“the state does not need to police a mother if a mother polices herself. Faced with ever increasing, and increasingly specific, advice about how best to meet her child’s needs, and messages about how her own needs are few – if they are truly needs at all – she begins to whittle down her needs to the bare bone.”
This essay originally appeared in the Griffith Review (Edition 89: Here Be Monsters) in August 2025.
I HAVE NEVER read anything written by Pearl S Buck. But a few years ago, I came across something she once said that I have been unable to forget.
In a 1958 interview on the American TV show The Mike Wallace Interview, the eponymous Wallace (pausing every now and then to plug Parliament-brand cigarettes) interrogates Buck about her views on women and the home:
Wallace: Earlier this week you told our reporter this. You said: ‘Most women are making their homes their graves.’ What did you mean by that?
Buck: Well, I suppose I meant that they bury themselves there when they don’t need to. Of course I believe in home you know.
Wallace tries to wrap his head around what Buck means: ‘I find it difficult to understand how you can say that most women make their homes their graves.’ Buck replies, ‘Well, I think because they stop reading, or reading books that would enlarge their minds, the minds of their family, for example.’ She later observes that a woman with young children may have to put off pursuing a career if she wants one, but ‘those years need not be what I might call “grave years.” I mean, bury herself–’ (Here Wallace cuts her off to make an observation of his own.)
I do not remember exactly how I stumbled upon this interview. I do remember it was late at night and I was sitting on the carpet in the dark with my laptop propped on the sofa – a favorite internet-browsing position of mine – thinking I should try to go to bed earlier so I could stop being exhausted all the time. I do remember I was exhausted all the time because I had young children, like the women Buck exhorts not to make their homes their graves. I do remember reflecting on her words, because, despite my exhaustion, I was in a position to reflect.
The danger of my ‘grave years’ was nearly past, I could see that – like one sees the sun peeking through the clouds of a storm. The next year, my youngest son would be five, so both kids would finally be in school. And I felt I had succeeded in not burying myself – had fought tooth and nail against it, had often felt motherhood was the thing trying to bury me. Amid the showers of dirt from above, I had kept reading books of the mind-enlarging kind – as much as I’d been able to scrape together the time and focus for. I had persisted in my literary activities, just like Buck, who was a mother herself – of one biological child and seven adopted children – and who admits in the same interview that she is ‘lucky’ to be able to do her work from home.
My two sons’ infancies and toddlerhoods had happened to coincide with an extraordinarily and fortuitously busy period, when my agent found a publisher for my first novel, secured a contract for me to write a sequel, and arranged contracts for my first two book-length translation jobs: two Indonesian novels into English. Aspiring writers and translators will understand: how could I have passed up such opportunities? Writing and translating had become my only job. My contract as a fixed-term university lecturer had not been renewed prior to my first pregnancy, and my efforts to find another job before beginning to show had not met with success.
Other writing and translating work rolled in during the infants-and-toddlers period. The money I made sometimes covered the expenses of childcare (two or three days a week, adjusted up or down at intervals) and sometimes didn’t. I tried to remind myself that both my husband and I were making use of childcare so that we both could work; caring for ourchildren wasn’t my burden alone. But society still largely operates on the assumption that child rearing is the responsibility of the mother – and all messaging is directed accordingly. I felt guilty working to pay other people to take care of my children so I could work. But the alternative was that I would not write or translate, and something inside me couldn’t bear that.
Money wasn’t the only currency I paid to avoid my burial. Keeping house well (which I felt obligated to do to ‘make up’ for my meagre financial contribution to the household), minding the kids four to five days a week and nudging along a literary career all at the same time left my brain stretched. My mental health suffered. During my second pregnancy and for more than a year after giving birth to my second child, depressive periods ebbed and flowed, growing deeper and longer each time.
Eventually the tide stopped going out. I pushed the enormous double pram through streets and parks and malls, ankle-deep in the sense that having kids was a terrible mistake. I had been utterly unprepared for the avalanche of advice around how to raise small children ‘well’. I loved my sons deeply, took joy in watching them laugh and grow and explore the world – but I also found spending time with them and doing the tasks required for their upkeep mostly boring. Temperament-wise I was all wrong, without the endless reserves of patience and gentleness that were apparently required. As a toddler, my oldest son was prone to white-hot bouts of screaming rage at seemingly everything: not getting to push the lift button, not wanting to get off the train at our stop, not wanting me to have eaten the leftover toast I had repeatedly asked him if he still wanted, to which he had repeatedly responded no. I too would explode in frustration and rage. I too would yell and scream. When I regained my composure, I would be overcome by remorse and guilt, and the even deeper conviction that I should never have become a mother. Eventually, I made the decision to seek counselling. At long last, the water of despair began to recede.
Grave years. Bury themselves. It occurred to me, as I sat alone in my dark living room, Pearl S Buck interview paused, face bathing in the laptop’s blue light, that though I hadn’t entered the grave – intellectual or physically – I had felt perilously close at times. Could one have called it ‘living’? Undead was the better term, perhaps.
But that was impossible. Hadn’t great strides been made since 1958? Since those black-and-white days of The Mike Wallace Interview? Had not women of my generation been reliably informed that the choice between motherhood and career was no longer one we had to make, that modern society had our backs 110 per cent? What had gone wrong?
Perhaps the grave holds some insight. Or rather, what the grave cannot hold.
‘I did not say she was alive, my child; I did not think it. I go no further than to say that she might be Un-Dead.’
‘Un-Dead! Not alive! What do you mean? Is this all a nightmare, or what is it?’
‘There are mysteries which men can only guess at […] But I have not done. May I cut off the head of dead Miss Lucy?’
– Bram Stoker, Dracula
THE UNDESIRABILITY OF the undead state is inherent in the term itself. The implication is that the being who is undead should be dead. Death is the proper order of things. Rest for the body, peace for the soul, RIP. The problem with the undead is that, for one reason or another, they refuse to go gently into that good night.
Some undead creatures are to be feared more than others: a ghost who hangs around hallways and makes objects float versus a zombie who dismembers and eats you or a vampire thirsty for blood. It is when the wants and needs of the undead conflict with the welfare of the living that they cross the line from merely spooky into monstrous – and must be forced out of undeath into death proper. Take young Lucy Westenra from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (not to be confused with the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula). She gets turned into a vampire and starts leaving her coffin to prey on children. Van Helsing and Lucy’s three suitors-in-life (ie, four men) have no choice but to drive a stake through her heart and cut off her head.
Lucy’s transformation involves not just a change in nutritional requirements but also in personality: ‘Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed,’ writes John Seward in his diary. ‘The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.’ The adjectives used to describe vampire Lucy suggest monstrous selfishness. She is stubborn, devoid of pity for others, sexually voracious – the opposite of the feminine ideal she once embodied.
Two things worth observing. One: vampire Lucy’s wants and needs are in opposition to the safety of the living, specifically children. Two: there is a hazy distinction, if any, between her wants and her needs. As a vampire, she presumably needs blood to survive. But as she looks up from the child’s neck, lips and chin dripping with fresh blood, ‘growling over it as a dog growls over a bone’, the implication is that Lucy not only has to drink blood – she finds it finger-lickin’ good.
Speaking of women, another undead creature comes to mind, one who is only ever a woman: the kuntilanak of Indonesian lore, also extant in Malaysia and Singapore where she is known as the pontianak. Details vary from region to region, but generally speaking, a kuntilanak was, in life, a woman who died during pregnancy or labour without successfully giving birth to a child (a failed mother, in short). Denied children in life, a kuntilanak steals them, those in utero and those already born. Sharp objects like scissors and needles or amulets should be carried by pregnant women or placed near sleeping children to ward off her attacks.
Some myths add that a woman who becomes a kuntilanak is one who also died a violent death, murdered and/or raped by men, and who now seeks revenge. Taking the form of a beautiful woman, she lures men into the woods, disembowels them with her long nails and feasts on the gooey insides. A kuntilanak can, however, be tamed. If a man drives a stake through a kuntilanak’s head (aka literally nailing her), as long as the stake is in place, she is beautiful, submissive and makes an excellent wife.
Like vampire Lucy, the kuntilanak is a selfish creature. Hungry for children she can’t bear and justice that earthly authorities won’t mete out, death won’t stop her from achieving her aims. You have to admire her go-getting attitude. Again, we have the conflict between the welfare of the living (including children) and a woman’s desires and needs. And, again, that fuzzy line between what constitutes ‘desire’ and ‘need’: the kuntilanak by definition steals children and attacks men, is compelled to by the grisly circumstances of her death. But she takes malicious pleasure in her afterlife’s work too.
It strikes me that a living woman need not be bitten by a vampire or die a grisly death to become an undead creature. The moment she conceives, a woman occupies a position not dissimilar to that of vampire Lucy or the kuntilanak. That is, her wants as an individual are set in opposition to the welfare of others, specifically (her) children.
I would hazard to say that all women who have been pregnant or mothers have experienced this opposition, from the twentysomething due to start work next month staring in horror at the two pink lines on her pregnancy test to the fortysomething mother-of-three who is looking forward to returning to work only to discover there’s a fourth child on the way. From the woman six months along who yearns for a sip of wine or a lick of soft-serve ice-cream to the mother of a six-month-old pining for a nice dinner out with friends but feeling guilty about leaving her husband by himself to care for their child and for spending money she isn’t pulling in. It will be familiar to the mother who opts for formula instead of breastfeeding but is still niggled by the strong advice that ‘breast is best’ and to the mother who weans her baby at twelve months old to the disapproval of her judgemental friend who is still breastfeeding her two-year-old on demand. It will be familiar to the mother who feels guilty for feeding her toddler frozen chicken nuggets three dinners in a row simply because it was more convenient and to the mother who lets her toddler play on an iPad too long because she’s attending to emails. Even when a woman willingly and lovingly forgoes her time, convenience, comfort and preferences for her child’s sake, the opposition remains.
More specifically, as with Lucy and the kuntilanak, the opposition is always cast as between a child’s needs and a woman’s wants. Wants are forgo-able, even selfish to indulge, especially if they are in conflict with a small, helpless being’s needs. And it is undeniable that a woman doesn’t need to go to a restaurant or answer emails when she could be playing with her child. She can do without soft serve – and hummus, and rockmelon (a new addition), and all the other foods on the NSW Government Food Authority website highlighted in red and labelled DON’T EAT. A woman absolutely does not need even the smallest sip of wine. And a woman doesn’t require the freedom of movement that comes from feeding formula to her baby, which allows her to easily leave the baby in the care of someone else. Also, formula is expensive – why buy the formula when you can have the milk for free?
Even if she wants to, a woman needn’t go to work if her family doesn’t need the money. Why not focus on that most important of all jobs: being a mother? (I mean ‘job’ in the loosest sense of the word, because motherhood is its own reward and doesn’t involve any pay.) Childcare is costly anyway, especially in Australia (same logic as above – why buy the childcare when you can have the mother for free?). A woman doesn’t need to not be pregnant, though she may not want to be. A woman may want to lose her cool and yell and tell her child ‘no’, especially when she got only four hours of broken sleep the night before and her child thinks pulling all the clothes out of her drawer and scattering them around the apartment is hilarious. But is such negative behaviour really necessary? As one mum blogger, who has titled her blog Extremely Good Parenting, says, ‘Parenting without negative language like “no”, “don’t” and “stop” is an important part of my every single day’ (emphasis mine).
Sanctioning or condemning specific choices or behaviours is not my point here. I include these examples to show how the opposition between a woman’s wants and a child’s needs is constantly present in a woman’s life, taking a variety of forms. And, as with vampire Lucy and the kuntilanak, the line between wants and needs is fuzzy, with health authorities, websites, and child-rearing and parenting-advice experts labelling more and more of a mother’s actions and behaviors and deeds and thoughts wants, and hardly ever making use of the needs label, except in the direst circumstances.
At the same time, the list of what a child needs has become exhaustive and tyrannical. These needs may be called ‘best practice’ or ‘developmentally beneficial’ or ‘recommended’ or ‘essential for your child’ – but to knowingly not meet them if you are able to, even at great inconvenience or cost, would be to monstrously and unmaternally prioritise your own desires. (Like vampire Lucy. Like the kuntilanak.)
The sheer onerousness of what constitutes ‘good’ mothering is, sadly, nothing new. Writing in the mid 1990s on the recommended methods of child-rearing that have become predominant in Western society, sociologist Sharon Hays observed in her book The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood ‘not only have they become expert-guided and child-centered, they are also more emotionally absorbing, labor intensive, and financially expensive than ever before’. Here are three contemporary examples from the sort of websites one visits regularly as a new mother trying to puzzle through it all:
1. A printable ‘The Perfect Baby Daily Schedule’ for babies aged 0–6 months, from a website called Toddler in Action. Schedule entries include (but do not consist entirely of): ‘Milk & Social’ at 7.00 am; ‘Milk & Gross Motor’ at 9.00 am; ‘Milk & Fine Motor’ at 12.00 pm; ‘Milk & Language’ at 8.00 pm, in between a total of five naps. In a column on the right are ‘Must-Do’ activities, categorised according to ‘Gross Motor’, ‘Fine Motor’, ‘Language & Cognitive’, etc. Specific activities include: ‘Baby exercises (ask paediatrician)’, ‘Baby massage’, ‘Practice strong grip’ and ‘Laugh’.
2. A post from The Baby Sleep Site on juggling a baby’s and a toddler’s individual schedules simultaneously. Capturing its complete and utter absurdity requires a quote:
Work on overlapping at least one nap between your baby and toddler’s schedule. For example, your 6 month old baby may sleep at 9 am, 1 pm, and 4 pm, so target your 18-month old’s nap to be 1 pm. Or, target your 10 month old’s naps to be 9:30 am and 1:30 pm so your toddler’s 1–3 pm nap has 1 1/2 hours overlapped. This will enable you to do chores or enjoy some downtime. (You deserve it!)
3. Last of all, a quote from the Australian parenting website Raising Children (which announces on its homepage its support from the Australian Government) on the importance of letting children learn to feed themselves solid food: ‘it might seem messy,’ the article notes, ‘but it’s one of the ways your child develops fine motor skills.’ Funnily enough, the article itself can’t seem to get over how annoying the resulting mess may be (‘it’s often messy and can sometimes be frustrating’; ‘it can be slow and messy at first’; ‘If you find the mess stressful, these ideas might help’). Nonetheless, it exhorts the parent to push on through. After all, a child’s fine motor skills are at stake.
Thankfully, the authorities do not take your child away (yet) if you don’t adhere to a baby schedule divided into half-hour increments, don’t implement any schedules at all, or choose to feed your infant by hand or by spoon, as many people from many cultures have done for generations to avoid food wastage and unnecessary mess. But as Hays notes, all the mothers she interviewed, across various cultural, educational and socio-economic backgrounds and circumstances, had internalised the values of those ‘expert-guided, child-centered’, ‘emotionally absorbing, labour-intensive’ and ‘financially expensive’ child-rearing methods. In short, the state does not need to police a mother if a mother polices herself. Faced with ever increasing, and increasingly specific, advice about how best to meet her child’s needs, and messages about how her own needs are few – if they are truly needs at all – she begins to whittle down her needs to the bare bone.
An observation: death is the state of not having any needs.
Unsurprising fact: not every mother is willing to die.
MANY A MOTHER has found herself at the mercy of this false opposition between her needs (which are cast as selfish wants) and the countless supposed needs of her child. And whenever she falls short – gives in to anger or frustration or impatience, or the more convenient but ‘wrong’ way of doing things – she undergoes a transformation: Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed. Her fangs protrude, her nails lengthen. Clutched to her breast is a child she is harming, a child not rightfully hers.
‘[F]or years I believed I should never have been anyone’s mother,’ writes Adrienne Rich in her 1976 book on motherhood, Of Woman Born; ‘that because I felt my own needs acutely and often expressed them violently, I was Kali, Medea, the sow that devours her farrow, the unwomanly woman in flight from womanhood, a Nietzschean monster’. Reflecting on several unexamined assumptions she held in her early years as a mother, including the idea that a ‘natural’ mother is someone ‘who can find her chief gratification in being all day with small children’ and ‘that maternal love is, and should be, quite literally selfless’, Rich recalls her despair: ‘If I knew parts of myself existed that would never cohere to those images, weren’t those parts then abnormal, monstrous?’
Who can ask for better company than Adrienne Rich? Not to mention the numerous other ‘mother-creators’ whose struggles are documented by biographer Julie Phillips in The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem (2022) – Doris Lessing, Ursula K Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Angela Carter, to name only some. All of them driven by a desire, no, a need, to keep creating art despite the obstacles, despite others’ disapproval and their own guilt. ‘Everyone in this book had periods of depression and failure,’ observes Phillips. ‘After the bleak days and the hard choices, they had to find their way back to the land of the living, and for some it was a slow, painful road.’
The land of the living.One is reminded of the female protagonist of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014), the writer and mother transformed from autonomous narratorial ‘I’ into helpless third-person ‘wife’, trying to construct for herself ‘a secret life. In it, she is an art monster. She puts on yoga pants and says she is going to yoga, then pulls off onto a country lane and writes in tiny cramped handwriting on a grocery list.’
The irony, of course, is that this act – small, occasional, restrained – in no way makes her a true monster, such monsterdom being attainable only by the unthinking, easy and casual entitlement that is the prerogative of men. Offill’s term ‘art monster’ has become ubiquitous. Can anyone write about female creativity without using it? I worry that through its overuse and removal from its original context, we are in danger of losing our sense of the terrible extent to which the concept of monstrousness has been weaponised against mothers to keep them in line…for the sake of the children, of course. It is one thing to be lovable in one’s monstrosity, as cute and toothless as a cookie monster. It is another to feel the horror and despair at one’s monstrousness: to begin to believe that, for the sake of the child one loves, a stake should be driven through one’s head and one’s heart.
I REMEMBER WITH great clarity the night I decided to get counselling. Like many an undead creature, I am at my worst at night. It was winter in Hanoi on the second-to-last day of 2018. We were there on a trip with my mother, aunt and siblings. Leaving our three-year-old and one-year-old in my mother’s care, my husband and I had gone out with my sister to a local craft brewery to enjoy ourselves, which I was not succeeding in doing. For months, a dark cloud had been coming and going, descending for longer each time. The cloud came with me. I didn’t feel like conversing with anyone, and my husband and sister left me alone, sensing that was what I wanted. They were right, but, perversely, it just made me more depressed. I checked out of the conversation entirely, began typing on my phone – ideas for a story I would never write. Lines that made me wince when, for the purpose of writing this essay, I fished out the note and re-read it, because I couldn’t believe I was really that low and because, aesthetically speaking, it’s cringe: about a woman having the courage to hang herself. About being brave enough to follow Virginia Woolf’s example and drown.
I remember being seized by an urgent need to talk to someone. But not my husband or my sister. Somehow their proximity made seeking help from them unbearable. I checked the time-zone difference, excused myself from the table and called my best friend from high school. We had lived in Singapore together. Now she lives in New York. We don’t text or call each other very often, though we still keep in touch. Perhaps it was instinctive – to reach out to someone I had been friends with before I had become a wife, or a mother, back when I could have been anything and done anything and was simply and entirely myself.
By the grace of God – for a monster may believe in God – Kathleen picked up. No one picks up these days.
Hey! What’s up?
I remember having a very hard time saying anything. I remember my eyes filling with tears and my voice trembling when I did say something, and how pathetic I felt when all I could manage to articulate, haltingly, was, It’s just. I feel so sad.
I remember her response. Like when you are approaching an injured animal to help it. Like when you are comforting someone drunk or in pain, both of which I was.
Awww. The softest, gentlest awww. I’m sorry. That’s really hard.
I don’t know if she did, but in my memory, she repeated at intervals: it’s okay.
The call lasted a few minutes. Most of it was silence. There was a part when she asked, gently, whether I had considered going to therapy. Tearfully, I agreed that maybe it would be a good idea.
Seven days later, I asked a friend in Sydney for the name of the psychologist she had been seeing.
I think I’ve mentioned it already, but I’m so very glad I went.
TO QUOTE A recent email from my children’s school notifying parents of a case of head lice: There is no single solution to eradication, only persistence.
Perhaps what will save women from death and undeath are the small, real-life stories, the tiny acts of sympathy and care. Not the timeless myths of rapacious, demonic women or saintly self-sacrificial mothers. Not even the oversimplified legendary stories that compress great women into the sum of their deaths. Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones and walked into a river; Sylvia Plath stuck her head in an oven: bodies twisted into cautionary tales or how-to guides for women too brilliant for their own good.
The life-giving stories:
My best friend picked up the phone and consoled me.
My friend recommended her psychologist.
My psychologist helped me.
One particularly awful afternoon, when I was nine months pregnant and my angry toddler had escaped his pram and was running towards a busy road, three women saw me chasing him, screaming, ‘Someone stop him!’ They converged to form a phalanx, blocking his path.
An editor once corresponded with me on lingering copyedits for my novel over the phone while I was changing a nappy. Ah, I remember those days.
The librarian on the phone chuckled. Do I hear a little person with you? No further questions asked, she renewed my book, due that day.
An elderly stranger stopped me in the street as I was pushing the pram. She declared, ‘You’re doing a wonderful job!’
Because this is what the myths don’t tell you: if you survive being undead – if you escape having a stake being driven through you and if you escape believing you should do it yourself – there will come a day when feeling and warmth will return to your limbs and your heart. And you will realise that you were never undead. What you are is alive.
* Thank you to Zhou Taomo for enthusiastically recommending Sharon Hays’ work. And thank you to Yumna Kassab for suggesting I listen to a Between the Covers podcast episode from 2022 featuring Julie Phillips on Ursula K Le Guin, without which I would not have read Phillips’ excellent book.
tiffany tsao 