Some background on the poem below:
‘If they are not there, I won’t have to deal with them.’
I find that hard to write, because it was an awful thought, and to be fair I can’t believe it was mine.
I had had it before, with a new baby, in a new foreign land, months of little sleep, mastitis etc - I didn’t go to check on an unusually eery silence, thinking, ‘if something has happened, then I won’t have to deal with all of this’. I didn’t have PND. I was just very tired and very lonely. And then very guilty for even thinking that thought.
What kind of mother was I?
Then I read Anne Enright’s Making Babies and realising dreadful thoughts weren’t mine alone.
But I’ve had flashes of it again over the last 22 years – on holiday with three children under seven, when the only escape was underwater, for a greedy second. And that is this poem.
I have friends who howl in recognition when I confess to this, because they too have shared the thought, and the guilt – without realising they weren’t alone.
Now I worry about my kids driving, being harassed at work and dealing with landlords.
They are beautiful well-adjusted young adults – who love escaping with me under the waves.
Taking a Breath from Motherhood
Underwater,
they are pulses, not sounds
and
bubbles, not beings.
And for that moment,
I am everything I have ever been
and was
in the beginning.
Floating, cushioned,
submerged.
Just pulses and bubbles.
And it ends
With that gasp of breath
as I come to the surface
to check they are alive.
Screaming, splashing, squawking
And I sink under the next wave, relieved,
to mute them.
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