I can’t speak for mothers, not being one myself, but as I was passing through the first few weeks of horror that is realising what you’ve let into your house when you have your first child, I had serious concerns that I’d been duped – that there was a conspiracy of silence about the trials and tribulations of pregnancy, childbirth and beyond; that pertinent information is deliberately witheld from first time parents by those in the know; and that it was basically because, if people really knew what having kids was like, the human race would become extinct within a generation.
Perhaps I should have read Nicole Chaison’s The Passion of the Hausfrau. I couldn’t have, of course, because it hadn’t been published. And while it’s probably not going to stop our overwhelming urges to procreate and continue the species, it does cast a humorously honest view of what mothers can expect from their new lives of domesticity.
Mixing short comic strips with short essays on the nature of motherhood this isn’t a graphic novel in the traditional sense, but if you’re approaching parenthood or have already got there and feel the need to be assured that the pain isn’t yours alone, it’s worth a look.