The Golden Hour in Szilvia Molnar's "The Nursery"
Some thoughts on motherhood, writing, and time
Last weekend I read The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar, and it has inspired a lot of thinking about my first weeks and months as a mother. I mentioned The Nursery in a previous post, written after I saw Molnar speak on a panel at the Texas Book Festival. In her novel, a translator of Swedish books gives birth to a baby called Button, grieves the death of her mother, and descents into postpartum depression.
I expected the book to be harrowing, and it was. I expected to relive the effects of sleep deprivation, loss of liberty, and that thing where you can’t stand to be touched because you’ve lost track of the border between your skin and the baby’s. The Nursery delivered all of those memorable emotions. We are immersed in the narrator’s surreal state as she nurses, uses a breast pump, changes diapers, and does mounds of laundry, all while tending to her own leaking, wounded body and wondering whether anyone will ever admire the skill and coordination required to use the toilet, change a bloody pad, and calm a crying infant at the same time. I recognized the shock of leaving the hospital with a baby after what seems like too short a stay. I recognized the ambivalence: “I am a prisoner of my own making. After all, I made Button and I wanted her, and now I can’t get out.”
What surprised me about the novel—and the thing I enjoyed the most—was Molnar’s writing about her character’s work at a particular time of day. When the book first came out in 2023, a line that got quoted in several reviews was: “I used to be a translator and now I’m a milk bar.” The novel doesn’t stop there.
Look at how beautifully Molnar describes afternoons in the before times:
Before, I was alone and there was no one to tell me that was a problem. John wasn’t even bothered by it because he had accepted that it was part of my job. Before, I would sit in front of a desk for several hours straight each day, scratching my head. I would move words around in almost endless variations, carve out a sentence or two, and occasionally dive into deep internet rabbit holes or argue with a colleague about if there is such a thing as a “faithful” translation. Other than one or two deadlines per year, no one was expecting anything else from me.
Before, I had rituals. Before, there was the luxury of getting lost on my walks. Before, there was the wandering of the mind. Before, there wasn’t the cliche “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
Before, I could spend time staring at letters. Before, I could choose between this word or that and settle on the third option, linger in the silence. Before, I could hide at the library. Remember libraries? The one place where no one asks anything of you.
Before, I could drink a cup of coffee and only be drinking that cup of coffee. Sometimes I wouldn’t talk to anyone the entire day until John came home. The work was solitary, but it was never isolating. Was it all meaningless? I can’t bring myself to think that it was, and is the arrival of a baby any more meaningful? All I know is that the stillness wasn’t aching before. There was more peace, there was more control, there was more independence, sjalvstandighet—the self capable of standing steady on their own.
There is so much longing in those paragraphs, I can hardly stand it. The stillness wasn’t aching before.
When my firstborn child was born in 2008, I was an attorney at a law firm in San Francisco. I conceived of my days in billable hours divided into six minutes, the smallest billable increment. Then I had a baby. The organizing principle of my new life with my infant son was purely physical: milk in, milk out. I was a manager of bodily fluids. I shuffled around a one-bedroom apartment in the Mission, changing diapers and nursing pads, chasing down rags to catch the copious results of my son’s reflux. I even caught myself muttering “precious bodily fluids,” like the crazy guy in Dr. Strangelove. He didn’t seem so crazy anymore.
My husband did his fair share of changing diapers and catching spit-up, but he seemed to come and go freely, with no symptoms of phantom limb syndrome. Meanwhile, I was bound to my son by an invisible cord that caused anxiety and disorientation when extended beyond arms’ length.
I felt the full extent of my identity shift the first time I ventured out alone. The warehouse ceiling of a grocery store around the corner from our apartment seemed impossibly high, the lights unbearably bright. I could not think straight. It was like a part of my consciousness had exited my womb along with the baby, and it happened to be the part that helped me navigate my normal routine. Before my son was born, I had loved to travel and walk alone through city streets. I couldn’t imagine feeling that free and independent again. The stillness was too aching.
Molnar’s narrator stays inside her apartment for most of the book, but she captures the feelings of imprisonment and disorientation that I remember from early motherhood. She also conveys the time warp effect of breastfeeding a newborn, a mind-bending process in which you become the entire world for a creature who doesn’t know the difference between night and day.
As a new mother, the thing I missed most was afternoons. In the before time, the phone in my office stopped ringing around 4:30 p.m. and I could work without interruptions. It was my favorite time of day. The light changed outside my office window and my colleagues went home to their families while I stared at my computer screen, drafting and adjusting sentences, choosing between this word and that word like the narrator of The Nursery. I could lose myself in that focus; I often didn’t stop working until my stomach told me it was time to go home. After I became a mother, I grieved those golden hours. I’ve never encountered that grief in a novel before The Nursery.
After I became a mother, I grieved those golden hours. I’ve never encountered that grief in a novel before The Nursery.
When my son was three months old, we moved to Austin to be closer to my family. I struggled to breastfeed my son through the move. I rented a breast pump because I hoped it would help, but the noise of the machine scared the baby, so what was the good of that? It was easier to give him a bottle. I found a postnatal yoga class near our duplex in south Austin, and that was the only place where I felt glad about the bottle: all the other moms had to stop to nurse, but I could move through the whole sequence of poses without a break while my baby lay happily beside my mat.
I didn’t experience depression or anxiety on the level of the narrator in The Nursery. But it was a hard time. I was lonely, and I doubted my decision to move back to my hometown. I hadn’t really liked being a lawyer, but I didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mom either. I didn’t know who I was anymore.
There was another woman named Sarah in the postnatal yoga class. We hit it off, exchanged numbers in the parking lot, and started texting each other for walks and park dates. One day, we took our babies to a playground between our two homes to push our babies on the swings. We pushed and talked until someone got fussy and it was time to go. Sarah was walking back to her car when she suddenly turned around, like she’d forgotten something.
“Sarah,” she said to me, “do you read?”
I said yes.
Sarah invited me to join a book club of women from the company at which she’d worked as an engineer. I was nervous, but I said yes. I had studied Slavic languages and literature in graduate school. I was used to discussing Russian novels and Polish plays in academic seminars. The first book I read with Sarah’s book club was What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty. It was so much fun. We read Eat Pray Love, and no one seemed to think I was a bitch for wishing it was one third shorter. We also read Nurtureshock: New Thinking About Children by Ashley Merriman and Po Bronson, in which a study of how white parents talk to their children about race profoundly impacted my parenting. Most of the books we read did not leave such a profound impression, but I loved being in a room with other intelligent women, talking about books.
I didn’t keep up with that book club after I moved to north Austin, but I’ve always been grateful for Sarah’s invitation. It was a defining moment for me. Until she asked me “do you read?” I hadn’t realized how far my life had drifted away from reading. After that first book club, I would join another book club, and another, and I’m now an enthusiastic member of two.
For me, book clubs were a gateway to writing. After years of talking about books with other women, I started wanting to write them. I took writing classes and joined writing groups. I stopped practicing law to write.
I can draw a direct line from my life now back to my longing for those lost golden hours in the office. Like the narrator of The Nursery, I fixated on those hours when I was a new mother. And years later, after my babies got older and the hours between 4-6:00 p.m. became the trickiest act in the whole work-life-balance circus because I had to pull off the daring feat of picking up two hangry children from school and getting them settled and fed while also fighting my own post-workday demons, I used to stand in my kitchen among boiling pots, a glass of wine, and the noise of the kids’ shows blaring from the next room and stare out the window at the sky turning orange behind the oak trees in our backyard, aching to return to those tranquil afternoons when no one expected anything from me. Like the narrator of The Nursery, I soothed my mind by recounting golden afternoons before motherhood. My story dripped with nostalgia; it was not necessarily reliable as fact. But if I hadn’t thought about those hours so often and with such longing, I don’t know if I would have found my motivation to write.
Here’s why: I thought what I missed was my independence. But my kids got less dependent, and I was still unhappy. Eventually, I found a good therapist who helped me figure it out. I learned that what I really missed most of all was not only my independence, which was an illusory concept in the first place. I missed the task that, in the before time, I used to put off until after 4:00 p.m. In other words, I missed writing.
My kids are 12 and 15 now. I no longer have an office, and I rarely have the opportunity to write after 4:00 p.m. Instead, I’ve turned myself into a morning person. I wake up at 5:30 a.m. to write in my journal, and while the kids are at school I work and write at the same dinner table where we eat meals, play games, and have important conversations. There's a big window outside with a view of a brown fence and our neighbor's house. It's not interesting enough to be distracting, but I like watching the dappled sunlight on the fence and squirrels playing in the trees. There is something magic about how the light changes in the afternoon; it’s still my favorite time to write. When my family comes home, I clear the table of my laptop, dishes, pens and notebooks and move into mom mode.
I still miss working all afternoon without anyone wanting something from me. Someday I’d like to have an office again. For now, since I lack space, I’m focusing on what I can do with time. I’m grateful for that aspect of motherhood: being a mother has made me more creative, out of necessity.
I’m not going to give away the ending of The Nursery here, but I will tell you that it ends on a hopeful note, at the golden hour.
Other interesting things
Want to read a description of a woman using a breast pump? May I recommend: A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ni Ghiofra. “I unclip my bra and scoop my breast into the funnel. It’s always the right breast, because my left breast is a lazy bastard: by a month post-partum it has all but given up, so both baby and machine must be fully served by the right.”
In this interview, poet Diane Whitney discusses finding the urge to write. “I did the full-time motherhood thing very intensively. I called it the Baby Cave. And a lot of these poems were written right as I was stepping out of the baby cave and this experience of limerence happened to me—which is a word I had to learn, but it definitely applies. And the poems came out of this thrilling intoxication, an awakening of both creative and sensual energy.”
When is the last time you listened to this Kate Bush song?
S.