A book review Comparing Soldier Sailor and Lies Our Mothers Told Us by Kalpana Misra
I expressed a desire to read Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy, perched on the longlist of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, during a bookish discussion with my reading group, a set of people eclectic in taste and age. One 25-year-old stated categorically that she would not read a book about motherhood. The discussion moved on and I missed the opportunity to ask if this was because of an unconscious patriarchal bias that denigrates the work of motherhood even as it places mothers on a pedestal.
Her reaction resonated differently after I read Nilanjana Bhowmick's Lies Our Mothers Told Us right after Soldier Sailor. These ‘lies’ focus on the sentimental delights of motherhood but don’t address the harrowing loss of agency that comes with motherhood. Supermums never show the cracks beneath the surface, and daughters want to follow in their noble footsteps. It's these lies that convince women that they can have it all. Women juggling careers and home, making it look easy while breaking apart inside do the world a great disservice. “Indian women are the most overworked in the world,” says Nilanjana Bhowmick in Lies Our Mothers Told Us, quoting from a Deloitte study done in 2019, before the pandemic. COVID restrictions meant women’s work hit a new low world over. It was a time when every family member was at home attending Zoom meetings but needed to be fed and cared for in other ways. While working women muted their own Zoom calls for the pressure cooker whistles or the baby’s screams, the rest of the family tutted at the domestic sounds they felt not the slightest bit responsible for. While it is gratifying to have women’s lived experiences corroborated by a study, it really isn’t anything new. Even as we changed our hats with panache, accepting "the accolades rather than exposing the reason for the dark circles under our eyes, the incessant anxiety, the suppressed anger," we knew we weren’t superwomen, but we kept trying. Bhowmick says "American women struggle with the idea of fulfilling the superwoman syndrome, but we in India and other developing countries have “internalised the double shift.”
Reading Soldier Sailor made me wonder whether women in developing countries are the only ones who have internalised the need for perfection. While Soldier (the mother in the book) doesn’t attempt Supermum status, she feels inadequate, always falling short, and there are people aplenty to scratch at this wound of hers to make it bleed. The book opens with drama, as we read with our hearts in our mouths what she is setting out to do. A decision made from the belief that someone else will be a better mother to her baby.
Let us look at Soldier in the book. She is the mother, and Sailor is her infant son at various stages of babyhood. The narrative isn’t linear. It’s as fractured as memories of motherhood are. In the book, Soldier is addressing her son, talking to him about life, his moods, her husband’s moods, and her own exhaustion. The narrative unfolds from a second-person point of view, where ‘you’ is the baby (Sailor) and Soldier, an Irish mother. Indian readers may brush aside many of her motherhood struggles as First-World problems. She has more than enough materially; her husband supports her and their baby so she could take the time to parent but she has given up on her career. Despite being unhappy and trapped at home with only a baby for company, she does have the luxury that many middle-class Indian women don’t have and if they can afford a nanny, it’s only by exploiting another woman’s time and resources. This is the only way to have some level of freedom as a mother. Very few men share in childrearing or domestic work. A cleaning lady’s wages are so low she must clean at least three houses a day before she can go home to clean her own home, fill water (because homes in poorer neighbourhoods don’t have running water), cook or urge her husband to boil the rice, then set out with her children to tuition class because she doesn’t have the learning to help them with their homework. Soldier is better off. But is she? Is it fair to compare her marginally improved physical circumstances with those of her Indian sisters? Her life is now all about caregiving in isolation.
Her nameless husband is a true patriarch, the ultimate bogeyman of every feminist’s nightmares. He is more than content with his life (if not his wife’s cooking abilities, which he routinely criticises) his car, his work, and his contributions to parenting, which consist of instructing her to put the baby down and leave him to scream.
“He’s a baby. Babies scream.”
Having added his wise words to the mess of the morning, his departure for work is described by Kilroy in a paragraph that made me scream with laughter, even as a dull ache nestled in my belly.
“He put on his new navy wool coat. The three of us in the hall mirror. You, me and Hugo Boss…Your father kissed us both before closing the door, a guillotine severing me from my world.” How much she longs for her old life while fiercely loving her baby.
“‘I luz you,’ you said, kissing my face, and then we were doing our thing again, exchanging electrons, the ion stream; whatever it was that felt so good, oh, oh. All I had lost and all I had gained.”
The drudgery of women’s work is stiflingly illustrated: “I cried over the onions and chopped the carrots... This woman peeled however many tonnes of potatoes, let's hear it for Mrs Whatever! And her husband? Well, he just ate them.” The truth in the humour is so biting that it makes the reader laugh, only to find a tear rolling down her cheek.
I don’t know whether this book will have the same effect on a man, but for women who have been through child-rearing or who anticipate this fate if they do believe the lies their mothers tell them, it feels like a prison door clanging shut.
Soldier is rightly resentful of a husband who comes home to dinner to watch Blade Runner (again), and instructs her how to be a mother because his working life did not implode with the arrival of a baby; it has in fact improved because now he doesn’t have to share the chores with a working woman. She does everything because she is at home, not ‘working’. But she is working. Harder than she’s ever worked in her life.
But can he see that?
The chapters in Soldier Sailor trace specific instances of Soldier’s (is she called Soldier because she just has to Soldier on?) struggle with Sailor, interspersed with moments of sheer love for him, dotted with very short interludes of fragile family time that fall apart with alarming predictability. Which of us hasn’t lost a child in Ikea or some other equally faceless and warehouse-like store? You may not admit to it, but you’ve definitely turned around at the park, the market, and the mall and panicked because you can’t see your child.
The presence of Soldier’s friend at the park offers some relief while keeping the reader on tenterhooks about the possibility of disaster. Or will it be the plot twist that saves her? Soldier draws comfort from this friend and then clarifies that even though he’s the perfect easy-going father, wiping knees and noses, staying out of children’s scraps, and telling them to “Deal with it yourself, I’m not your solicitor.’ Even though he never makes her feel inadequate, she doesn’t want her friend to be her husband, she wants her husband to be her friend.
Women, mothers-to-be, or those who are mothers will feel every word of this story. I hope men do too. They may not. It’s so easy to dismiss Soldier’s anguish as postnatal depression. Mundane grumbling. Unnecessary resentment. And so avoid engaging with the gritty reality of wriggling toddlers in poop-filled nappies. There’s always Blade Runner to delve into when the baby screams.
About the Reviewer:
Kalpana Misra is a writer with an irreverent sense of humour who writes stories, poems and essays. A novel is also desperately seeking attention. She is ably assisted by two cats in her study of human nature, the results of which she puts to good use in her
writing, most of which she does in the mountains.