“Five-Dollar Family” follows its protagonist, Michelle, as she gives birth to her first baby and adjusts to being a new mother. Though the story depicts several tender moments between Michelle and her newborn baby, Jason, the story largely frames Michelle’s transition into motherhood as both physically and emotionally taxing. Over the course of the story, she struggles to breastfeed, suffers a painful tear in labor, worries about the financial responsibility of having a baby, navigates her complicated relationship with the baby’s father (Des), and more. Through Michelle, “Five-Dollar Family” presents a complex picture of motherhood—it’s tender, grueling, and transformative all at once.
The story often alternates between describing moments that are physically or emotionally tender and ones that are painful, suggesting that motherhood is a mix of both extremes. For instance, the story describes Michelle’s “big loose body, slack and sore” after giving birth—a physically painful mark of her newfound role as a mother—and describes how her baby looks “startling in its strangeness.” But the story then quickly transitions to Michelle sharing a quiet, sentimental moment with her newborn in the middle of the night, as she sings her baby made-up songs and listens to his breathing. This kind of back-and-forth between painful and joyful moments happens all the way until the end of the story, reflecting the idea that motherhood—and particularly new motherhood—encompasses both ends of the emotional spectrum.
“The light in the hospital is cold, and everything hums,” and Michelle hates how her noisy, plastic-lined hospital bed keeps her awake when she knows she should be sleeping, but she’s nevertheless “burning with bright energy, like someone’s flicked a light switch on.” Here, the contrast between the dark, cold, sterile hospital and Michelle’s warm, bright energy mirrors the story’s insistence that motherhood can’t be distilled down to just the uncomfortable moments or just the warm, playful, and joyful ones. Instead, these two experiences of motherhood happen one after another or unfold at the same time, as they do in this passage. And when Michelle looks at her baby, she always feels a “rush of disbelief, terror and happiness,” again underscoring the emotional complexity of motherhood.
The story also suggests that becoming a mother is a deeply transformative experience, both physically and emotionally. Michelle notes throughout the story that, after giving birth, her body no longer feels like it belongs to her—the skin around her belly is “slack,” while the skin around her stitches (the result of a tear she suffered during labor) is so swollen and inflamed that it feels foreign to Michelle when she touches it. Her body changes in other ways, too, as she experiences the let-down reflex; when Jason learns to latch to Michelle’s breast, this eventually signals Michelle’s brain to release the chemical oxytocin into her bloodstream, which consequently makes her breast milk begin to flow. Motherhood, then, is physically transformative for Michelle as it completely changes the body she once knew so well.
Becoming a mother also transforms Michelle’s behavior in various ways. For instance, Michelle now allows the nurses to “poke and prod” her (like when they teach her how to breastfeed) whenever they need to, even though she notes that this would have been wildly embarrassing for her just a matter of days ago. Michelle also finds herself becoming increasingly assertive now that she’s a mother. The story implies that Michelle is usually a passive, permissive person, but now she feels emboldened to break the midwives’ rules when it comes to how and when Michelle interacts with her own baby. Even though she’s not supposed to take Jason out of his crib at night in the hospital, Michelle does so anyway and settles him in bed with her for a while, deciding that the midwives would certainly back down if she told them to “mind their own business.” And throughout the second half of the story, Michelle hears a new sense of power and “steel” in her voice when she talks to people—suggesting that becoming a mother has turned her into a more assertive version of herself. Through Michelle, “Five-Dollar Family” shows that having a baby and transitioning into being a mother is a complicated, transformative experience.
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Motherhood Quotes in Five-Dollar Family
She’s not tired now, though. She’s burning with bright energy, like someone’s flicked a light switch on.
‘You’ve got little hands, I’ve got big hands, let’s put our hands together,’ she sings to him in a whisper. She invents heaps of songs, in the middle of the night, songs that definitely sound as good as The Wiggles. She lies curled with her tiny oblivious son, hearing his moth breaths, singing softly to him until she has to put him back in the crib before the midwife does her rounds again. They’ve tried to be strict about it, but she bets they wouldn’t push their luck if she told them to mind their own business. Her wakefulness seems tinged, now, with a private, freshly minted exhilaration.
‘Let Baby find his own way there,’ says the midwife […]. Baby. She hates the way they call him that, like he hasn’t even got a name, And the way they talk about you as if you weren’t there in the room, like the obstetrician who called the trainee midwife over after the birth, when they were weighing and measuring her baby and Michelle was lying there stunned, like a casualty thrown against a wall after a bomb blast […].
[…] Des wasn’t even next to her when she turned her head to look for him.
When they handed her Jason, though, it was like she finally stopped thinking about Des. Stopped worrying about him. She leaned over and smelled her son’s head, fresh as newly turned earth, then glanced over at her boyfriend, who was back now, bashing an empty Gatorade bottle mindlessly against his thigh and jiggling his leg in his stretched tracksuit pants as he sprawled in the chair in the corner, so freaked out that he couldn’t even meet her eye. Useless, she’d thought, feeling a startling surge of impatient, adrenaline-fuelled scorn. She was suddenly way beyond him now. She couldn’t believe she’d ever needed him for anything.
Jason might grow out of it, she thinks, but Des never will, and there’s nothing she can do about that now. The let-down reflex, she thinks fleetingly as she holds out her arms to take her son. Let-down is right. The story of her life: numb on the outside, and a burning ache inside.
‘The five-dollar family,’ says Michelle. ‘The portrait.’
He gets straight away at the tone in her voice, folding his paper with a snap. She can hear it too, the new hint of steel there.
[…] The stitches are killing her and she eases herself gingerly onto the chair, sitting them the way she’s planned it: Jason on her lap, Des with his arm around her. Dragging pain makes her face damp with perspiration; it’s like a flush of heat goes through her, a tensed fist tightening.
Some women describe the let-down reflex as a tightening or tingling sensation, the brochure had said. It’s not, though—not for her. It’s like a shiver rippling out of your control; the way tears will start when something makes you forget, for a minute, what you’re supposed to be holding them back for.
