Taking a Breath from Motherhood

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.