Seasons of Mothering
Photo Courtesy | Mary Rothery
BY MARY ROTHERY
Time has altered since I became a mother. It is not the measured constant it once was before I held my tiny squalling daughter in my arms. No longer a reliable yardstick, it bends and shifts, rolling away from me as clouds roll across the Downs. It swells and roars around me, crashing like a wave breaking upon a rocky shore. It trickles over me like rainwater, beading and falling away from me as though I am coated in wax. There are days I feel as though I am looking at my own life from a distance, it is held far away from me and I gaze at it like I am staring down the wrong end of a telescope. Held away from me I see her too. A pinpoint on the horizon, the sun creeping over the hill. She is clear as she always is. The face I knew before I ever saw it. She is always there at the centre, the sun around which I - and all my time - orbit.
I waited so long to become a mother, walking head bowed as I trudged through many a storm to get here. Her birth was the spring, the first shoots of snowdrops peeking through the layers of ice and frozen soil. Believing that I was prepared for the difficulties of having a newborn, I thought I was ready for the periods of sleep deprivation - though I had no idea just how long that would last. What I was not prepared for was the duality and fluidity of motherhood. The ups and downs. The days that tear at your soul and make you want to cry and run away, the days when you feel like you will burst with love and joy as your little one floods your senses in all the most beautiful ways. The way that all those feelings can come within seconds of each other. These are the seasons of Mothering. Some seasons are longer than you can imagine, and sometimes they are short. They are not linear in the way they fall, not in the same way as the earth orbits the sun. Sometimes just as you think the season is changing it turns on a pin and you're right back to where you were before.
When you are in the depths of a winter, the days and nights where the light barely reaches in, the sun barely creeping above the horizon, it is difficult to remember that spring will return. Dark times filled with tears and fears, with exhaustion and a longing for time to disappear, to bring an end to an endless day. The spring of her birth gave way to long winter days filled with cluster feeds and a desperation to put her down, countless minutes where I simply longed to have no one touch me. Hours of screams, of reflux and feeds that took so long I’d lost all track of time, only for them to be puked up, spilled all over us, accompanied by our sobs and guttural screams. The many nights I have lost, lying on her floor, wishing the seconds away, raging silently at her, at myself, longing for her to sleep and for yet another night of misery to be over.
As she grows the physicality of the winter seasons edges away. But it is swiftly replaced with a heavier emotional toil. Amidst the frost come words of fear, anxieties whispered in a voice too young to understand the words they speak, falling upon my ears, ears too inexperienced in this to feel like I am doing a good job. Her tears melt into the cool of my shoulder as I hold her tight, kiss her skin and long for it all to pass.
The spring creeps in at last as it always does and desire is turned upside down. There are days when I wish I could stop time, pause life as it is and halt all change. Hours when laughter and happiness roll through my home. My heart expands with the warmth of a summer as everything gets easier for a while. She sleeps, I sleep. She eats and bounds through her days filled with enthusiasm. She laughs and her laughter scatters the light like stars thrown across the sky as she twirls around the room. We talk and she fills my head with questions, intriguing and beguiling me with the expanse of her mind. Her curiosity is a thing of wonder, which drags me along as it races away down one track after another, a puppy bounding onto the next adventure. I follow in her tracks, in awe of all she is.
In every season there is loss. Time turns moments of the ordinary into moments of grief. I have lost track of all the days I have woken up to find a new child in my daughter’s bed. A face that has changed during the few precious hours I slept. I wake to find my child gone, replaced with another. As she changes I blink, never able to fully catch up with her, always looking behind me to the baby - the one, four, six year old - she left behind. When I turn back, if I am too slow, often I am face to face with yet another iteration of her. It is like time itself moves through me but I am powerless to control it. If I could, would I pause it and savour every second of the summer? Of the age where she is all giggles and wonder? Or would I abuse it, and skip past the tears, the strops, the triggers of my own trauma which she pulls unknowingly, and which leave me crying against the bathroom walls, or storming out of the room to protect her from my failures? And if I did that, what would I be losing?
She is and always will be my only child. There will be no other baby to soothe the painful fissures her growth leaves in my skin. I cannot look to another child to be a salve to my wounds. I find moments amidst the bleakest of winter nights where I see them for what they are, mere seconds which are fleeting. Building blocks of her life which add to her growth and which will eventually be built upon with the next. In those hard and rarest of days, when I can hold time within my hands, put it to my lips and savour it, I know that time is but a mere snapshot of a life, a freeze-frame captured, to which I will never return. She will never be the age she is now, and I will never go through this with another child. It is that thought that allows time to still and be held in suspense, for just an instant.
The sun will always rise and the days will again get brighter. There may always be seasons of storms, of floods, and gloomy, cold nights. But as she grows, I too grow as a mother, as her mother. I learn how to better weather the winters, how to wrap up warm and appreciate the stars which appear when the night is at its blackest. And I remind myself that spring will return, and that it is during the winter that much unseen growth happens. When everything is cold, dark and appears lost to the frost, far underneath there is new life sprouting as the snowdrops prepare to bloom once more.
MARY ROTHERY is a writer of stories about women. She writes with a focus on motherhood and infertility and loss, trauma, hope and love. She is currently working on her first novel and has recently had a short story published in the Friendship Anthology by Pure Slush Books. A mother of one and a Content Manager by day, Mary writes from her home on the Sussex Coast of England, where she lives with her daughter, her husband and her dog.