As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which

Host: The morning was grey, the kind of grey that seeps into the walls and bones, quietly demanding stillness. Rain tapped against the window, not with anger but with persistence — a steady reminder that the world outside moved on, indifferent.

Inside the small apartment, the light from the overcast sky fell over a kitchen table cluttered with half-drunk coffee cups, baby bottles, and a laptop with emails left unread. A laundry basket overflowed in the corner, and somewhere beyond the door, a child was crying softly, like an echo from another world.

Jeeny sat, her hair unbrushed, a loose sweater hanging off one shoulder. Her eyes were tired — not from sleep but from constant being. Across from her, Jack — in a rumpled shirt, tie loosened, hands around a mug he hadn’t sipped — watched her with that peculiar mix of confusion and concern men often feel in the presence of quiet despair.

Jeeny: “Rachel Cusk wrote — ‘As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.’”

Jack: (softly) “That’s… bleak.”

Host: His voice was gentle, but it carried the kind of hesitation that comes from not knowing whether to speak or listen.

Jeeny: “It’s not bleak. It’s honest. You think motherhood is all lullabies and warm light, don’t you? But it’s more like walking into a forest with no map — and no way back.”

Jack: “I don’t think that’s true for everyone. My mother — she loved it. Said it gave her purpose.”

Jeeny: “Of course she did. She had to. The world demands that she does. There’s no language for a woman who says, ‘I love my child, but I hate what I’ve become.’”

Host: The child’s cry behind the door faded, then ceased. The silence that followed was almost too heavy. Jeeny’s hand traced the rim of her cup, circling, circling, as if searching for some lost center.

Jack: “You sound like it’s a prison.”

Jeeny: “Sometimes it is. A beautiful, necessary prison. You give life, and then your own vanishes in the process. You become a caretaker, a vessel, a schedule. You stop existing in the eyes of the world — you only function.”

Jack: “That’s too harsh. Isn’t that what sacrifice is? Doing something bigger than yourself?”

Jeeny: “Sacrifice is noble when it’s chosen. Motherhood isn’t always a choice — sometimes it’s an inheritance. And no one tells you that being needed constantly can make you invisible.”

Host: Her voice quivered, not from weakness, but from truth too long contained. Jack leaned back, his jaw tightening. The steam from his coffee rose between them, a fragile wall of warmth in the cold honesty of her words.

Jack: “You think fathers have it easier?”

Jeeny: “They have distance. That’s their privilege. They can step out of the forest. The world still recognizes them. They get to miss their children — and be admired for it.”

Jack: (sighing) “You make it sound like we’re enemies.”

Jeeny: “No. Just different species on the same terrain. You build, we bleed.”

Host: The rain picked up, drumming harder now, as though the sky itself was echoing the tension in the room.

Jack: “So what do you want, Jeeny? Applause for the pain? A medal for surviving the wilderness?”

Jeeny: (quietly) “No. I just want acknowledgment that it is one.”

Jack: “But isn’t that what all of this — the writing, the movements, the stories — are for? You’re not alone anymore.”

Jeeny: “And yet every woman still walks her own wilderness. You can’t outsource isolation, Jack. You can only describe it.”

Host: She stood, crossed to the window, and looked out. The city stretched beneath her — indifferent, restless, alive. Her reflection in the glass looked like another woman entirely: pale, still, almost translucent.

Jeeny: “When I was pregnant, everyone smiled at me. Strangers gave up their seats. They called me radiant. After I gave birth, they stopped seeing me. The world moved on, and I was just… here. A caretaker in the ruins of my old self.”

Jack: “You talk like you regret it.”

Jeeny: “No. I ache for it — that’s different. I love my child more than air. But that love doesn’t cancel out the loss of who I was before it.”

Host: Jack set his mug down — a soft, deliberate sound — and walked toward her. His reflection joined hers in the glass. Two silhouettes, side by side — one steady, one trembling.

Jack: “Maybe that’s the heroism Cusk talks about — not in the act of motherhood itself, but in surviving what it takes from you.”

Jeeny: (turning) “Heroism isn’t survival, Jack. Heroism is choosing to return to the wilderness every day knowing it will never love you back.”

Jack: “Then maybe the exile is what makes it sacred.”

Host: His voice softened, reverent almost. She looked at him, eyes wet, not from tears but from the kind of emotion that sits somewhere between grief and recognition.

Jeeny: “You know what’s strange? The world still calls it the most natural thing a woman can do. But nothing about it feels natural. It’s construction, destruction, rebirth — every single day. You learn to love the wilderness because there’s no other way through it.”

Jack: “And the exile?”

Jeeny: “Becomes your country.”

Host: The rain softened, turning into a mist, coating the window in a thin, pearly film. The child’s soft voice called from the next room — not crying this time, but singing in fragments. A sound so pure it seemed to reach through the walls.

Jack: “You could go back to work, you know. The firm would take you back in a heartbeat.”

Jeeny: “And then what? Pretend I’m the same person? That I didn’t die and resurrect a dozen times in silence while the world measured time in deadlines?”

Jack: “Maybe you’d find yourself again.”

Jeeny: “No, Jack. You don’t find yourself after motherhood. You make a new one — from the ashes of the old.”

Host: She walked back to the table, picked up a crayon from beside her child’s drawing — a stick figure, a house, a heart — and traced her finger along it slowly, like someone reading scripture.

Jeeny: “This is the art no one wants to frame — the art of continuing. The art of making meaning out of fatigue.”

Jack: “Maybe that’s the most honest art there is.”

Jeeny: (nodding) “Maybe.”

Host: The light shifted, faintly gold, as the clouds began to break. For a brief moment, the room was bathed in warmth — imperfect, temporary, but real.

Jeeny smiled, small and weary, and turned toward the door.

Her child’s voice called again, and she went, as all mothers do — back into the wilderness, part martyr, part pioneer.

Jack watched her go, his reflection left alone in the window — a man standing outside a forest he could never enter, but could finally see.

And as the rain stopped, the light lingered on the table, on the drawing, on the empty mug — all silent proof that exile, too, can be a form of home.