Body + Time

Whilst having a bath yesterday:
‘Mama, why is there soil in your belly button?’
(My belly button has turned black inside since giving birth)

On getting out of the bath yesterday:
‘Mama, why do you wobble all over’
(Three months in bed whilst growing a human takes its toll)

Since the moment I decided I wanted to have a child 8 years ago until this moment, as I type with a baby across my left arm, sucking my boob whilst the other one leaks through four layers into a puddle on my red cardigan, my body has not been fully my own. I’m ok with that now, but that first time round, that leap from zero to one was seismic.

Getting pregnant the first time took two years for us and in the trying my body entered an elaborate dance with temperature charts and LH strips and shoulds and shouldn’ts and turbo intravenous infusions of vitamins and pee’ing on sticks. And I was dragged along for the ride. My body became a mystery to me, a challenge, an uncertainty. I was unsure of its next move.

Two years in and three weeks after printing out the papers to apply for adoption, I fell blessedly pregnant. It was a joy. It was also the start of sleepless nights (before the baby! how unfair!), the incredible exhaustion, the horrible nausea, the surprise that no one really seemed to have mentioned these bits to me before. They came as a shock. The rapid and complete change in my body – thighs and boobs and belly expanding, nose getting stuffed up, itching all over. The blood in my veins doubling in volume. And the small matter of another human growing inside me, squirming, feeding off me. As a friend said to me this morning – a time bomb. A shock.

When he came out of me there was the joy and the love of course. Of course. But there was also the almost literal ripping out of me that was his birth, the pain, the swelling and bruising from my knees to my bellybutton, the hot sweats, the milk and the blood. The realisation that this small creature was completely reliant on me for everything it needed and that everything that I wanted to do suddenly, absolutely, fundamentally had become secondary, tertiary, had moved somewhere very far down the list.

I struggled with that immensely that first year. I wanted to ‘have it all’, but was really too shattered to do so. I resented Brian for getting to go to work, yet I wanted to be around my baby 24 hours a day. I found the panicked showers and snatched meals super stressful. The fact that everything I did involved another human being. I was attached, tied up, being fed off, being cried for 24/7. A shock.

When he met Max for the first time a wise friend took one look at him and said ‘gosh, you’ve been here before’ and also ‘but I don’t think you were quite ready for the world this time round’. Neither Max nor I slept for more than three hours at a stretch for at least 18 months. My son was a wise wee soul struggling fiercely with his arrival into the world. It took him a few years to settle in. Meanwhile I mourned my old life and didn’t quite know how to find my feet in the new one I’d longed for for so long. I wanted to feel recognised, validated, intelligent, slim, the way I used to. And felt none of the above.

Why is it easier now with two kids, with three? Is it that I’ve just given in, given up, moved so far from the life I had I no longer yearn for it ? A little. But it is also more than that. I still want to have it all. But I’ve realised a few things along the way:

That motherhood, in and of itself, is part of having it all. That having my baby sleep on my chest for hours on end when I want to do other things is an enormous blessing as well as a curse.

That I will be have a shower for longer than 30 seconds again some day. As my midwife said to me after Max was born – ‘Always remember: This too shall pass’. I know now that things always change.

That time now moves in eddys and spurts rather than straight lines. I used to divide my day into 2 hour windows. 7-9, 9-11. These days there are Things To Be Done, Things I’d Like To Do and Imagine Ifs. They float around of a day and some come in to land.

That I can work my way through my dreams one by one rather than bulldozing through them all in one go. I will run my business. I will write a book. I will have a vegetable patch. My body will get back to a (albeit new, scarred, older) normal. But maybe not all right now. Having it all is somehow about having less, going slower and softer, doing one thing at a time*, yet somewhere holding a steely determination that I will achieve the things of which I dream.

I look out of the upstairs bathroom window often and see the young birch trees whose tops are level with my eyeline. They are made of wood. They have roots. They are fiercely strong. But they sway and bend and dip. There is give and take to them. They go where the wind takes them.

* I laugh at this as I think of me, yesterday, simultaneously removing nails from a cork board and cutting strips of sellotape for Martha whilst breast feeding Oscar, listening to Max’s reading homework, answering the phone and drinking a cup of coffee. This is what I mean by one thing !