Kyra Wilder on the 'utterly common kind of insanity that comes of having children.'

Kyra Wilder, author of Little Bandaged Days, discusses how the everyday experience of motherhood inspired her debut novel and recommends her favourite books about mothers.

Kyra Wilder’s debut novel Little Bandaged Days is a beautifully written, painfully claustrophobic story of the mental toll that isolation can take, something that many readers can now identify with all too well. When Erika moves to Geneva with her husband and two small children she is determined that their lives will be perfect. But, with her husband often absent through work and Erika unable to speak French, she quickly finds herself becoming cut off from the world around her, and soon her whole life revolves around caring for her children. As Erika begins to lose her grip on reality, the reader starts to wonder what exactly she will be driven to do. Here, Kyra Wilder tells us how Little Bandaged Days was born out of a desire to talk about her own experiences of motherhood, and recommends some of her favourite books about mothers.

This book built up slowly out of the sort of detritus that collects around the edges of those frantic, empty hours that fill, that always surely must fill, the days of people taking care of babies that have just been born. For instance, there were a number of years while I was having babies (three babies) and bringing them home and trying to feed them and keep them clean and happy, that I stopped eating cereal, or salads, or anything really that required sitting down at a table with a plate in front of me and taking bites. Mostly I just started eating walnuts, bags of them, out of my pockets, and this, at the time, seemed like a perfectly rational, perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Of course, most mothers of young children have some very similar story. If not walnuts exactly, there is almost always some sort of insanity simmering in the background. Because mothering, as it turns out, is not at all reasonable. And Little Bandaged Days started because I wanted the chance to talk about that, to dig into it and suss it out. That quotidian, banal, domestic, utterly common kind of insanity that comes of having children.

Also, I wanted to look at the tricky kind of power mothers have.

I began to think about a story my own mother loves to tell about when I was small. In the story, I fall down and badly scrape my leg and she runs over and grabs me and picks me up and says, My god! Oh I’m so glad you fell down! Some kids fall up!

And in the story, I don’t cry. Instead, we look up at the sky together and she says, solemnly, holding me now in her arms, Who knows what happens to those other kids . . .

And the story is, of course, funny, and a joke, and she wants people to laugh when she tells it. But the story is also a story that makes a claim. A claim that she could distract me so quickly and so completely that I would not feel any pain. Not any at all.

And I was thinking of this story, while I was eating walnuts and washing babies. And now I wondered, crunching, washing, grinding on shells, to what extent is she, as a mother, responsible for the pain her children experience?

Because in the story of the bloody knee, she’s responsible for all of it, isn’t she? If a mother can tell a story that takes the pain away, isn’t she responsible any time she doesn’t?

Isn’t she culpable anytime she’s just lazy, and only puts on a Band-Aid, and doesn’t invent a story or a game so distracting, so enticing, that physical reality is changed and the child is safe, and indeed, actually has never been injured at all?

And I wanted to suss that out too, the not-really-at-all-benign power mothers have, their position, often, as first story-tellers, and what that might mean. What they might believe, mothers who believe in stories, and what kind of energy they might then bring with their too-much power and too-much responsibility, to the stories they tell.

I was thinking about these things, but I wouldn’t have been able to write about them if I hadn’t moved to Switzerland, where it is often very quiet, and where I didn’t know anyone, and where I was often alone.

And I found, writing, that I was really glad to write it. I found it freeing and I had fun with it. I’m having fun sharing it too, and I think it should be shared, because, in my experience, if you’re eating walnuts out of your coat pockets, the chances are that most of the other parents at the park are doing pretty much the same thing.

Here are some of my favourite reads about mothers and violence and rage and interior decorating: