Day 13 - Up

A month-long writing challenge exploring the theme of "Being Myself"

This is the day 13 instalment of the 21 day writing challenge I did with Megan Macedo in March, where I wrote a piece in response to a prompt (unseen by the reader) every day. Reading it now, I think this is one of my favourites. Thinking back to that hot summer of sitting crying in a deckchair in Dulwich, I feel as if the way I’m feeling right now is some kind of culmination of it. In a good way. As if I am starting to come out of something that started as grief and guilt and wasn’t processed, but perhaps now is starting to be. Not via a grand moment of catharsis, or with any one life-changing solution or action, but slowly, accumulatively. When I think of how I feel in my body at the moment, my mind goes to swimming in open bodies of water, any ones that feel wild (aka not a swimming pool). I suppose these are cathartic places for me. I feel the same and different, an iteration. Let’s see where things go from here.

“I wrote
All over the walls with my
Words, coloured the clean squares
With the wild, tender circles
Of our struggle to become
Separate. We want, we shouted,
To be two, to be ourselves.”

From Catrin, by Gillian Clark

When my son was around six months old, my partner started to take him one afternoon a week. I hadn’t yet returned to doula work, and there was no viable way I could work out to earn money from yoga teaching in that awkward afternoon spot.

My husband said: do something nice. Sit and read, or write, or go to a gallery. These generous words felt like instructions in a foreign language.

It was summertime, and I would drive ten minutes to the grounds of a nearby gallery, and sit in one of the communal deckchairs. I spent some of the time making plans in my notebook to do some kind of paid work in the small amount of time I had in the week when I wasn’t looking after children, but I spent most of the time crying, sometimes behind sunglasses and sometimes just letting hot tears roll down my cheeks.

At that time I was trying to stop breastfeeding, distracting my 18 month old from the milk he wanted, saying it would be soon and offering exciting play opportunities or outings instead. Sometimes he would cry a little, and I would cry too, quietly this time, around the other side of the worktop or in the bathroom, wondering if it was the wrong thing. I had those true words in my ears, about the years being short, and I wondered exactly what I was trying to get away from.

I wondered whether I should be attempting to sit with it, the discomfort as my son wanted milk (again), or whether listening to the flight reflex in my body was the right path. Which more difficult thing was right? I sat and I felt the push and the pull of it, unable to move within the tension.

As my body slowed down making milk my hormones were creating their own concoction of emotion, and I sat on this deckchair and I sobbed. For not “being productive” with this gift of time I wasn’t sure I deserved, for my guilt for getting it. For not being “consistent” enough to deny his demands, for denying his demands. For my impatience and my selfishness and my hunger for other things, for space. For this being my last baby, for his growth as an exigent reminder of the passing of time. For wanting to give my body to another in a less demanding way than breastfeeding, something that often felt sweetly tender but that sometimes felt like self-erasure. This did not feel enough, because it could not, in terms of my definition of a good mother being something that can and should erase themselves and their needs.

I cried for how beautiful and sweet my son was. I cried for endings, for the end of the time my body made food for my son, for his quieting as he breastfed, for the gulping sound and the sweet red cheeks and the fluttering eyelids before sleep, for what this ending represented. For the pain of the depth of love mothers have for their children and everything that must conjoin with that: all the grief and all the fear.

However old our children get, however “independent”, I am sure the depth of these emotions remain. They are enduring and ancient, I don’t think they go anywhere, not until our bodies are no longer our vehicles for our expression, and our longing and joy and sadness move out into the earth and transmute to different kinds of power: volcanic, tidal, a bud bursting into bloom.

Recently I learned about an example of a “righting reflex” in the body, where the eyes tend to automatically move towards an imagined horizon. It’s common to see a spine that curves slightly forward in mothers of young children, who spend their days feeding and changing, picking up and leaning over. Combined with the righting reflex as the neck lifts and the eyes look up, neck and shoulder tension sometimes occurs. I can’t help but feel tender towards these urges in the body, to move into a certain place even though some pain is a by-product. The will, the leaning towards, in spite of everything.

As I move away from the years of breastfeeding and holding and bending over to change nappies and do up shoes, it feels completely new to allow my collarbones to lift a little. A thoracic, kyphotic curve in my spine is possible but it is not my destiny. There is a sense of emergence here, as there must be even from difficult endings. We are able to look up, and survey the landscape in a new way.