“I needed to start writing again to escape from you, a little, so little, guiltily, to see if my life before was irretrievably lost, sucked away by your hungry, smiling mouth. Howling. But I couldn’t find anything else to write than this public diary, this dramatization of my new mother’s skin, now healed; the scarred skin of a converted body, a body that has literally changed its function, a body that needs a new narrative to become habitable. »
One cannot be a mother and not recognize scraps of oneself, hidden here and there between the pages of Scars. Conversion books, an intimate essay by Sara Danièle Michaud, where she tries to bring about, through writing, the transformation, the conversion that has upset her body and her mind, since she took her daughter in her arms for the first time .
“I’m not writing my conversion into a mother, it would be too good to correspond to this point to its staging, no, I’m a mother because I write. It is by pursuing the scar, by tracing it in a conversion notebook that the mother exists,” she writes.
By basing her experience on the reflections of Maggie Nelson, Sheila Heti, Rachel Zucker and Joan Didion, among others, she evokes the panoply of contradictory emotions that populate becoming a mother: guilt, loss of self, lack, fear of filial inheritance, of making mistakes, of loving badly, of loving too much, the quest for space and its opposite, fusion. An experience that transforms the body and the mind, that erects thoughts as foreign, that evokes savagery and transcendence, that gives birth to a union so strong that it is almost mysticism, the absolute.
The possibilities of the sacred
Sara Danièle Michaud has been interested in the sacred and in conversion since her doctoral studies. “I was fascinated by these notions which seemed inaccessible to me. Maintaining a personal relationship with the sacred is something that we have shunned a great deal, and of which we only find scattered fragments in the contemporary world. In the end, it was the most banal experience there is—motherhood—that allowed me to reach this state that I had never imagined. »
To problematize becoming a mother, the essayist has no choice but to think from her posture as a daughter; heiress of a filiation which makes true the belief according to which being the mother of a girl condemns to suffocation or flight. Through the myth of Persephone and Demeter—in which the daughter flees the mother to better land headlong into her side—she reflects on the vital comings and goings, the fatal entanglement from which she wishes to protect her baby. “If I succeed, you will betray me. If you love me, you will betray me”, she underlines.
“The more you try to get rid of your filiation, the more you fall back into it, explains the writer. This fight between mother and daughter is something that lives in me, that I haven’t finished thinking about. It’s part of my narrative, I can’t ignore it, but there’s something unfinished quest in there. »
The essayist also questions the role of writing in the creation of a space, a time to escape motherhood. “All of this is always accompanied by guilt. Leaving my daughter at my mother’s house, running away to a café to write, escaping time… Being a mother involves a form of failing, flaw, negligence. We are constantly in search of absolution. »
This absolution, she finds it in the words of Anne Dufourmantelle, who writes this, in the last pages of The Woman and the Sacrifice “A child asks for nothing but love and attention, especially not sacrifice, for which he will have to pay double the price all his life, that of his mother and his own. A creative mother is not entirely his or entirely there, a part of her is elsewhere […], and this absence, the child also receives it as a gift, since he then participates, in his own way, in this “other” space where he feels his mother summoned and towards which he too wishes to turn. »
“Maybe I’m not so guilty after all,” the writer mused out loud. Maybe if my flaws, my spiritual and literary hunger keep me away from my daughter, it’s to better send her a call, a desire for something else. »
By sharing this extremely intimate notebook with the world, Sara Danièle Michaud achieves something that is almost sacred; she makes possible the universal becoming of singularities, her own, but also that of writers who preceded her and who, like her, sought to enter into conversation, into a relationship, with other mothers. “To live and understand this conversion, I certainly needed to write, but I also needed to read. Sheila Heti, Fanny Britt, Rachel Zucker, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette… They all spoke to me in one way or another, they put their finger on something, in my personal experience, which was common. That’s all I want for my book. »