Motherhood Quote by James Fenton

Motherhood gets mythologized as pure tenderness, but Fenton snaps the halo in half and shows the dented metal underneath. Calling the mother an "ogre" is deliberately rude, a fairy-tale word that drags domestic life into the realm of curses and metamorphoses. It acknowledges what polite language tends to bleach out: the exhaustion, resentment, and sudden ugliness that can seep into caregiving, especially in the small hours when a crying child turns the self into something snarling, impatient, and unrecognizable.

The genius of "spell" is that it makes the lullaby less a sweet song than a ritual of self-repair. The mother sings not only to soothe the infant but to reauthor her own role, to talk herself back into the version of herself she wants to inhabit. Fenton’s verb "attempts" refuses sentimentality; it admits failure, repetition, the nightly re-trying of patience. The lullaby becomes a performance of goodness, a kind of improvised moral theater where voice stands in for certainty.

"Transform herself back" is the dark pivot. The mother isn’t turning the child into an angel; she’s trying to reverse a private transformation triggered by stress and power. That’s the subtext: caregiving can be both love and coercion, intimacy and control, and the mother is the one most trapped inside the role. Fenton, a poet with a reporter’s eye for unflattering truth, makes the lullaby a small, human exorcism - not of the child’s fear, but of the mother’s own.