Recently I read an article by the author Lisa Taddeo about motherhood. Or more accurately, the Motherload. It resonated with me on many levels. Taddeo was in The Netherlands with her family to attend her book launch, and after the event, she is so giddy and filled with joy to be out, relieved of her motherly obligations, that she does what tourists are wont to do in Amsterdam: she heads to a café and buys a joint and then, feeling extra mischievous, a bag of hash brownies. She wanders along by the canals, in a blissed-out reverie, savoring the feeling of solitude. Back in her hotel room she discovered that she was absolutely starving, and with no other snacks at her disposal, she eats the entire bag of brownies. The next day she is still so high that her husband has to put her onto the plane for the next stop of her book launch in Romania. She revels in the experience though, of feeling dislocated from her usual role of anxious mother. For a little while, at least, she basks in the freedom of not being on high alert.
The first time I read this, I found myself becoming increasingly, judgey. My first reaction was one of concern and disbelief. I kept re-reading the passage about the brownies. Did she really eat ALL the brownies? On her own, and AFTER smoking a joint? I wondered how she didn’t wind up in a marijuana induced coma. And secondly, I felt it was irresponsible. She was, after all, a mother, and her daughter was in the next room, albeit with the father.
Getting high was something that I associated with being a student, hanging out with friends when we had nowhere to be and not much to do; it belonged to a bygone era. Having once experienced some grass with hallucinogenic properties, it also made me reconsider the drug’s reputation for being “harmless.” I had been terrified, and vividly remember clinging to the bannister as I clambered down the stairs in search of chocolate biscuits. Finding none, I ate some granulated sugar direct from the caddy in the kitchen, with a dessert spoon. It wasn’t one of my finest moments, and suffice to say, was one of my last flings with the substance.
Given this, who was I to judge anyone? And the question that I kept coming back to, was that I was judging Taddeo more harshly because she was a woman. Yikes. I mean, men go away on boy’s weekends and stag parties and if they didn’t drink too much beer or get high it would be considered unusual. And surely, as a mother myself I should know how essential it is to put some distance between who you once were and whom you have become, with the ever present burdens of motherhood.
A balancing. A reconfiguration. A readjustment of self. I experienced all of the above within the first couple of months of my daughter’s life and I’m not going to lie: it was a lot.
Once, when my baby was a few days old I took a shower. As I stood under the water, I wished that there was at least one part of me that didn’t hurt. Everything smarted. My nipples were cracked and bleeding; the wound on my abdomen was still raw and the vein on my right hand still throbbed from the cannula. And then, in a moment of terrible coordination, I squirted shampoo straight in my eye. I have never done this before or since, but I did it then. The pain was acute, and I started to sob. As I stood, thirty-two years of age and crying like a baby, my actual baby was kicking off in the other room. I cried even more, because already I knew that sound, the sound that said she was hungry and that soon she would be fixing her fierce little mouth to my breast. How, I wondered, could I possibly tend to this child, when I couldn’t wash myself without injury?
In the end, I didn’t do very well looking after her initially. In my determination to breast feed and my inability to do so, her weight plummeted, and I ended up with a tiny, jaundiced baby who dropped well below her birth weight at 3 weeks.
She refused to sleep in her cot and to get her to drop off, I lay with her on my chest. One midwife encouraged this practice, while another looked aghast. So every night, I would prop myself up on a v-shaped pillow and tuck her carefully in a blanket so she couldn’t roll off. This was successful in so much as the baby slept, but I lay in a state of stiff semi-consciousness in case I rolled over on her. My shoulders were blocks of concrete for months.
Fear. That’s what I remember about when my children were babies and toddlers - an unrelenting terror that something would befall them, and it would most likely be my fault. Taddeo summed it up, as she went to look in at her daughter asleep in her cot “without the attendant worries of something terrible happening.”
The absolute truth and clarity of that statement. The freedom from worrying. Imagine! How vividly I recall looking at my babies, observing their perfect little sleeping selves. But I wasn’t stroking their heads with a beatific smile, feeling joy that they had drifted off, at last. No; I was worrying that if I left the room would they stop breathing. Should I stay and watch them all night? If only there was some way I could just look at them and love them, without all the angst.
And so, Lisa, I want to say that I get it. I reserve all judgement. I know why you smoked the joint and ate the brownies. I understand that for a while, you wanted to bask in the glow of your book launch and stretch out that feeling a little while longer. To indulge in it fully, without the slightest chance that your real-life obligations would intrude. And later, you wanted to look at your child and appreciate what you had created, with an open, unburdened heart. With absolute love, comes its less than lovely side-kick, abject terror, and finding a way for these to co-exist is essential for the well-being of all.
Helen McClements is a mother, writer and teacher from Belfast. She can often be heard on BBC Radio where she shares her musings on “Thought for the Day.” In contrast to this, she writes a blog called www.Sourweeblog.com, where she unleashes her frustrations at juggling parenthood with work and the vagaries of life.
