I’m sitting here eating a rasmalai cupcake wrapped in gold casing with a teaspoon; the blue buttercream sticks to my lips and I taste the dried rose petals and cardamom. I pour condensed milk into the moist sponge and make it wetter.
I’m so hungry, so insatiably hungry, constantly. Maybe it’s because I’m breastfeeding, but I look around and other mums don’t seem this ravenous. I go to a mum and baby yogalates class and I feel my caesarean section scar strain with every crunch and twist and I feel like a ton of bricks when I try to do a downward dog now, remembering when my legs would lift off the ground like air itself. The vein pops in my head now and I haven’t quite worked out how to style my new “mum chop” so my new awkwardly cut bangs flail around my eyes and I think, how long is left?
The class ends with a chat and a cup of coffee, which is usually the time I begin to disassociate as they talk about nurseries and the tantrums and keep-in-touch days and I just savour the fact that I’m not at home; the baby finds new faces entertaining so she’s having a good time. The teacher offers biscuits and everyone sheepishly says no and I wonder, do they mean it? Do they really not want biscuits with their coffee? Don’t they need the sugar? I’m dying. Give me the biscuit.
I go to another class, a baby and mum yoga class, and at the end the teacher serves grapes and paper cups of herbal tea and biscuits. I never get to eat breakfast before the class because there’s no time for such a luxury, so I always head straight for the biscuits while everyone drinks their chamomile tea, politely taking no more than two red grapes off the vine. Last week I left my baby on the yoga mat and went over to the table of snacks, and the teacher smiled at me in acknowledgment. I’m looking for the biscuits, I smiled back and she said sorry, they’re finished. I felt so embarrassed. You don’t ask for the biscuits, that’s the unwritten rule. No one said anything, but I felt ashamed. Biscuit shamed.
I’ve written so many newsletters, all dancing around the defining factor of my life at the moment - motherhood. None of them worked out. It’s inescapable. It’s unavoidable.
A part of not wanting to surrender to talking about motherhood is a fear of being unrelatable to the people I once knew, of being disconnected from the life I once lived. I’m still the same person, I tell myself over and over, but I’ve chopped off seven inches of my hair because it was falling out from the hormonal shift in my body and I’ve gained two stone and my priorities have changed. I can’t be the same person, my birth experience alone fundamentally changed me. Sometimes, after I’ve fed the baby in the middle of the night, I do something emotionally unhealthy. I lay in bed in the dark and my mind passes over people who haven’t reached out to me in recent months. People who I used to see often who haven’t asked me how I am, if I want to meet, do I need anything? I read posts on Reddit.
am I the asshole for wanting my friends to ask about my baby?
But I’m not, because I’ve been there for them, through their heartbreaks and career drama and family traumas. Whether I had a child or not, I would be there for them if they were new mothers. That, I know.
Maybe it hasn’t crossed their minds, and why would it? You only know when it happens to you that motherhood absolutely rocks your world, throws it into the ether and there is no gravity here, you just stay afloat and try to find some control. I need the grounding of other people, I realise. I really, really do. I'm so grateful for the people I do have.
A great white shark has to keep moving, or it will die. They get their oxygen through ram ventilation, which means they swim with their mouths open and water is pushed through their gills. The faster they swim, the more water that is pushed through. If a great white shark stops swimming, it dies.
I think I’ve always been that way; which means I don’t get very much done. ADHD. I can’t sit in the stillness of it all because a cloud of melancholy always starts to creep up on me, washing over me like an acid rainstorm. I keep moving from one thing to another. I take the baby out every day. We go shopping, to lunch, we walk miles upon miles, we sit and watch trains go by, we attend every baby class possible, we keep going, we get home in time for bed. I want to stop moving but I don’t know what will happen if I do. When I do stop I eat and I eat and I eat. I eat until my stomach strains and I think I just need to finish this plate.
She grabs for my food now. I’m starting to really understand that she absorbs me like a sponge, watching me with fascination every time I brush my hair, my teeth. The way she twists her head around when she’s laying down, because she’s looking for me. She has a very intent gaze, very deliberate, very alert. The way she watches me shower from her bouncer on the bathroom floor, the way she watches me put my jewellery on. I wonder who she’ll be when she grows up, I write her emails that I hope she’ll care to read one day. Those big brown eyes gaze at me all day, inquisitive and cheeky. I owe it to us to learn to work on stillness, to stop trying to fill a void that will never be filled.
A Rumi quote comes to mind. “Do not seek for water; be thirsty.”
This resonates with me so much in other ways, but I can only imagine what it would be like during motherhood. Your doing brilliantly, I am ever so proud of you 🫶🏾
Too many relatable things in here. The ADHD, the constant need for moving but the sheer exhaustion from it, the void to fill by the constant eating. Once always being available to others when I probably shouldn’t have been. The dissociation.
It is hard but I find I do push myself to be more responsible for understanding myself since becoming a mother. Would I have had that same motivation if I didn’t have a child. I’m not sure…
We just gotta keep pushing through I guess🤷🏽♀️💕