Motherhood Quote by John C. Hawkes

Desire arrives here as a quiet inventory, the kind a child remembers not because it was announced, but because it hummed under the daily life. Hawkes gives us a mother who “wanted very much” to play tennis, then sharpens the aperture: “most of all” she wanted to sing and play the piano. The sentence moves from the socially legible to the privately urgent. Tennis reads like aspiration with a costume on it - leisure, class, the permission to take up space in public. Singing and the piano feel riskier, more intimate: not merely an activity but a claim to artistry, to being heard.

The construction matters. Hawkes doesn’t say she couldn’t; he says she wanted. That gap is the whole story. Want, in this register, is a measure of containment: a life in which longing is cataloged rather than fulfilled, and where the narrator’s attention turns domestic biography into a map of missed selves. The mother’s ambitions also split along a familiar gendered fault line. Tennis is “respectable” ambition, the kind you can pursue without challenging the household’s hierarchy; music implies devotion, practice, ego, performance - a self with volume.

As a novelist, Hawkes is interested in how a family’s emotional climate is built from these small, ungranted permissions. The line suggests a household where talent is secondary to duty, where the mother’s interior life is present but managed. What makes it sting is its restraint: no complaint, no melodrama, just a precise ranking of dreams, which is often how disappointment survives.