Junk Drawer

18 October

I don’t know how many times I’ve sat down in the corner of this couch after putting Luna down for a nap.

Take a deep breath, soak up the quiet, settle in the still. Look out the window. Treetops and shingles, but mostly sky. An airplane usually. Today it’s a grey blanket, but there are hints of baby blue behind the clouds fighting to be seen.

It’s the last time I take this seat before I go back to work. After a year of maternity leave.

Nap times were little pockets to myself in the day. At first I would do laundry or tidy up or do something “productive.” Sometimes I would sleep. Then I would write.

As I rocked her to sleep, I would feel her weight and let my thoughts wander. Lines would come to me—I’m not sure how many of them actually made it to the page.

I always stay for a moment after I put her down and let the disbelief and awe wash over me again.

Her body was in my body. I think about how my mom probably looked down at me thinking the same thing, and now I’m this big looking down at my baby, and some day she’ll be this big, and maybe one day, she’ll look down at her baby.

I find it easier to write about what is happening in this moment, rather than remember how I felt before. Even if before was yesterday, or a week ago. Things change so quickly, I can’t be sure I’m really capturing what it feels like unless I’m feeling it now.

For so long work was “over there”, another category, something that would happen again eventually. And now that it’s four days away, eventually has arrived.

Maternity leave has gifted me one year that doesn’t revolve around work. And so time and space have reoriented around care. The most important thing is the wellbeing of a little person, of a family, which then feeds a community. Of course, care is work—hard work. But care for a human you made, for a new being that activates an entirely new and wild love, is motivated by something so deep and urgent, it feels different than a job.

It is your own singular experience, while people are going through it everywhere, every second of every day. It’s how all of us arrived. We were all born and raised in order to arrive at where we are now. It is the most universal experience.

Which is why I eagerly devour depictions of early motherhood, and frantically try to document it while I can. It’s all of our stories. But I had never been exposed to the detail, emotion, expansiveness of this time until I was in it. I anticipated that motherhood would be complex, but I underestimated just how flat the narrative is that we all receive. I am awestruck at the extraordinary dimensions of life to be found in the varied stories of labour, postpartum, caring for a baby and being a mother. Birth and the body that did it and the raising of a young child are as essential a piece of the human experience as coming of age, falling in love, a hero’s journey, or any other story we are told many times over. These most formative elements of our existence have just been sidelined because women have a lot more to say about them.

When I was pregnant, I asked my mom how she dealt with the pain of labour and she said you go to a different place. Labour is a different place, but it’s all a different place.

…

I return to these thoughts at the Horniman Gardens. I sit on a bench looking at the Victorian dye garden. A hodgepodge of species burst from their designated patch of soil, defiantly resisting the symmetrical design of the space. Shrubs are dry droopy, their colours dulled, as they push to live beyond the season in which they thrive. I am drawn to the disorder, fighting spirit, mess. It’s a warm, sunny autumn day. Kids in cords and wellies run around, climbing and falling over things.

I have been thinking about what this year has meant to me. As I sit here, the weight of that task suddenly swells in my stomach, lurches in my throat and tingles in the corners of my eyes.

Part of what it has meant is this, the ability to be in a moment so powerfully, it stretches out for longer than it should. Noticing the details and sensations that make the present remarkable, or maybe just bearable.

It has been time. Time with no conditions. Time that is yours to shape for you and your baby. Which is daunting, overwhelming, claustrophobic, monotonous. But also immensely freeing. We have been able to fill it with fun, connection, creativity, adventure.

The invisible, instrumental part of what has made this possible is privilege. The privilege of two salaries that can cover the shortfall from statutory maternity pay, family that can cover expensive flights to see them on the other side of the world, a support network that has handed down or gifted many of the big ticket items that make up the cost of raising a child, a long list that has made a substantial difference to our quality of life this year.

Acknowledging privilege always feels incomplete, the first step before doing something about it. It’s always useful to make the invisible seen, so I guess acknowledgement is a good in itself. But it feels like the bare minimum.

These are structural issues, and gratitude sometimes helps deflect responsibility rather than face this truth. I don’t know what the right response is, but it’s something beyond just having a good time and walking away.

I often want to dive back into the time when it was so cosy, when Luna was barely human, and we were wrapped in endless blankets becoming something new together.

But that time was also fraught. I was in the pharmacy the other day and saw a bottle of Lactulose, a generic brand of stool softener I took twice a day when I was constipated and afraid to poop after birth. The sight of the bottle summoned the smell of its sticky sweet contents and I was transported back to the tender body that wasn’t only mine anymore. I was sharing it. She was no longer inside my body, but rarely disconnected from it, either feeding from it, sleeping on it, grasping it, thoughts of her occupying it. I was in love, but I was exhausted, overwhelmed and questioning my every impulse and decision. Just emerged from the different place, I was psychically and physically not quite me.

That feels like a lifetime ago.

This year that passed so quickly was also very long.

28 October

I’m on the platform waiting for a train. It’s Monday morning of my second week back at work.

Yesterday I was sorting through baby clothes to give to a friend and a colleague who are both pregnant. I was flooded with nostalgia again, for the tiniest version of her body that tucked into mine. The onesie she wore for her first passport photos, the pyjamas she wore when we arrived in New Zealand. I kept some of my favourites and put the rest in a pile for the tiny bodies to soon come along.

I’m excited to join this cycle, passing along useful items to people about to meet their new person. A practical meeting of needs but also an unspoken “I was once where you are, I know what it’s like, now it’s your turn, and I am here for you.” I received this kindness and feel a deep desire to pass it on.

Luna didn’t cry when I dropped her off at nursery today. She usually wails as I hand her over, but today she reluctantly accepted the exchange and burrowed sadly into the shoulder of one of her favourite members of staff.

I used to journal on the train to work, now I’m writing knowing someone might read it.

21 November

I stopped writing as often because it’s time to get serious. Go back to work. Return to routine. Join the real world. I didn’t do it on purpose, but a subconscious, condescending whisper told me to stop fooling around. Which is ridiculous because I work in an industry built around playing pretend.

I miss the shapeless days. I miss the softer me, kinder on myself. Leading with curiosity, moving at a slower pace. I was determined to hold onto these qualities—not new, but strengthened. But armour I thought I had shed is creeping back against my will in response to the fast pace of a workplace and competing priorities and feeling like I can’t and don’t want to keep up. On the outside, I probably seem the same.

Luna is talking to herself in her room while she’s supposed to be napping. The undulating, nonsensical syllables are intoxicating and take me out of my head. They make perfect sense to her. I felt so grounded and open when my days were traced around her needs and whims.

I’ve been thinking about gratitude. On a cynical day, I wondered if it wasn’t enough, if it was permission for inaction. Today, I don’t think so. Gratitude, beautiful and infinite, owes no one anything. Gratitude can power action, but it should also just be. I bathe in it as I listen to my daughter surprise and delight herself in the next room.

When she gets bored of her own conversation and starts to cry, we look out the window. She stands on the windowsill, palms on the glass, nose and lips smushed against it, watching. She has always been drawn to the window, even as a tiny newborn who could only see blobs of colour and light. She tracks everything that moves and talks to me in her language—bababa, dukkadukka doodloo. I listen, repeat her words, and respond in mine—car, bird, post van, person.

The trees outside are skeletons, the grass below concealed by their brown and red leaves. The last time I really noticed the trees, they were bursting with green.

It’s been one month exactly since I started work. The deeper in, the harder I’ve found it.

I hoped I would come back redefined, carrying something from my new role into the old. My boundaries stronger, purpose clearer, leading with integrity. So far I just feel slow and unfocused.

Creating a place to share my writing was a positive step forward, the outlet I had been looking for. Back in the world of a job and a schedule, it feels frivolous and self-indulgent. Fears and doubts resurface.

I often use writing as a way to test out thoughts, discover what I think. Knowing that someone might read it makes me feel I have to commit to what’s on the page.

Writing is a way for me to play, but it’s hard to truly let yourself go when someone else might see. I want to be seen, but not exposed. I’m more self-conscious than I’d like to admit.

I need the process to be visible to ease the pressure of a perfect final product. But then will the final product be diminished or hidden or indistinguishable from all the messy bits in progress?

When I have a thought I want to express and give it space, the words flow. But I don’t publish the words because they feel incomplete, so I go back and meddle and see all the loose threads and overwrite and have to step away. And then it languishes in the drafts folder until I’m stressed by all the fragments and publish them all together to get it out of the way.

I would love to let each fragment be what it is.