13 November 2024

Motherhood is full of agony, but its songs are deemed “nice”

I’d always shied away from writing sentimental songs about having babies for fear of seeming too soppy.

Laura Marling made me cry the other day. I was on my morning walk with her new album – mentioned in these pages last week – in my headphones. The track “Child of Mine” began with the sound of a baby gurgling. The guitar part started up and I idly wondered, “Is that baby on Laura’s lap, or in a Moses basket at her feet?” and then suddenly there were tears streaming down my face. It was this line that got me – “Last night in your sleep you started crying/I can’t protect you there though I keep trying”. And it got me, as they say, right in the feels.

The emotion conveyed was one I understood well, but one I had shied away from writing about when I became a mother. The year our twin daughters were born, EBTG recorded the album Temperamental, and there is no mention of babies at all. Instead, Ben wrote about being out in clubs (he was DJing a lot at the time) while I wrote about post-punk suburban violence (“Hatfield 1980”), the decline of a pop career (“Downhill Racer”), and the urgency of living your life while there is still time (“No Difference”). The pressure of new parenthood hangs over all these themes, but there are no direct references.

I’ve talked before about how happy I was during this time. When our son was born three years later, I temporarily retired from music altogether, and so I never wrote any mother-and-baby songs. I just couldn’t see how it would be done, how you could describe such unconditional love without drifting into being mawkish or sentimental.

Partly, I suppose, I was too busy and immersed – there was no time to reflect in tranquillity on emotions that were often intense and overwhelming. I’d written about wanting to have babies years before I had them. “Apron Strings” captured the kind of physical yearning that can sometimes overtake you: “Apron strings, hanging empty/Crazy things my body tells me/I want someone to tie to my apron strings”.

“I Don’t Understand Anything”, from 1994, had me questioning my own reasons for wanting to have children – “What is it that I think I need?/Is there love in me that wants to be freed?/Or is it selfishness and ego/We carry with us everywhere that we go?” Was I trying to reason myself out of it or talk myself into it? Either way, it’s a cerebral lyric about complex emotions. My head is doing the talking, perhaps afraid of what my heart might say.

Many years later, after my kids had grown into teenagers, I wrote about being a menopausal mother with children going through puberty (“Hormones”) – and finally a song actually called “Babies”, which was not a gentle lullaby but a hymn to planned parenthood (“I didn’t want my babies/Until I wanted babies/And when I wanted babies/Nothing else would do but babies”), containing the loving but unsentimental line, “GET THE F*** TO BED NOW”.

You can see how much I avoided indulging in messy or soppy emotions. Perhaps I was scared of the inevitable response. I read the Observer review of the new Laura Marling album and it says, “Marling is fully aware that there is something a little bit cringe about writing about motherhood,” and the line makes me wince. I know what the reviewer means, and I slightly hate that I know. There is no limit to how often we’ll listen to songs about romantic love – perhaps because the good ones always contain a bit of sex, and a bit of conflict. Maybe motherly love is seen as too nice, too pure. We want pain in our love songs.

But that line that made me cry – “Last night in your sleep you started crying/I can’t protect you there though I keep trying” – well that’s an acknowledgement of the pain that is present from the second your baby is born. The realisation that you can’t save them, the fear that they might come to harm – it’s a kind of primal agony. Perhaps we don’t really want to go there.

Perhaps it’s easier just to think that motherly love is “a bit cringe”.