In those initial weeks...

#4 in the series of light-lift, unworkshopped, and unvarnished motherhood essays.

Hear me go, watch me roar, words fly, my Substack is born. What is not to love about sitting down, pausing, listening to the insides of my head, focussing on the pebble smooth finish of the keys on my fingers, hearing myself breathe, and letting an essay rip from my system?

Academia was creative work, lawyering was creative work, my secret pseudonymous Substack is creative work as is my other secret poetry blog. Over the years, I built a routine for it, I planned it out, and built lots of diffuse, silent, wide open space around it to give it room to breathe. My life was ordered around letting the creative energy flow, rise, spill over. And when it didn’t, I had a fail-safe punitive regime of execution through deadlines, overcommitment, and fait-accompli.

This practice of expressing myself is a bit like carpentry. I cut, I chisel, I chip away, I sand, I smoothen, I keep at it, on and on. I might not like much of what I make, but I keep making anyway. And that’s what I love. I come back to it, and I do it, so I enjoy it.

And then there was having my baby.

Hear me go, watch me roar, contractions grip me, first slow and spaced out, then fast and in a rush. I push till I can no longer breathe, and a little human is born. I just went about my life per usual, and lo and behold, a single-celled zygote evolved into a whole being, complete with instincts, intuitions and ideas. Of course, my body demanded things of me. Sleep at unlikely places, flavours at unlikely times, and a slow, zen-filled retreat into a little cocoon within myself in the run up to the birth. But there was not much I could plan for, anticipate, or contrive.

In those initial weeks, I reawakened each day into a surprise discovery: that an incompetent and tiny human needs me, an incompetent even if grownass human, to ensure its survival. I could not understand it; it might as well have been an inanimate lump. I could not relate to it; it barely knew itself apart from its umbilical connection to me. I could not even hold it close to me without layers of swaddle cloths; it collapsed at its rather flaccid and floppy neck and its body whirred and whimpered at the slightest touch.

In the wake of this rapid, forceful, violent unfolding of life, I did the only thing I knew to do from my pre-baby life. Schedule, anticipate, execute, or at least try. I watched this little person closely and began a series of obsessive experiments. If baby is doing x, does it imply y? Should I tweak z and see if it’s the same? This felt like complex cognitive gymnastics because babies don’t come with manuals and you don’t get any money back guarantees for the entailing sleep loss.

In a cluster of ever-changing dependent variables made foggier by my perpetual sleeplessness emerged a trail of data. And that data became the building blocks of my mothering instincts, a subconscious operating system that was tuning into this baby’s evolving needs and altering our surrounding conditions to meet them. I began to spot a gassy cry from a sleepy cry from a hungry cry from a bored cry. In those ever-observant eyes, I began to notice a seeing person. In that shifting gaze, I began to notice the possibility of catching her attention. In the morning stretches, I noticed her searching for my voice.

Still, every single thing happened to me before I could do anything about it.

Did I build a routine around it? Definitely not. Did I draw on some magical primordial mothering energy and discover that I am mama Shakti personified? Heck no. Did I at least have silent time in the interstices of endlessly breastfeeding, massaging, burping and diapering? Also no.

There wasn’t even an illusion of control. My mind turned into fudge. My attention shattered into shards. And I regressed into a perennially vigilant, semi-awake, phantom-like beast, physically always everywhere but seldom present anywhere. As Sarah Knott says in Mother is a Verb, “caring for an infant interrupts thinking, punctures reflection, or leaves a book half read.” In those initial weeks, I couldn’t if I tried.

I was my body. Surviving on oxytocin hits piercing the veil of exhaustion engulfing me, winging it as I went along with each new day and its new demands of me.

In the wake of this rapid, forceful, violent unfolding of life, I learned that creating is not just scheduling and executing. It is also knowing when to sit the heck back and get the heck out of the way.