1 Year of Motherhood: a reflection
Trigger warning/ disclaimer: this post is written from my point of view of labour, birth and my first year of motherhood. It describes a not so positive birth. I am not an expert. This is simply an honest account of my personal experience.
“She was a mother. This identity shuddered through her, welcome like water to a dry riverbed. It felt so elemental and true that Julia must have unknowingly been a mother all along, simply waiting to be joined by her child.”
“She realised, amazed: I love myself. That had somehow never been true before.”
The above two quotes are from a few pages in the book Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano which I read at the start of this year. They are from a few pages where one of the main characters describes how she felt after giving birth. It’s a stunning piece of writing and it resonates with my own feelings post birth. She describes this sense of pure clarity, of power. “Her newfound power was like a wonderful secret.”
After I gave birth and each day that passes since, I truly feel in awe of women! I couldn’t stop thinking about it in the days after birth, women are just truly amazing. I kept messaging my friends who were already Mums… “wow babe we are incredible” I’d type. I can and will do anything and I will protect this baby like a lioness because I can, as Julia in the novel says… “shake the world apart”!
This year as friends travel the world, wearing belly chains on beaches in Brazil, text me telling me to jump on their last minute flight to Cape Town, stumble through their doors at 4am after meeting boys from Paris in jazz clubs, spend days curled up together in libraries working from their laptops (my friends who read this will know exactly which one of those is in reference to them ;)) - I ponder at how foreign their worlds now feel to me. How drawn I am to the ordinary. A cup of tea in quiet room, a midweek bath, chopping vegetables for dinner. The ordinary, the mundane, the magic.
I marvel at their lives. Which was my life. Before Seb . Before child. Before motherhood.
So in reflection:
The birth
Let’s go back 365 days, Monday 27th February 2023 when my labour began and vagina was still intact. So now comes the disclaimer. If you are pregnant, if you are thinking of becoming pregnant in the future, if you are practicing hypno-birthing or are simply a tad bit f***king scared of birth, the next section is not going to describe a floaty, breezy, beautiful birth. Because let me tell you, I was not prepared.
28 hours of labour. Seb was posterior (facing the wrong way) and had his arm up by his ear. I was defiant, stubborn, wildly determined not to have any pain relief apart from gas and air. My contractions were not waves on a beach flowing in and out. I convulsed, clawed, groaned my way through it.
“An uncritical embrace of ‘natural childbirth’ has led birth discourse too far into the realms of myth and misinformation, and birthing women into a place silence and shame” … “the truth is that birth really hurts for most women.” Those two quotes are from the book Matrescence by Lucy Jones (now nominated for the Women’s Prize for Non Fiction long list) which I’m currently reading and in awe of. I’m just reading it and constantly thinking yes yes yes!
“The pressure of a uterus contraction is, according to midwife lore, the same as a tube door closing.” - oh my god, again yes yes yes! This to me is exactly the kind of pressure I felt. Even more if that is even possible. It was greater than me, more than me, not natural for my body to handle. No-one gets it, this woman gets it!
After 28 hours, my baby’s heart rate started to drop which meant a very very quick and urgent finale. I was yanked out of the birthing pool and quickly asked if I gave permission for an episiotomy. I did and within what felt like seconds, my boy was pulled out of me, his wide eyes looked up at me. He was on my chest. I was broken but ecstatic. I did it, we did it baby boy. We did it.
And from that moment on, it’s been we and not I.
The new born stage
We had a scary first few days of Sebby’s life, in and out of hospital as he struggled to establish feeding. The feeding, wow. I really wish someone had told me how much this becomes EVERYTHING immediately. And I wish I’d done more research on feeding than on literally anything else really.
My life became note-taking. Left boob, right boob, latched for 20 minutes on and off, used a nipple shield, didn’t use a nipple shield, 30ml formula etc etc etc.
I was so grateful to have a I had a wonderful reassuring midwife and together with her and Sam, we worked out Seb’s feeding routine and took things day by day, week by week. That’s all you can do.
The above is a note to myself that I made during that period. All you need to do for the next 6 weeks, be in bed and focus on Sebby. I do believe that is what I did but I also can see alongside these notes are notes regarding work, we were planning things within the business like the LMP Pilates mat, the summer challenge etc.
I don’t resent that at all and in a way, it was nice for my mind to have somewhere else to go sometimes however if and when there might be a next time for the newborn stage for me, I think I’ll fully fully truly go into a bubble.
My postpartum body
My body was battered. From the outside, it seemed as though I’d “bounced back”. Just hours after birth as I staggered bleeding to the bathroom, a midwife said to me “wow where has your bump gone?”. For weeks after, people commented on how I looked back to “normal” already. In reality, I’m not sure my body will ever feel the same again.
Again, I really wasn’t prepared for this. We had to go back into hospital a few times after Sebby was born and on one occasion as I walked from one zone of the hospital to another zone, I was stopped three separate times to ask if I needed a wheelchair.
I was listening to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Woman’s Hour and she describes birthing as a violence. She doesn’t think we truly speak about the brutality of it. Birth is so so physical. Overwhelmingly physical. I felt that my body was broken, bruised. My sacrum felt pulled apart and put back together. My vagina felt and looked really freaking weird and different. “Is that how it looked before” I asked myself even 11 months on.
And now 1 year on, there’s the sublime softness. My body looks pretty much the same as it did before. Genetically perhaps, that’s the way it’s been for me. As it will be different and beautiful for every woman. However what I LOVE more than anything now, is that I LOVE my softness. I love the softness of my breasts, my belly, my thighs. My postpartum body looks the same, but feels different. It feels tender and a little raw still. Soft and sublime. Strong, soft and sublime.
What I know for sure
What I know for sure, every day since giving birth and today and for always, is that my son is the best thing that has ever happened to me. There’s a piece written by Rhiannon Lucy Coslett for the Guardian called To my friend who worries about becoming a parent: here are some things to hold on to, and reading this helped me be less apologetic about absolutely loving every second of being a mum.
“We hear a lot about the obstacles we meet on the way and less about the wonders we encounter, so I wanted to say that: you will experience wonder the likes of which you can’t imagine now.”
My son brings me joy like I never knew was possible. But not only that, I appreciate EVERYTHING more. I feel connected to everything. Past, present, future. Parents and people all over the world. My brain feels like it has more cells, as does my heart. Time doesn’t exist. I said to my husband, “I feel like I want to adopt every child, every dog, every cat in all the land.”. For now though, I’ll focus on Sebby and Lenny.