Hannah: To have and to be everything
After Raphael
It’s been nearly eight weeks and I want to say ‘it’s been a blur’ but it’s been a blur not in the sense of time rushing past us but the blurring of our bodies as time passes through us.
The days don’t have edges, though they have more definition than they did. In his first two weeks we became different creatures. The days so soft they became mush. Do you know what happens inside a chrysalis? Disintegration before transformation. Caterpillar soup.
In the beginning I deprived myself of sleep. I dreaded night so much I tried to draw out the day. We’d go to bed at one AM, two. Reducing the space between darkness and dawn. In those lonely hours I would sit against the wall, propped up with pillows, feeding a baby I was afraid to turn away from. Too fearful to sleep. I brought my baby into bed so I could hear his breathing, feel his rise and fall. Irregular rhythms of a new life. I curled my body around his without touching, protecting the space between us. The cat jumped into the bassinet.
While I leant against the wall in the quiet dark, feeding the baby and watching his father sleep beside me, the only thing I could hold was my phone. I began to write in the notes app to spare staring at the curtain. I kept a vigil, stayed awake until I couldn’t. Everyone told me to sleep when he slept, but I couldn’t. I refused to give the day up to the dark.
*
It’s easier to write my vulnerabilities here, for public consumption. My eyes are closed out here, or yours. It’s hard to say it’s hard to someone’s face.
Don’t mistake me, this is not a cry for help. My life brims with joy, and occasionally overflows. My phone is full of nighttime notes describing the details of my son I never want to forget; my phone is full of photos. Cupid’s bows and conch shells. It’s a strange sensation, to live in the awe-inspiring everyday. To live in caterpillar soup. It is mundane and it is extraordinary. I have my baby and my baby has me. It is motherhood, and I am here.
~
Raphy is one, which means I’ve been a mum for a year, which means we’ve been a family for a year, which means it’s been a year since I had an unbroken night’s sleep. A year and nine months since my body was my own. It’s been a brutal year, and beautiful too. I thought giving birth was hard lol. Motherhood is relentless and lonely and it has utterly broken me, but I keep thinking of the pattern Chloe Coles, one of the mums I occasionally talk to on Instagram, wrote about: Resisting, surrendering, happiness.
Sometimes it feels like motherhood has taken everything from me. My body, my freedom, my identity. My ignorance of loss. But I got Raphael. I love Raphy more than I ever thought it was possible to love. The world is a strange and unsettling place these days but it’s better with him in it.
*
I posted these two photographs in an Instagram caption the day after R’s first birthday, underneath a photo of our hands holding a corner each of a Polaroid I took of the two of us, self-timer on the bathroom shelf after a post-mango shower. Our jaws are set; expressions vague. I tried to smile the way a mother would.
I left out most of the petulant list I’d started keeping a few days earlier, titled Things Motherhood Took From Me. I kept another, shorter, even brattier one: Things It Gave Me (1. my son, 2. an ever present awareness and anticipation of loss).
I love my son. He’s the best. He plays games with me now, pretending to sleep or fall flat on the floor, his ruse betrayed by a gap-toothed smile. He says cat (‘gat’) and Dad (‘gad’) and loves zucchini as much as he loves chocolate (so I baked them together into his birthday cake). The problem is I don’t love myself.
I keep joking that birth was a walk in the park compared to parenting, It’s true, because birth ends. To be a parent is to reckon relentlessly with your whole self. Every part of you. Especially the parts you consider the most rotten. Even the most placid, charming child will dredge up the worst of you and shove your face in it. It’s messy, myopic and ugly. Most importantly: it’s necessary. Sometimes gently, sometimes not, my son is forcing me to become the parent he needs. The person I need to be.
If you’re on the brink of parenthood, or have freshly found yourself here, I don’t have any advice. Only this: I wish I learned how to love myself before I became a mother.
But: I’m grateful to finally be learning how.
Since it’s the end of the year I’m counting my gratitudes. (Better than a balance sheet of losses and gains.) Something huge I’m grateful for, and only just realising: getting to see myself through my child’s eyes. To be made both soft and strong by his gaze. To be vital.
To be the first and last thing he sees everyday. To have him: my waking thought, the thought that sees me to sleep, and every other thought in between.
To be a family, three in the bed from the day he was born.
How lucky we are, to have and to be everything.
~
Hannah Debus is an artist who publishes her writing via a newsletter Dear Shrimp; Scenes of new motherhood. This article is a republication of entry 01. Soup, days so soft they become mush and 23. To have and to be everything, resisting, surrendering, happiness, thanks.
Head to her instagram @hannahdebus for more of these insanely beautiful and real reflections. You will find a link to subscribe to her newsletter there.
