Hello!
It’s been a while since I checked in here, with good reason - an increasingly mobile baby. But I thought I’d drop in with a little milestone post, before I’m able to sort all the other drafts out into somewhat coherent structures.
Little S turns one! Which also marked one year of motherhood for me.
I had in mind a big(ish) sort of birthday party where we’d invite friends and family, seeing as many haven’t had the chance to meet her yet, but felt quite overwhelmed by the idea and it was scraped down the line. We ended up taking a trip to my hometown and celebrating only with our immediate family.
I busied myself with making plans the weeks prior to travelling, but the plans were a bit overambitious. Turns out planning to visit five places in a day, come home and set up for a party is tiring as it is, let alone with a baby and having to factor in nap and feeding times. Who would’ve known?
But we did what we could in the end. Prioritised what we needed and turns out that was good enough. Which is basically most situations in parenthood (and in life), I suppose.
—
What can I say about the first year of motherhood? It was overwhelming, to say the least. By far the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Motherhood demands everything from you and it demands in right now, especially in the first few months.
I have also turned myself inside out; flipped over and re-evaluated things I have known to be true and re-emerged with new branches of thinking. Among the books I’ve been reading on motherhood, Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work is one of my favourites (the first being Julietta Singh’s The Breaks).
As she says,
“Birth is not merely that which divides women from men: it also divides women from themselves, so that a woman’s understanding of what it is to exist is profoundly changed. Another person has existed in her, and after their birth they live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness. When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.
— Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work (2001)
Maybe it’s not typical, but for me, going into parenthood also meant diving deep into readings on psychological and emotional health. To me, it’s been a part that’s constantly neglected by society and so many around us, yet it’s so, so essential to our growth as a well-rounded person. You can’t obsess over physical growth while neglecting inner-emotional health and expect to live well.
“If parental love is the blueprint for all loves, it is also a re-enactment, a revision, an investigation of self-love.”
— Rachel Cusk
There has been so much that’s been eye-opening for me, from the ways we treat children to the ways we treat mothers. How most people are comfortable flaunting their power as adults over literal children and demanding obedience while providing absolutely no respect to the child as their own individual. How mothers are put on a pedestal, expected to sacrifice literally everything including time, energy, sleep, and their own basic needs; and not only not being afforded basic financial compensation, but also no recognition in the course of history. (I’ve been wanting to write about women and invisible labour, so let’s hope I’ll be able to put something together.) Like many out there, I never learned these during my childhood.
But I appreciate how resources like these are getting more and more accessible, and that there are people out there talking and sharing ideas and experiences. In part, I do understand that our parents and many out there remain unaware due to the lack of resources back then. Nevertheless, knowing better means being able to do better - and that is what I strive to do.
For now, we’re entering the era of toddlerhood here. And while I know that it will come with it’s own set of challenges, it’s also nice to see her become progressively more independent, which affords me my own pockets of time.
“Increasingly, motherhood comes to seem to me not a condition but a job, the work of certain periods, which begin and end and outside of which I am free. My daughter is more and more a part of this freedom, something new that is being added, drop by daily drop, to the sum of what I am.”
—Rachel Cusk
Mum life is busy, but I will be back.