I spent most of the first few months of my firstborn’s life sitting on the black pleather armchair of our Dublin rental. It was a good breastfeeding chair, and a cosy place to read a book while my infant snoozed on my chest, the weight of her body like the most sublime heat-pad-come-weighted-blanket. It was also where I cried and cried to my husband about my feelings of loss and violation over an emergency c-section that had seemed to come out of nowhere, that no one had prepared me for, that I didn’t know how to process. I also cried over the pain of breastfeeding, and the alarm of seeing blood from my nipples regurgitated in my baby’s spit up.
When she was a few weeks old, my body was suffering from sleeplessness and my mind was beginning to understand that there was no respite on the horizon. When I was pregnant, I had imagined that waking up with my baby through the night would be a pleasure - an opportunity to spend some bonus moments of bliss with my tiny beloved. Remembering this after weeks of having slept a maximum of three consecutive hours, I wanted to go back and punch my naïve, smug, pre-birth self. Sleeplessness, it turns out, can make you want to die.
And so, I looked down at my fat, curly haired little darling - she was mainly a placid baby, an “easy” baby - and felt regret come crashing over me. This was a mistake. I cannot do this, but I have to. There’s no turning back. I just have to make it through the next 18 years. I remember, very specifically, having that thought. I was sitting on the pleather chair in the wee hours, my husband taking his sleep shift, my baby in a deep sleep on my chest, sure to wake immediately if placed elsewhere. I was angry at myself for having always yearned so desperately for children. Why did I yearn for this? This is awful. Unbearable. Until I sleep again, I do not want to live.
I shared this memory with a friend the other day. She does not have children, but a good friend of hers just had her first baby and is ragged with exhaustion, and so I offered my recollection of despair during those early weeks and months of motherhood when lack of sleep was all-consuming. My friend laughed, and it jarred. She’s a sensitive, cautious type, who calibrates her interactions to the perceived mood of her companions. Maybe she thought I was exaggerating for effect, or that I now regard those feelings of doom as hormone-induced hysteria. (Maybe they were?) But although I have long since moved beyond those feelings, and chose to get pregnant again just a year later, I want to shield my previous self from my friend’s laughter.
A book I’m reading at the moment1 documents motherhood around the world and across history, from hopes of conception to pregnancy to feeding a child to raising them beyond babyhood. The author notices a pattern of mothers describing their lives with infants - in journals, letters, memoirs - as interrupted, broken, without order, fragmented.2 Of course, anyone who has cared for an infant knows this to be true: you can rarely complete a task, finish your coffee, crystallise your thought. Nowhere is this truer than sleep. There is something particularly punishing about never knowing how long you will be able to sleep before being woken. The exhaustion of early motherhood comes as much from being unable to anticipate a good, solid block of sleep, as it does from the sleeplessness itself.
I am now the mother of an infant for the third time in a little more than five years, and whilst the nights of broken sleep are somewhat more tolerable because I know to expect them, it is still fatiguing to live through these fragmented days. Put on the kettle. Put the teabag in the mug. Pick up the baby. Pour boiling water onto teabag with fussy baby on hip, directing him away from a burn. Change baby’s diaper. Forget about tea. Sit down with baby on knee. Read emails on phone. Baby knocks phone out of hand. Bend down to pick it up. Remember tea, now steeped too long to be enjoyable. Put baby down. Pick phone up. Start replying to email. Baby starts to cry…
When I think back to that moment of hopelessness - just 18 more years - I think I was shell-shocked by the explosion (or maybe implosion) of my cohesive, rhythmic life into fragments. I am the type of person who likes to complete one task before moving onto the next, and this is simply not a possibility with an infant. The fabric of my life seemed to turn overnight from something smooth and secure and amenable, to something ragged and patchy and uncomfortable. But all anyone else seemed to see was the appearance of a cherubic babe, fulfilling my dreams of motherhood.
I still feel very tender towards myself in that moment. Although I am a lot more positive and at ease in my motherhood now than I was then, that’s mainly due to having had time to acclimatise to the (not so) new nature of my life. The same things that left me so despondent when my daughter was a few weeks old are still true now that she’s about to turn 6 and has two younger brothers; it’s just that now the fragments don’t appear so much like something once beautiful and now shattered, but as little pieces of something rich, textured, and more beautiful than my own perception can comprehend.
(This is for the “recollect” prompt of the writing challenge I set for myself here.)
Mother is a Verb: an Unconventional History, by Sarah Knott
My 7 month old woke up from his nap as I wrote this. Ha. Getting back to it now that he’s in bed.
Wow. Thank you so much for sharing this. It was healing to read words from another mother that I myself thought when my daughter was an infant, but never spoke aloud. Entering motherhood through a long and painful labor with a colicky infant just shattered me in those first few months. Sending a hug to new mother Gina, and your current self too. ❤️
"This was a mistake. I cannot do this, but I have to. There’s no turning back. I just have to make it through the next 18 years. I remember, very specifically, having that thought."
You took the thoughts out of my head! I remember constantly thinking this in the early days. Dreaming about running away to a hotel to sleep. And remembering a time when I was young and decided to ride a very steep roller coaster with my dad. We were buckled in, climbing the steep incline to the plunge and I told him "I don't want to do this!" He said "Too late now! Can't go back!"