is 8212; the sheer physicality of it, the messiness 8220;God, this baby business brought you very low8221; and yes, the joy. Also, the emotional roller-coaster ride, the desperate loneliness, the pangs of doubt, the sudden panic, the endless crisis. 8220;There was the mother thing, which is to say, too much complaining and too much love.8221;

8220;In the Bed Department8221; shows us a woman in her 40s, with two grown sons, who meets a 8220;sixty-plus8221; man in the local drama society and becomes pregnant: 8220;The child was no bigger than a pip in the flesh of her stomach.8221; When she has a miscarriage at 13 weeks, she wonders if she has imagined the baby after all, but she knows that she had felt the joy of a life growing inside her. In 8220;Shaft8221;, a pregnant woman going through mood swings shares a strangely personal moment with a friendly American stranger who wants to touch the baby. 8220;He touched all my hopes,8221; she says simply. In 8220;Caravan8221;, a woman struggling with her two children senses the presence of a ghost in their holiday caravan 8212; the ghost of another woman who sat quite still and died in the caravan itself while playing solitaire. In 8220;Yesterday8217;s Weather8221;, a new mother spends an afternoon at her sister-in-law8217;s house, watching her three boisterous children. When husband and wife return to their hotel room with their sleeping infant, they have the blazing row that often follows family gatherings, but the baby sleeps through it all. As mother and baby go through the aching intimacy of a feed, she wonders, unsure of herself, whether she is doing the motherhood thing right: 8220;Was this enough? Was this how you loved a baby?8221;