Book Review: The New Mother by Nora Murphy
By Doreen Sheridan
October 17, 2023
Part One of The New Mother opens with Natalie Fanning in the hospital, drained after the birth of her first child, Oliver. She can’t sleep and resents the fact that her husband Tyler is snoring on the couch in her hospital room, their child in a bassinet between them. Though she realizes that she probably isn’t ready, she decides to use the bathroom unassisted. When she inevitably falls, her husband wakes and attempts to help her. Stubbornly, she bars him from the bathroom. He needs to look after their sleeping baby, is her reasoning, the kind of reasoning that will permeate the rest of this disorienting look into the mind of a woman clearly suffering from postpartum psychosis. And that’s even before she falls victim to someone determined to use her for his own nefarious ends.
As she comes home from the hospital and learns to cope with her new child, Natalie discovers that motherhood is nothing like she expected. She loves Oliver with every fiber of her being but his constant colic only fuels her desperation to soothe him. As she grows more and more obsessed with keeping him from crying, she finds herself losing her grip on time and responsibilities. She becomes paranoid and resentful, viewing the good news of others as a personal slight against her for being unable to pull herself together and “have it all”:
And here I was. On a sabbatical, with stinging nipples at the ends of drained and sagging breasts[,] my seven years of higher education useless and inconvenient, like a persistent mosquito buzzing around my face. <i>Unfair</i> felt a callously inadequate descriptor for this place where we found ourselves, but it captured the general idea. And <i>why?</i> Why were we here? Because I could feed our child with my body, while Tyler could not? Because, as an educated person, capable of understanding the benefits of breastfeeding, that was what I was expected to do?
Having succumbed both to the cult of exclusive breastfeeding and to the worst parts of her own nature, she’s easy prey for another stay-at-home parent in the neighborhood she and Tyler moved to right before Oliver was born. Paul quit his job as a poorly paid college professor to take care of his daughter Petra, while his wife Erin’s financial consulting business was on the rise. Ten years on, he feels that Erin despises him and his lack of ambition, never mind the fact that he’s devoted his life to building a wonderful, nurturing home for both her and Petra.
Read an excerpt of The New Mother
When the Fannings move in, Paul goes out of his way to be kind to his new neighbor. It’s clear that Natalie is flailing both emotionally and physically, as she dazedly pushes Oliver in his stroller past their houses. Paul offers her sympathy, assistance and his experience as a parent:
It truly wasn’t that difficult–he couldn’t see what Natalie found so impossible about putting her baby to sleep. He suspected the issue was that she was so insecure, so anxious all the time. She feared nothing more than being a bad mother, being incompetent. Babies were so intuitive. They drank that anxiety up. They needed a calm and confident presence. He’d always been that.
But this seeming godsend of a neighbor has an ulterior motive. Will Natalie be able to escape her own storm of negative emotions to discover this, before the worst happens and she’s separated from her beloved Oliver for good?
In all honesty, I found myself rooting for Paul through large chunks of this book. Nora Murphy writes of him at home so sympathetically that it’s hard not to be on his side, his absurd insistence on Erin continuing to pay for Petra’s expensive private school notwithstanding. And I truly felt sorry for Natalie thinking that if she didn’t exclusively breastfeed Oliver then she was failing him as a parent. The pressure on new mothers to exclusively breastfeed is both very strong and very wrong. Baby formula is not rat poison, and it’s deplorable how new mothers (like myself, once upon a time) are shamed away from something purposefully designed to give babies the nutrients they need.
I do wish that the book had started a little sooner in Natalie’s life, so that we readers could get to know her pre-psychosis. Her self-confessed Type A personality – that her husband acidly but not incorrectly labels a martyr complex at one point in the book – combines with the overwhelming onslaught of hormone-induced poor decisions to make her very difficult to sympathize with. Nothing is ever her fault, not her choice not to ask her loved ones for help, nor her constant bleating over why they won’t just read her mind already. It would have been intriguing to see if she’d always been this passive-aggressive.
Even so, this is a bluntly honest look into the mind of a deeply flawed woman whose pursuit of perfection in parenting causes her to risk losing everything. If this book persuades even one new mom to be less hard on herself, to swallow her pride and ask for help when she needs it, then it will have done great good in the world.