In the bookshop where I used to work, I bought a copy of Jung’s Four Archetypes because it had a chapter entitled: THE MOTHER-COMPLEX. Written just like that, in capitals.

Mother: ancestor, antecedent, attend, author, authority, bear, bring forth, centre, cherish, child-bearer, creator, cultivate, determinant, encourage, forebearer, foster, grow, keep alive, keep tabs on, look after, mainspring, mind, minister, nurse, nurture, origin, pamper, pay attention to, protect, provide for, root, raise, see to, source, support, wait on, watch over.

My mother has not read anything that I have written. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I have sought to keep my writing from her in case she discovers I am not the obedient child I have tried to be (ever failing, of course, but endlessly, desperately trying).

There is a passage in Circumfession where Derrida recounts when his mother was dying in hospital and was no longer able to recognise him. He describes an exchange with his mother where he asks her if she is in pain (she says “yes”) and then he asks where it hurts. She replies: ‘I have a pain in my mother.’

Driving home the other night I catch a conversation on Radio National about taboo topics in children’s books. A librarian on the panel explains how the original edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales differed radically from those we are familiar with today. Notably, the mothers were turned into stepmothers in later editions of the stories. It was actually Snow White’s envious mother who tried to kill her, the librarian says, and it was Hansel and Gretel’s mother who left her children out in the woods.

In Tala Madani’s ‘Shit Mother’ paintings, the body of the mother is represented as literal shit.

The shit mother is a difficult figure for our culture to hold onto even though we know she exists. We know that just as the mother is the one who provides for us, nurtures us, and loves us unconditionally, so too can she be envious, hateful, spiteful and neglectful. The mother’s body in Madani’s paintings is totally malleable, a plaything for the growing child. The toddlers in the paintings climb over her, shit on their hands and mouths.

We know that for the first few months of a child’s life they do not understand the boundaries of their body. They do not experience the mother as other.

In my early twenties, I worked as a nanny of two young children. One day when I was picking the little girl up from school her teacher pulled me aside and told me that the girl had been caught with her classmate’s pink tutu in her locker.

It seemed perfectly clear to me that for the little girl: that tutu was not a tutu. That tutu represented so much more than its pink tulle. As we get older, we find ways of getting whatever our version of the tutu happens to be without stealing or running off with it. We earn money so that we can buy it for ourselves, or perhaps we become artists or writers so that we can acquire it imaginatively.

Early memories of dressing up in my mother’s clothes and jewellery.

As children, before we learn what to do with our desires, we stuff them into a locker and pray that no one will notice.

Someone always notices. And if nobody notices that is upsetting in a different way—Winnicott famously said ‘it’s a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.’

When Ocean Vuong describes the mother in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous as unable to read English, I find myself thinking that must be why he was able to write the book in the first place. Because his mother would never read it. Then I think, how presumptuous it is of me, to read the mother in this book as Vuong’s own.

What Ocean Vuong captures so well in his novel is that mothers are not monolithic. They are not good or bad, proud or envious, kind or mean, violent or nurturing etcetera. They can occupy both or several opposing positions at once. The ability to move between and among various positions is perhaps what we struggle most to reconcile (though feminist and queer theorists have been writing about this for a long time). To put it simply, the positions we occupy are not stable.

We cannot insist, as mothers, that our children experience us as always loving and never unkind simply because either we see ourselves as kind, or we have been kind almost all of the time. If my daughter momentarily experiences me as unkind, I can only seek to take in the rupture, and resist demanding that she remembers I have previously acted lovingly.

The pain of relating is such that we cannot control the way that we are experienced. There is little use in insisting that isn’t what was meant when what must be done is to listen to those who say it was hurtful, or disappointing, or thoughtless, or disrespectful, or not funny.

Tala Madani says in a New Yorker article: ‘I tell my students sometimes that, if they’re making work that their mothers will like, they’re in trouble.’

In season four of Jill Soloway’s Transparent Lila says to Sarah ‘secrets are the perfect stand-in for boundaries.’

Publishing any writing, but particularly writing which includes mention of my mother, has felt like a terrible betrayal. Because once it is out in the world, it can be read (and indeed read into).

I often discuss the meaning and usage of Modern Greek words with my partner, who was born and raised in Greece. In one such discussion, I am intrigued to discover that the word for betrayal, προδοσία (prodosia), shares its root with the word traitor, προδότης (prodotis). In English language, while a betrayal can make you a traitor, the two words are not so closely entwined, nor is the sense of secret-telling so explicit.

When I write about the capital M, mother, I understand Elena Ferrante’s desire to write using a pseudonym—something that bothered me when I first began reading her novels because, at the time, it seemed to let her off the hook. Isn’t it the case that we don pseudonyms in order to write what we want without taking responsibility for it outside the text?

In Rachel Zucker’s book MOTHERs she wrestles with the formidable mother-figure in her life, and also more broadly in the culture. Her mother was a famous storyteller and their relationship was fraught from early on. After completing the book, Zucker sent the manuscript to her mother, who responded in no uncertain terms that she did not want the book to be published—and that something very bad would happen if it were. Zucker’s mother died not long after and her dying wish—quite literally, her last words—was that the book not be published.

In a Los Angeles Review of Books interview Rachel Zucker says: ‘In the terror moments I think that this book actually killed my mother. I think that I will never write anything again.’

One evening when my mother was visiting from interstate, we were sitting side-by-side on the tram and I was wearing my prescription glasses, which I don’t wear every day, though I probably should. As I turned towards her to listen to what she was saying she paused mid-sentence and said: ‘don’t look at me with your glasses on!’ I pointed out that wearing my glasses didn’t give me super-vision. And then I took them off.

A close friend’s mother died recently. When I texted to ask how she was doing, she replied: I’ve immersed myself in work and this has helped. At night, though, the grief comes back.

When I thought about including my friend’s text in this piece, I emailed her first to seek permission. I attached the draft and explained my use of the quote and said that if including her words in this piece would make her feel uncomfortable, I would take them out. This concern for my friend immediately demonstrated the dilemma of permission where my mother is concerned. My mother, whom I have given no right of reply.

When I was about 8 months pregnant, I remember telling a friend that I wouldn’t survive the loss of my child at that late stage, and I remember her looking me in the eyes and saying: ‘of course you would.’

Before I had a child, I didn’t know what vulnerability was. Which isn’t to say that those who do not have children don’t know something the rest of us do (that’s the way addicts talk about heroin). No, it isn’t like that. Sooner or later we are all made aware of our utter fragility. Some through old age, others through illness, or trauma, or childbirth.

When I became a mother instead of feeling stronger, I felt weaker. I felt more afraid. Or suddenly afraid. It still surprises me. While it is something of a parental cliché to say it, the moment my daughter was born I no longer felt invincible. I knew that I could be utterly and definitively destroyed by the loss of her in my life. That my love for her makes me profoundly vulnerable.

When I was pregnant someone told me, I would be so changed by having a child that I would even watch movies differently. I think he said that they would make me cry more easily.

After the death of his mother in 1977 Roland Barthes began a collection of notes reflecting on his grief. These would later be made into a book and published as the Mourning Diary. On October 30 Barthes writes:

Many others still love me, but from now on my death would kill no one.
—which is what’s new.
(But Michel?)

Here, Barthes gives voice to the comfort for the child (even for the adult child) of knowing there is someone in their life who loves them so absolutely. And then he wonders aloud if in fact it could be possible for another to love him this much after all.

I find the tenderness of Barthes’ love for his mother, which comes through in so much of his writing, very moving. I still long for such a relationship with my own mother.

Towards the end of my daughter’s labour when they rushed me into surgery, I was exhausted and terrified I was going to die. This is not a metaphor. When I was giving birth, I came close to death.

What if I told you that almost every woman I know who has had a baby experienced a labour that was touch-and-go?

What if I said that childbirth puts you in touch with death? That being a mother, in particular, puts you in touch with death?

Before I was a mother, I wrote a story about a little boy who died. I would write a different kind of story now. Or, perhaps I should put that in the present tense and say that I do write different kinds of stories now.

In an interview with Sarah Broom about her book The Yellow House, Paul Holdengraber says: ‘You know, Sarah, just hearing you talk about your mother … I just … I love you loving her.’

The phone rings. It’s my mother. Though since her number always comes up No Caller ID I never know if it’s her calling or not. I answer: “Hello? Melody speaking.” Formal, in case it’s not her, but also, to communicate—if it is her—my annoyance at never knowing when she is calling.

When I was about 8-weeks pregnant I found out that I was having a girl. The clinic rang with the results of the routine genetic tests, double-checking that I did indeed want to know the gender along with the results. when I confirmed I did, they told me I was having a girl. I remember taking a sharp in-breath so frightened was I, then, of what I saw as the inescapably negative mother-daughter dynamic.

Marguerite Duras once famously wrote ‘in childhood and the lives that follow, the mother represents madness. Our mothers remain the craziest people we’ve ever met.’ As a mother, I expect Duras is speaking for herself here also.

It was my mother who set me up for a life of the mind. It was she who filled my bookcase with books I was always just a little too young to read or understand, but which I could strive for. She who filled her own bookshelves with Gertrude Stein and Simone De Beauvoir alongside books on astrology, Nietzsche, art history and knitting. She for whom a university education was everything.

In her seminal essay Motherhood and Daughterhood, Adrienne Rich writes: ‘[The] cathexis between mother and daughter—essential, distorted, misused—is the great unwritten story.’ She goes on to provide a map for ways we might think about the mother-daughter relationship and its various wounds. Arguing, ultimately, that ‘women are made taboo to women.’

I met a friend for breakfast on a sunny early-spring day, when the sun called for a t-shirt, though it was still cold enough for a jacket in the shade. I told her how much trouble I was having writing this piece about the mother figure. She asked me what was so difficult, and I found myself saying, somewhat surprisingly at the time, that the project of writing about mothers and motherhood was really about finding voice. My friend nodded and said, ‘isn’t that always the way?’

In an incredible speech given by Virginia Woolf to the National Society for Women’s Service in 1931, she articulates—with trademark precision—an experience of encountering a phantom in her consciousness that inhibited her ability to fully express herself in writing. She calls this phantom ‘The Angel in the House’ and articulates how the cause of this phantom is essentially the demands of the patriarchal culture to be angelic and devoid of opinion. Woolf goes on to describe having to kill off this internalised demand lest it take control of her writing and stifle her ability to speak with, and from, her own critical mind.

A text message exchange with my mother:

She: One day your daughter will hate you the way you hate me.
Me: I don’t hate you.
She: Well that’s one thing.

The Paris Review recently published an excerpt from a new collection of Marguerite Duras’s work in which she writes: ‘In the end, I think motherhood makes you obscene.’

When this piece was close to finished, I read it aloud to a friend. They leaned forward in their chair and said: ‘you know, Melody, when I think about your writing I think of Greek Mythology.’ (It happens my friend and I are both Greek-Australian, so this comment was especially pleasing to me). ‘I think of Medea who butchered her own children as an act of revenge … but mostly of Persephone.’ (I took a sharp intake of breath). ‘You know, it’s typical to think of Persephone as an innocent figure trapped in the underworld, but there’s another theory that she went willing, partly because she wanted to fuck Hades’ (they paused here and we both smiled), ‘but also because she needed to escape her mother.’

In a scene towards the end of Sally Potter’s remarkable film The Tango Lesson, the character Sally walks to the Saint-Sulpice following an argument with her lover, Pablo. There she encounters Delacroix’s painting of Jacob wrestling the angel, and stands in front of it for a time. Afterwards, she leaves a message on Pablo’s answering machine recounting the biblical story from the painting. She describes how Jacob meets a stranger in a valley and they start to fight. They fight and wrestle through the long night, but as dawn breaks Jacob realises that he can never defeat the stranger because the stranger is an angel, or God.

‘Or perhaps, all along Pablo,’ Sally says to the answering machine, ‘Jacob had simply been wrestling with himself.’

To make a work of art, we are first required to take a position.

To write, we must then have the gall to speak from that position.

To do so is to find a way to speak separate to any and all external (and internalised) demands. Including to: be a good girl (or boy for that matter), act your age or prescribed gender, toughen up, not speak back, not bite the hand that feeds you, know your place, not speak unless spoken to, not air your dirty laundry, not humiliate your family, not disrespect your elders, not speak out against the State and so on, and so forth.

I had always thought the wrestle for voice, or agency, was an inevitable part of the creative process. Which is why I find Woolf’s description of killing the inner obstacle to her writing so radical. She says: ‘had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own …’

I think we all inherit inner phantoms of a kind from the culture, and that they have a way of sucking our voices dry. As artists, in particular, we are confronted necessarily with our own inner limits, and that what coming up against these limits demands of us eventually is that we find our own voice—in spite of, or because of, or alongside of—whatever our own particular challenge-for-voice happens to be.

Sometimes, as Woolf describes, it is a bloody battle and the phantom must be bludgeoned to death. There is no other way.