by Zosia Swidlicka
In the beginning, I thought it was an ending of sorts. The end of lie-ins. Of uninterrupted thoughts. Of last orders. Of stillness. Life — as I’d known it — was over.
Motherhood looked nothing like I’d been led to believe. There was no white linen in sight. The glow of pregnancy was gone. I was a ghost, not fully awake nor ever truly asleep, haunting my four walls with holes for eyes and face as white as a sheet.
My body had been torn open. Everywhere leaked, hair fell in clumps, tears ran dry. He was insatiable, but feeding him made me crack and bleed. My breasts were smeared red-and-white, and everything looked black-and-white. It was like every vein in my body was bursting with feeling. Unprecedented joy, unprecedented pain. Deafening screams, deafening silence. If this was just the beginning, how would I get through the rest of our lives?
At times, I wondered which one of us was the true baby. I relied on other people for permission to take a shower, to make my food, to hold me to sleep. I had no idea what I was doing, and whether I could do it at all. Sometimes, the loudest cries were mine.
When I finally was able to soothe him to sleep, I gazed at his pursed lips, his scrunched-up fists, his michelin thighs. I drooped over his cot, willing him awake so I could take him in my arms again. Bury my nose into the sweetness of his head again. Be his mother again. In those moments of stolen solitude, I cried out for him with my entire being. And yet I mourned my previous life. A life of Me, before I became We.
I tried to look for my old self at work, over dinner with friends and in my journals. But as much as I lapped up the client calls, small talk and adult stimulation, my anxiety was off the chart. At home, I cried for no reason. And at the tube station on my way to work, I had to press my back against the wall so no one could push me onto the tracks. I told myself I wasn’t tough enough to deal with the demands of work and motherhood, that I wasn’t as good at my job as I thought I was. That I didn’t deserve to work, or to be a mother. That I was out of my mind if I thought I could do both at the same time. I felt like an imposter at home and an imposter out there, totally disconnected from who I was, or wanted to be. I didn’t just lose my self-confidence. I lost myself.
The hardest thing about motherhood isn’t the practical stuff. Most children will learn how to walk, talk and maybe even say please eventually. And every mother will find a way to get that clean nappy onto their squirming toddler. No, for me, the hardest thing about motherhood is coming to terms with myself.
Motherhood is a mirror challenging you to a staring contest. It holds your gaze and doesn’t let go. It forces you to look deep into the darkest parts of your psyche; the bits you hope no one will ever find, but that have suddenly been excavated and laid out for all to inspect. Your worst character traits are reflected back at you, magnified by the vivid intimacy of family life. Motherhood is a stage on which you stand, desperately trying to remember your lines while the audience files out, leaving you blinking in the spotlight. Every show must come to an end, but motherhood never does. A mother will always be a mother, because motherhood is a sentence without a full stop.
If there is no end to motherhood, then is there a beginning? Was it the first time I clenched my teeth as he sliced through my nipples in search of sustenance? Was it the first time he looked at me and said ‘mama’? Or was it that moment on the tube platform, when I realised it will never get easier, but I can only get stronger?
It wasn’t until many months after those panicked commutes that I realised why I couldn’t find myself in that first year as a new mum. I was looking for someone who didn’t exist anymore; maybe never did. I thought being a modern mother meant cradling your baby on one arm while clinging onto as much of your previous life as you could with the other. But the previous life no longer made sense. It was like toast without butter, a bicycle without wheels, a tree without roots. The birth of my child was the birth of a new self; my whole self, in which Me and We were inextricably bound together.
Motherhood is messy, unpredictable, difficult. But beginnings are never easy. It’s far from over, but there’s comfort in the process. I don’t know where he ends and I begin, but I do know that we are in this together.
And because I’m no longer searching for the full stop, I’ll leave you with this…
