fourth

on three months of motherhood

I wrote this last week, when I woke up with words in my head for the first time in months. A lot can change in a week, but it seems wrong to try and update this. I had an equinox baby, I mark the seasons with his changes now.

Midsummer is a week away and I can’t make sense of it. Spring has stretched and warmed up and dried out and instead of fiercely watching it - the lime tree pollen collect in the gutters, the leaves emerge - I have been elsewhere. Today marks the supposed end of what is known as the fourth trimester, the three months after birth that are as discombobulating and physically strange as pregnancy itself. I can’t believe it is really that neat, but it’s taken me that long to know how to pull the words together.

People use the clichés because they are true. It really does go quickly. I vowed never to be one of those people who urged others to “cherish every moment”: it is hard to cherish being woken up drenched by your own milk, or the pain of recovery, or the realisation that you can’t remember if your husband wore scrubs in the operating theatre, or not. In the spin-cycle of it all, of feeding and sleeping and visitors, it is difficult to find pause. But even 12 weeks in I can see why people say it. Now, now I would go back and hold him for as long as I possibly could.

When he first emerged, unseen silver glinting around his wet licks of hair, I didn’t feel that love people speak of. Care, undeniably. Towering responsibility. When he cried in the little plastic box they put him in, he was small enough for us to lay a palm and cover his whole torso. I don’t think we knew what else to do. He spent his first night curled up on the puffy remnants of the stomach that had held him for 40 weeks exactly.

The love had to grow. It’s felt like dating at times, a free-fall at others. We are still getting to know one another, as we will for the rest of our lives. I can’t understand that it was him all along, but he also couldn’t have been anyone else.

I wanted a child but I didn’t think I wanted a baby. In those first few weeks I was a little at war with my nascent - still nascent - motherhood. I never really stopped working; he has grown to the sound of my fingers tapping on a keyboard. I am learning to forgive myself this: with words I have been able to capture some of this time. With money I can buy more time with him later.

My understanding of what I was and wasn’t going to be as a mother was more deeply ingrained than I realised but nothing on the muscle memory I didn’t know I had. To latch, to feed, to comfort, to shush, to be patient, to let go. He has taught me to sit still after a lifetime of living in fear of it. Together we have gone places: the bakery, via two buses, a week after he was born so I would not be scared of it; Prospect Cottage; Broadcasting House; The Barbican; The lido, in the rain. I find it funny that I have never been more on time than since having a baby. The days stretch around so much less now.

Other surprises: you can function on less sleep than you think. He doesn’t sleep through the night, and that is fine - he will do one day. His head smells like malted wheat, his breath like strawberry yoghurt. We have the same eyes, and I can tell when they are tired. I am more proud of his thighs than anything else I’ve made. It took 10 weeks for my synapses to start firing into a familiar shape. I still wonder who that person is in the bus window reflection, pushing the pram.

Before he arrived I wrote that I felt naive. I still feel naive now, perhaps more so. Every time I feel like I have unlocked something, he changes the shape of the key. I spend all day learning things and feel even more questioning of what I thought I knew. He keeps me on his toes. I can fit all of his along the length of my thumb, for now, at least.

And so we are meant to emerge. He’s no longer a newborn. I’m no longer a new mother. I will stop writing about it so constantly soon, it will become life, we will no longer be stopped by strangers on the bus, but be subsumed into all the people of this city. He will find his own world, and I will watch on, trying to keep up.