savourites #76

little losses | soho | surprises

The baby started at nursery this week. It’s acknowledged that parents cry after the first drop-off but I did it in the kitchen the night before instead. Great heaving sobs, entirely out of nowhere, while the tap ran in the sink.

I wasn’t so much mourning his forthcoming absence from our days as the end of us being near-permanently together, the end of a time in which I have written and made and hushed and cradled and fed and picked up and cleaned and pushed. Whatever I envisaged maternity leave to be, the one I had didn’t fit the expectations: the baby fed too quickly to watch much television; I was too restless to put my work to rest. There is a stack of immaculate Jilly Cooper novels that I never opened. Now it is over, if it ever really began, and my grief for it is mixed up with my grief for a babyhood that is vanishing with every leg-stretch and clumsy wave and collision of burbled consonants. To mother, I am learning, is to learn how to let go.

M found me crying and was patient while I worked out why. We stood there: his back against the table, mine against the worktop, as he listed what I had done during maternity leave. Became a mother; recovered from birth; wrote a column; left the country; made five good friends.

I made my own in his absence: made a garden; learned the words to Imogen Heap’s ‘The Happy Song’ and Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup with Rice; drank tequila-based cocktails in Kennington Park on a Monday lunchtime; developed a wildly complicated nap-based mental arithmetic; pumped backstage at literary festivals; chose guilt over resentment; ushered a pink, mewling stranger of a newborn into a boy who, at times, I understand without thinking; let myself be held, over and over and over again.

Days later he sits on my lap as I coax him into the little blue coat his cousins wore, which now bears his name on the label. He smells like my sister’s house, warm with her washing powder, and I tell him how he’s going to have a lovely time. There’s a bottle of milk, instructions under an elastic band, on the table.

For weeks I have maintained that nursery will be a good thing. C will have fun, it is only for part of the week; I need time, proper time, to write. But I have been feeling the gentle wrench of it for as long. A friend tells me that in Chinese medicine grief is represented by the lungs and I have clung to it. For all that is shifting away, all that he is growing up, I am also getting more room to breathe. Both can - and must - exist at once.

Other good things this week: