The Cerebral Mum

One of the things that I’ve learned about being a mother is how incomprehensible time is. While I was pregnant, the possibilities of Cas’ whole life were running through my mind. I never thought about having a baby, I thought about having a person, and suddenly things like life insurance and a will and a college fund became things I had to consider. Now.

I was very aware of him throughout what was a wonderful pregnancy, a pregnancy during which I felt more comfortable in my skin than I ever had in my whole life, during which I felt more beautiful than I had in my whole life (except for that last week once I had stopped work, and the week after that when it didn’t look like he had much motivation to enter the world), during which I felt so connected to every breath, every heartbeat and every mood of the child growing inside me. But in spite of my awareness it was still a surprise to meet him. I was surprised by the separateness.

I don’t mean that I felt disconnected, or felt less of a bond, but I didn’t realise how immediately he would be a person, that he didn’t need to grow into one. He came into this world an individual, limited by his inability to hold his head up, or speak, or feed himself, but an individual nonetheless. He came into the world distinctly himself, no longer a part of me, and I found myself waiting eagerly for him to grasp that first toy, to see that first smile, to hear that first babble, I found myself waiting for his individuality to be translated into the movements and the language I could understand, wanting to learn more about him, to learn more about us. I felt privileged not see him become, but to see him be.

With motherhood time becomes both too fast and too slow. This is a cliche, I guess, but it was something I could conceptualise yet did not know. With every new skill, new expression, new sound, I wanted the next, and the next and the next, but as all these things started piling up, I realised how quickly time passes. It is odd to be so impatient when the world is spinning too quickly. It is odd to want time to stop at the same as I want all my tomorrows.

I long for my baby and my boy and my man in equal measure.

And the possessive pronoun in that sentence makes no sense to me. He is so far from being mine, this individual whom I clothe and feed and bathe and lay down to sleep. Motherhood is both temporal and eternal. We get to watch our children unfolding day by day, yet, in those transcendent moments, we can see them complete.

I am a caretaker. Even as he clings to my legs for balance, I am a caretaker. Today when, for the first time, he walked the length of the room without a hand to hold or furniture to lean on and he came to me, all those future moments when he will be walking in the opposite direction were present.

I can’t wait to see him to walk out into the world, into his own life, but I am grateful that for we humans this takes so much longer than it does for a foal to first stand on its tentative, sticky, newborn legs. I am grateful that we get to hold onto the present and the future for so long, even though I know when that day comes, I will wish it had been longer.

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Tonight I am struggling with what I want to say. It is too complex. So tonight you get to read this poem by Wallace Stevens. Forgive the tristesse. I am sad for someone. But it’s always darkest before dawn.

Another Weeping Woman

Pour the unhappiness out
from your too bitter heart,
Which grieving will not sweeten.

Poison grows in this dark.
It is in the water of tears
Its black blooms rise.

The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world

Leaves you
With him for whom no phantasy moves,
And you are pierced by a death.

^{WALLACE STEVENS}

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If Caspar swings any more he will throw up so we are sitting in the middle of the playgound and Caspar is inspecting the bark. There is another mother here who makes no eye contact with me. She looks old to be the mother of the two girls playing, one nearing 5, the other 3. Her face is worn and her hair is dull. Her voice is strident. And constant.

She watches her girls with obvious love but constantly instructs them.

“Concentrate.” she says, but not in a way that means, “Be careful“.

“Now play on the see-saw.”

“I don’t care if you don’t want to.”

The girls are not having fun. From a distance it might appear so but up close the smiles are frozen and do not light their eyes. The older girl’s “Woo-hoo…” is an imitation of enjoyment and she harps at the magpies and her little sister, an echo of her mother.

It is unpleasant.

The girls’ father arrives. He and the woman say, “Hello,” with their bodies turned slightly away from each other. They sit down at the picnic table while girls continue to play. The father has one arm across his body, his chin on his hand. His other hand is drumming on the table. There are long silences between words.

The father gets up to go and fill a water bottle at the fountain and I see the mother lift her sunglasses and rub her eyes with her head lowered. I wonder if that grim face is her only restraint for tears.

I do not know, but I put Caspar in his stroller and we head home. I do not want to see this family leave in what I think would be opposite directions. I do not want to see this mother walk away alone.

And I am grateful that I am a single mum; not a separated mum, not a divorced mum but a single single mum. I am grateful that I do not have to say goodbye to my son over and over again, that I have never had to lose something and wait for time to ease the clenching of my jaw. I am grateful that none of my choices as a mother can be taken away from me, that I do not have to find it in me to make compromises which feel like sacrifices at a time when the whole world seems to be falling apart.

I’m grateful that I do not have to miss that thing I never had.

_{(cross-posted at www.blogher.com)}

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Me, that is. Not Caspar.

I’m one of those annoying mothers whose child sleeps through, eats anything I give him, cries only to let me know his nap is over, and fills his nappy at the same time each morning.

That’s not to say there haven’t been a few hiccups along the way. The week after his first two vaccinations were awful. The week after surgery was horrible. And he has a tendency to shit twice on any day that I’m not the one who changes that first nappy. He must know it’s my job.

I have slowly worked his bedtime back from 11pm to 7pm. My alarm goes off at 7am and I wake to the sound of ABC Classic FM (Caspar’s choice), not to a baby crying. Mostly I’m lazy and I take Cas back to bed with me so I can steal another dozy half hour or so while he annoys his toy giraffe and the curtains.

I’d like to give myself some credit for his 12 hour sleeps but I’m pretty sure I don’t deserve it: Routine and I are incompatible. I just happened to get the beginner’s model baby. Take tonight for example.

He had his dinner and I stripped him off to let him play in the nude. (It’s nice to play in the nude. I miss it.) I had intended to give him a bath but decided I couldn’t be bothered so we just hung out. Like I said, I’m lazy, and, boy, is Big Sis’ bathroom draughty!

At 6:44pm Caspar went to his bookshelf and pulled out all his books. This is not uncommon but he usually turns each one around trying to get to the pages before giving up and trying again with another. Tonight he was actually looking for something. And there it was, being handed to me: Time For Bed by Mem Fox.

(This is nearly always the last book we read together before I tuck him in for the night. The other likely suspects are Penny Dale’s Ten In The Bed and Mike Brownlow’s Little Robots.)

It was at this juncture that I looked at the clock and saw 6:44pm. Why else would I have any idea of the time? He’d factored in 16 minutes to have a snuggle, drink his bottle and hear his bedtime stories before lights out. He’s got it down. Me on the other hand…

As a first time Mum you hear a lot about how hard it is having a baby and living off 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night. I’m not saying that being Mum isn’t exhausting because sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes it’s draining. And I know that it’s different for everyone but I wonder how many other Mum’s are like me and living off 3 or 4 hours sleep because they choose to have a full day of their own once bub has gone down. Did I really luck out and get the beginner’s model, or was I being hazed?

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It was 9:30pm and I was starting a post about our days at the park. I had pictures. I went over to the pram to grab my camera from the nappy bag hanging off the handles.

It wasn’t there.

And I’d been busy. There were so many photos I hadn’t yet had time to upload on that aptly-named memory card; photos from Mum’s visit, from Caspar’s surgery. Photos from today. Photos which marked an amazing change in Caspar as a little human being. Which I was going to write about.

I remembered putting the camera down beside the red slide when Caspar walked over to me. I remembered going to play on the see-saw, and going to have one last turn on the swings before Big Sis called to see if I would take her to the supermarket. So home we went.

Once my brain had taken that split second to process those movements, I was frozen. I had a sleeping baby in my bedroom but I had to go to the park. I’m lucky. I could. Big Sis, whose house I am living in, was only a step away, watching the football and waiting for pizza with her boyfriend in the house behind us on this dual occupancy lot. They came over to stay with Cas while I sped out onto the road and took a right. Parking half over the curb, I left the lights on and barefoot, wearing only a singlet, I ran outside into the winter, over the grass and over the bark to the red slide.

It wasn’t there.

I drove home still frozen. Big Sis and B came out to meet me and I burst into tears. Not just tears but those deep, sorrowful, heartbroken tears; the kind only a woman can cry, the kind you cry when you know your loss is irrevocable.

I walked into the house. I couldn’t speak. Big Sis, in her dressing gown, came toward me to envelop me in her Big Sis arms but she stepped away from me abruptly when she saw, plain as day, my camera sitting on top of Caspar’s bookshelf.

This is a really funny story. It should be funny. A blind panic from a mother whose brain is still not functioning at full capacity. A mind is a terrible thing to lose. That’s my punchline, right? But I’m not ready to laugh yet.

These digital remnants I get to keep are a drop in the ocean for a mother who, so many times a day, sees something new in her son, sees him grow, sees him change, sees him approach the world from different angles, sees him constantly becoming that little human being she already knew he was before she gave birth to him.

But they’re what I get to keep. They’re what I can look at now, while he’s sleeping, so I don’t go and pick him up and disturb his rest just so I can hold him. They’re what I will be able to look at when he’s grown and gone and I can no longer glance up from the dishes or my computer or the chopping board and be overcome by the transcendent perfection of this person I created and yet can take no credit for.

So thank you, Big Sis, for not laughing. Or, at least, for not laughing at me.

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I’ve been doing a lot of reading today, filling my head with brilliant ideas on what to write about. A simple and shocking post from Dad Gone Mad has blown all of that out of the water. So instead of producing an erudite, layman’s commentary on pop-psychology and neuroscience or a lighthearted story about the pain of putting my books into storage for a few months, I am sitting at my desk in state somewhere between frozen and shaking, with my jaw clenched and August & Everything After playing on repeat in iTunes.

And I need to write about Death.

Today, DGM had to tell his son that his six-year-old friend had died. For me, his post brought to the forefront how much my attitude toward that inevitable part of life has changed since becoming a parent. The capital letter I used above is indicative of the shift.

BC (Before Caspar), Death never shook me. I had no tears when Opa, a very important figure in my life, died, and at Oma’s funeral I wanted to see her body before the cremation not to say goodbye but out of intellectual curiosity. That may seem bizarre and callous to some people in spite of the fact that I love her and miss her to this day. But there is a reason this blog isn’t called The Emo Mum.

When life is a wonderful, amazing, abstract experiment, it is easy to look, like Henry Miller, upon decay as being “just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth”, whether that decay is premature or not. It is easy to know that “to deny one is to deny the other”.

But children are not abstract. And…

Death is not for children. _DGM

So now Death is something I need distance from. It is no longer earthy. It no longer human. It is an awful presence incompatible with the effortless, all-encompassing care that exists within me as a parent.

Children are written in the future tense. So I have to try, like DGM and the Counting Crows, to tell myself the things I try to tell myself to make myself forget, and while i continue to know that life and death are inextricably bound together, I can no longer feel at ease with it.

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Well, Caspar’s first birthday is only a couple of months away now and I’m all turned around about what to do. The budget is very very tight so a party seems out of the question and, quite frankly, the thought of organising it seems pretty daunting while I’m working so hard to get the house sorted out so that I can sell it.

At first glance it’s a pretty major milestone but it seems fairly obvious that a first birthday celebration is more for me, and for some photos in the album. Is Caspar even going to notice it? Chocolate cake he would definitely notice. Mum got him quite attached to the stuff while she was here. In fact, I ate some chocolate the other day (which is not like me!) and his lips started trembling and the tears started welling with the injustice of it all. My sensitive, maternal response was, of course, to start laughing my head off at him. And not give him any chocolate.

But my question is, is a first birthday party worth all the effort? Do I even have anyone to invite? It kind of appears to be a pointless exercise but not making a big deal of it goes against all my instincts. What are everyone’s thoughts? Comments here would be most welcome.

I’m currently toying with the idea of having a picnic-style get together where I don’t have to provide everyone with food and drinks. But then how to transport myself, and Caspar, and a cake, and presents to, say, the Botanic Gardens (which is more central for my friends) without us both being completely exhausted before the party even starts?

Grrrr. It makes my head spin.

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