mothership part one

His arms are all pudge until they reach his wrist, where it is as if an elastic band has tightened and pulled the flesh in. And then a spludge out again into a fat palm and five fingers that pad my breast like a cat as he feeds. Sometimes he holds my breast as a lover would a face, one hand caressing either side, at others he takes fistfuls of it and pulls me to where he wants me to be. After these weeks of hot summer, despite our keeping him in the shade, this arm pudge has all turned a sandy brown bar the elastic banded wrist where the inner folds are still a virgin white.

He is a snuggler, a charmer, a flirter, an-almost-8-months-now-social-butterfly. He rests his head on my breast mid feed and locks eyes with me. Blue blue eyes poured straight from the Adriatic. It is hard to grasp how close he came to not being here, looking at him now so present, such smiles, such chubby legs. That I have managed to have three children, each so vividly themselves, is a blessing beyond words.

*

We are on holidays in Croatia. We have visited the same spot every year bar one in the last 10 years. As new lovers, as bride and groom, with pregnant bellies and babies one two and three. I have travelled here from seven homes in Ireland and Germany and looked in the same mirror as single me, married me, pregnant me, mother me, us. We visit the graves of locals we have known who have passed and lay flowers there. It is a good place to take stock. Make plans. Swim and float and lie on your back and listen to the snap crackle and pop of the stones on the sea bed.

Last year I swam little – here was where I started to bleed. The beginning of that four months of holding on. It’s been quite the year.  Both of us seize up when we arrive – his neck, my back, my neck, my arm. Creaking and grunting and Thunder-Birding as we move around. For days it feels like my body is too tightly coiled to let go of itself – I might explode confetti popper-like, be un-put-back-togetherable. It takes nearly 10 days to feel like I am starting to unwind.

This has been a year of many things. Of action, drama, movement, stillness, uncertainty, fear, love, relief. And once the craziness subsided, a year of finding our feet. In Ireland. In Wexford. In our house. With our (three!) children. With each other. In ourselves. I have cried lots, we have fought loads. About curtain rails and bank balances and lost phones and spending and who we want to be. Some of the arguing makes sense – we’ve done a lot this last year and haven’t found our rhythm yet. And some of it is down to bigger things it is impossible to tie down. My railing against being a ‘stay-at-home-mum’, being 39 with no career, not earning anything, feeling like I can’t clear the way to be that other part of me and yet, and yet, and yet, not wanting to remove him from my breast, not wanting to take her hand out of mine, not wanting it to be anyone but me who is there at his school gates, at bedtime, who cooks their meals. A wanting to soak up every blessed moment I have with them battles with a frustration and a yearning to do something alone. To earn my own money, to write, work, treat people, create on my own terms. (I also wonder – would I feel as dissatisfied if society placed more worth in the job I am doing? Is it recognition I am after?)

A friend once asked her daughter ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ and she answered ‘I want to do nothing Mama, just like you.’ This haunts me and I hear in it Daisy Buchanan’s ‘beautiful little fool’. I know this is over the top, but it haunts me all the same.

*

One Sunday a weight of loneliness combines with a suffocating claustrophobia to form a perfect storm. It’s been weeks of feeling like shit. Caught up in kid-dom, unable to come up for air, pissed off at not having a moment or the energy to do anything outside of the domestic. The steam-train of emotions and worry from those four months of waiting catch up on me and it feels like those cartoons where the train crashes in to a wall and all of the carriages concertina into the back of it. Wham. There is one evening where I fall apart and cry until I can no longer stand or breathe. I want Brian to bundle me up and look after me in a way that it is impossible to do.

I think I am pushed over the edge by losing my phone. Which sounds a little pathetic perhaps but there you go. For starters the loss in itself made me feel incapable, inept, scatterbrained. And then in a Sisyphean Apple password hell I lose all calendar entries, many contacts of friends. It all leaves me feeling strangely unhinged. But this is a topic for another day – suffice to say it was the straw that broke this camel.

This perfect storm Sunday Brian drives us all to Dublin to a friend so I can to talk with someone other than him. She surprises me by being just as lonely and lost. We talk together of sea swimming and tribes. Of the lack of a village to help rear our children, of the need for friends. She has left facebook and instagram and plans to use her time to call and talk to people instead.

*

After months of falling asleep by the third sentence (my tiredness, not the text) I read Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and gasp with relief. In many ways so different to her (in my ‘heteronormativity’, my narrowness of field, the rustiness of my Deleuze, Guattari, Hay, Butler, Kristeva, Zizek) nonetheless I feel such relief at the ways in which she writes of experiences I have been having trouble putting to a name. Although I have never heard of Peter Sloterdijk, I read this paragraph in particular again and again:

“In his epic treatise Bubbles, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk puts forth something he calls the ‘rule of a negative gynaecology’. To truly understand the fetal and perinatal world, Sloterdijk writes, “one must reject the temptation to extricate oneself from the affair with outside views of the mother-child relationship, where the concern is insight into intimate connections, outside observation is already the fundamental mistake.”

Nelson continues:

“I applaud this involution, this “cave research”, this turn away from mastery and toward the immersive bubble of “blood amniotic fluid, voice, sonic bubble and breath.” I feel no urge to extricate myself from this bubble. But here’s the catch: I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write. (Nelson, Maggie, The Argonaunts, p.45)

I read this line over and over with waves of relief.

But here’s the catch: I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write.

So it is not just me.

I remember reading Anne Enright in her motherhood reflection Making Babies talking of typing one handed with her baby on her knee. Which amazed me. Logistics aside, how did she divide herself that way? Managing the don’t-choke-look-at-this-bouncybouncy caretaking of motherhood in tandem with the pause and stare and distraction-free carving out writing requires. Nelson is talking, I think, about something much deeper that this literal example, but I remember it all the same.

I read a New Yorker article about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It tells of her trying to write while pregnant and ending up watching French police shows and eating chocolate cake instead, of falling asleep instead of writing after the baby is born, of the ‘Society of Stay-at-Home-Mothers’ who are all ‘deeply good and pure and righteous’ and whom she doesn’t feel like at all.

I go back and draw a pencil line down the side of the page in The Argonauts where I read poet Alice Notley ‘rais[ing] the stakes: “he is born and I am undone-feel as if I will / never be, was never born. // Two years later I obliterate myself again / having another child … for two years, there’s no me here.”

Thank God. I take great comfort in all of this. In reading of poets and academics and novelists splashing, flailing, gulping for air in the same murky waters as me. I am still submerged in “blood, amniotic fluid, voice, sonic bubble and breath”, I am “undone”, forgetful, at sea. Yesterday, in a rare moment of stillness I think to myself I must write about how I forget. I turn my head from left to right and the thought is gone. I’ve forgotten my forgetfulness. I have to blunder around in the dark in search of the thought – catching it is like fishing with my bare hands.

Like Nelson I don’t want to extricate myself from this bubble, I am aware of its unique preciousness, but neither am I at peace with the lack of me these years entail. I am not ‘deeply good and pure and righteous’ (but, really, who is?) but I do want to let Oscar sleep in the crook of my arm his mouth finding my breast whenever he pleases. I do this gladly every night and wake with no feeling in my arm, with a body so stiff it aches and throbs until midday.

And so the question remains. How do I remain submerged in this baby’s wrist creases and sea-eyes and yet manage to hold on to the anchor of me?