Rose: A tale of life lived now, postpartum forever

When you reach the end of what you should know, you will be at the beginning of what you should sense. — Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam 

It is Rose here and this is a body of thought of life after twins, and my trying to understand it. I write this with teething babies biting my thighs and the sound of an empty container being scraped across wood as it becomes a postmodern shoe for my daughter. 

This is a meditation on time, the body, the dailiness- it is after my second pregnancy. This state of post- partum is life lived now and it continues still. 

I am moving away slightly from the pixelation of post birth motherhood, where everything is a dreamscape of soup and warm palms. It was an intense period of damage for the most part and a time of piecing things back together. The chronology of my body is not linear but can be deciphered by the months that followed. Month one: the weight of newborns and what that all means, month two: silence and noise and touch and the smell of off-milk, month three: finding work and the astronomical costs of living, month four: losing weight fast, month five: the crisis of the self, month six: the infinity of hours in a day. 

Consequently I map the story of my body from engorged tissue to reduced abdominal fat, and come- back haircuts. Perhaps the body is left out of the question for many but for me, I turned what was raw and recovering back into a product. I began to model again as the babies etched their way into the world at three months and I was photographed standing sideways. A small pot still showing, a suggested girdle; and I was going through a $35 tin of formula every three days. 

Motherhood is about performance in many ways. The performance of pretending to not long for more than these babies, and of now always putting yourself last. Sometimes you still come first and that is a sensual and emotional fact. Other days you come last stirring porridge furiously and cutting toenails while they sleep. Performance showed up most for me when I started drawing again. The internet gave me continuous and intimate access to other sensitive souls doing their thing- a lot of them parents trying to create during naptime. Performing with drier skin than normal, the help of good filters, and pregnancy knickers they never threw out. I will continue to paint walls and make work and do it with a singing headache and not enough lunch. I pause now to observe my four year old outside singing as loud as she can, performing too for her invisible fans.

The tedious tale of exhaustion takes center stage. We give ourselves over to potentially falling to pieces forever. But we don’t and there is a day where we simply become more stoic and can stay awake for longer than what feels natural. No one is listening anyway and exhaustion is relative and no one will ever be as exhausted as you. Instead, we begin to actually enjoy the ephemerality and the daily crises of slammed fingers in un- baby proof drawers and simply; we transcend. 

The question really is whether we are richer after having kids. Does our work become richer, our life's work? I know for sure that it is a bond that makes you hate yourself more than ever and also love too much. No two post partum symphonies are alike. The feeling of being in neutral again- where you aren’t looking in every direction at all times- might never come back. Slowly as they grow, there might be more spaces and places of silence. I yearn for it now but when it arrives, I know I will grapple for the sweaty skin of my fevered toddler stuck to mine. 

Being a mother is the sudden fear of death. Of theirs, of my own- and all the roads in between where they don’t hold my hand and run ahead. The motherhood map is one that is deliberate, endured, expensive and unbelievably lucky. There is a lot of mess and hardened congee on chair legs but I read once somewhere- that it is nice mess. 

I am a mother to a mother- girl and a wendy bird; I watch her walk with boys lumped in her arms. I haven’t flinched at the responsibility of loving two babies equally at the same time. 

I have to go now and rescue my airpod from a runaway toddler as singularly, these have become a very dear friend to me.

~

Rose Louey is an artist and model living and working on Wurundjeri land. Head to her instagram @rosealouey or website roselouey.com for more of her stunning work.