Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz

I’ve been needing the loo since lunch but it’s impossible to do anything other than be a mother. Enough already with the crying. He cries, and cries and cries. I’m going to lose my mind. I’m a mother, full stop. And I regret it but I can’t even say that. Who would I say it to?

This book is the antithesis of one of those nauseating Anne Geddes photos, of an eternally adorable, sleeping infant, nestled inexplicably in a costume so that they look like a pea in a pod. Urg… pardon me as I retch.

Where was I? Oh yes, the opposite of Anne Geddes. Because Anne Geddes is the biggest liar out there. About motherhood, about babies, about what I want to look at, framed on the wall. Ariana Harwicz, on the other hand, tells the searing, brutal truths of the dark, inner, mostly unuttered experiences mothers have, none of which are socially acceptable. Who ever says “I regret having my baby”? Who can admit aloud that they wish physical harm on a defenceless toddler? Who dares confess they have felt that way, even in a difficult and fleeting moment?

Harwicz’ story is like a big, horrific reveal. Ta-da! The infant you’re carrying is going to carry off YOU… your freedom, your body, your relationship, your identity… and you have to love it! Every minute of the day! Stifling any feelings to the contrary. Photographs with smiling faces hiding the inner madness.

This book gives voice to a mother’s secret protests. I was almost afraid to turn the page at times. What is going to happen NEXT? The protagonist is on the razor’s edge of insanity, full of contradictions. She is trapped and clingy at the same time. It’s unclear sometimes what is real and what is imagined, but the effect is a claustrophobic fury, of claws scratching against splintered wood, of agony and alienation. But in that, Harwicz unleashes a freedom by uttering the totally unacceptable, in telling a story without sanitising one single word.

There’s something of Sylvia Plath here, of The Yellow Wallpaper, of Surfacing, of every mother who has felt the desperate loss of self. The writing is powerful and dense, so I took my time reading this, treating each short chapter as I would a poem. It’s not for the faint of heart (thank goodness it’s only 123 pages) but it gives permission to acknowledge these dangerous yet universal feelings, and I think that can only have healing consequences.

Die, My Love was published in 2017 and is available to order from Charco Press.