The trouble with having a baby is that even though it’s among the most common human experiences, and should, in theory, unite people going through similar things, it is also an incredibly stressful, political, politicized, and acrimonious affair. Mothers, and birthing people in general, bear the brunt of child-care duties and their mental health and careers suffer for it. British novelist Naomi Wood clearly knows this, and her first short story collection, “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” focuses on moms and moms-to-be who are not only tired, harried, and doting — all of which we might expect — but also ambitious, angry, callous, and lustful.
In the opening story, “Lesley, in Therapy,” the title character has returned to her job at a video game company before her maternity leave is up, and spends her morning attending Group Therapy for Returning Parents alongside a colleague and former friend, Irina. Lesley isn’t particularly interested in group, her mind preoccupied with presenting her latest game design to her boss that afternoon, but the therapy is compulsory, part of an equal opportunity initiative, and clearly a nod by Wood at the larger trend of corporate mandated wellness programs. As Tina, the group therapist, urges the women (and it is, of course, all women) to share their anxieties and birth stories, Lesley squirms, torn between eye-rolling impatience and a great deal of pain she can’t face.
Later, after having utterly lost her cool in group, she sits at her desk, looking at pictures of her two children: “The photo [of her daughter] always made Lesley think, with some astonishment, that she too used to be like that, a little girl, so idly inventive and wholly intact; a small person who hadn’t yet had anything taken away from her.” It’s moments like this, quiet and still and not particularly dramatic, when characters make the psychological leaps between childhood and parenting, between parenthood and personhood, that make Wood’s stories truly shine.
The book’s second story, which won the BBC Short Story Prize in 2023, takes a completely different approach to its main characters’ struggles. Where Lesley’s return to work is spurred on by her inability to love her new baby like she wants to — and the violent thoughts she finds herself having about him — the narrator of “Comorbidities” is consumed by her kids: “Often,” she says, “I felt lovestruck by my babies. … This is how my love felt for [them]: bone deep; viral.” At the same time, though, she misses intimacy with her husband, and after a racy morning alone with him, she has to admit that she “wanted to preserve who [she] had been this morning, and not go back to being these good people of endless patience and infinite care.”
The mother in the last story, “Dino Moms,” is again different, and certainly not a woman of endless patience or infinite care. Perhaps the oddest story in the book, it takes place on an island riddled with dinosaurs which is also the setting for a reality TV show focused on veterinarian moms and their daughters. Claire, a vet tired of the endless downer of euthanizing pets, signed on with her daughter, Mol, and is convinced that “coming here has brought [them] both a lot of joy and a lot of togetherness, and that more than makes up for the dicey parts.” These include a fellow mom getting killed by the Carnotaurus, and the show’s producer pushing Claire into taking care of the orphaned daughter, Sandy, which she has no interest in doing.
Other than “Dino Moms,” the stories in the collection take place largely in England, where mothers are entitled to up to a year of maternity leave, regardless of how long they’ve worked for their employer, and where health care is nationally subsidized. As a parent living in the US, I strongly related to the emotional content of the book, but couldn’t help envying the (still inadequate but certainly better) governmental support its characters have access to — I suspect other American readers might feel the same. Yet I was tickled by Wood, who once lived in Washington, D.C., occasionally winking at her US audience, as she does in the first story, where Lesley works for a company called IX Games (Title IX being the American federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funding).
Work — whether as a contestant on TV or at a more conventional job — features heavily in the collection. Wood explores the ways that colleagues and bosses react to women choosing to have kids, as well as how women themselves anticipate this judgment. She looks, too, at the emotional labor required of women both in and out of their homes: One story is about twins who both happen to be pregnant who have to try to get their alcoholic dad out of his timeshare, while another follows a woman trying to keep herself and her family sane and safe during lockdown. Wood isn’t preachy about it, but the “This” of “This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” is, throughout the book, the structural inequalities and social expectations mothers face.
The collection is slim, but powerful. The mothers that populate its pages feel like complete human beings, messy and unruly, and as a new parent myself, witnessing their bad behavior and tragicomic situations brought both relief and pleasure, a rare and valuable feeling when one’s life is ruled by a tiny, diapered, sleep-averse being.
THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS
By Naomi Wood
Mariner, 256 pages, $28
Ilana Masad is a books and culture critic and author of the novel “All My Mother’s Lovers.”