“A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother” by Rachel Cusk (post 2): She thinks that becoming a mother has given her a temporary case of multiple personality.

“I am surprised to discover how easily I have split in two. I worry; I console. Like a divided stream, the person and the mother pay each other no heed, although moments earlier they were indistinguishable: they tumble forwards, each with its separate life, driven by the same source but seeking no longer to correspond” (1, p. 56).

“…my desire to shed my motherly persona, a persona I cannot seem to support without injury to what I have come to know as my self. I remember reading a magazine article about people whose brains housed two or more alternative personalities; how these personalities just arrived one day, with their own thoughts and memories and impulses, and took up tenancy in a person’s mind. Long arguments could occur between host and tenant; parties could be held if there enough people in there. This is, I suppose, what is more commonly known as madness. Am I, then, going mad? If so it is a madness that has its genesis in pregnancy; it is the whole reproductive act, not just its postscript in breastfeeding, that has shaken my sanity” (1, p. 106).

1. Rachel Cusk. A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. New York, Picador, 2001/2003.