The mysterious adventure that is baby making and baby loving

#1 in a series of light-lift, unworkshopped, and unvarnished motherhood essays.

Thanks for sticking along when I was gone, and hello and the biggest hugs to you - I’m now somewhat back, a freshly minted mum!

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I am sitting in the park. In front of my favourite tree. It radiates zen. Its branches spread wide. Wider than my range of vision. Its crown oversees a vast patch of mud. No grass ever made it under the shade of this giant tree.

The magnificent zen-tree witnessing my mothering break.

I’m discovering wormholes. Interspatial passageways that run throughout the “Galactic Commons.” The opening of the first of the Wayfarers books that promises to suck me in.

I am having my first weekend off since I birthed our baby a year ago. I don’t have big plans. A massage followed by tea at a café with a book last night. Strolling in a park and later sitting in front of my favourite tree today.

I look around. Babies crawling to their yellow and blue ball together. A mum taking photos of her toddler sitting in front of a birthday cake. Couples sitting together in huddles. A six-year old playing chai-chai with her parents, pretending to be the park’s tea seller. An eighteen member family posing in front of their Disney-princess attired eight-year old, doing her bidding, ready to walk a pageant. A kid atop a tree branch, preparing to dangle off it. A crow that won’t stop crowing. A parakeet flying by. Shabby hairy dogs trundling along going about their silly days, distracted ever so slightly by ongoing picnics beside them. A foursome coordinating a cute jig for some kind of viral reel trend.

Life is everywhere. It is full and luminous in its radiant green vivacity. The light is orange as the sun prepares to go down. The only sounds are bird song, laughter, low chit-chat and squawking babies. A cool nippy breeze comes my way, as a frisbee family erupts in cheer at their latest round of the game.

I feel like I’m breathing in air for the first time in years.

The business of giving life is strange, I reflect – as I take in this scenery in my first real break from mothering. The real problem though might be that there is little room to process that strangeness. There are no frameworks. There are no models. There are no manuals. And there is most certainly no village.

Days become nights and nights become days. A wriggling and tiny infant comes out of a crevice in me, sleeps noisily, cries like a little kitten when hungry, wails like an angry cat when gassy, finds her feet (and her neck) and suddenly invades my every thought and feeling like a bull in my all-too-fragile china shop.

I note that my bodymind complex is colonized by the force of nature that has been the arrival of our daughter.

The crawling babies make me wonder what would elicit such swift and speedy quadruped mobility from mine. The birthday cake reminds me mine is a whole year old on this planet already. The little pretend-chai-seller makes me wonder what mine will sound like when she is six years old. The family pageant makes me realise how little it would take for all members of my baby’s gene pool to be similarly dancing on her fingertips. The crow and the parakeet – I realise – would have brought out a delighted “buubb” and the shabby dog would have been driven out of the park with her excessively enthusiastic squeals of “bow bow bow bow”. The little kid hanging off the tree branch makes me picture the day we bring our little monkey to this tree to show her the ropes of tree-climbing. The dancing foursome remind me of her silly grooving and shaking every time we play Old Mac Donald.

Some inordinately large portion of my sensory apparatus is always scoping her surroundings. I spot a mosquito and realise I forgot to spray the repellant on her; that gentleman walking past her has an unholy cough; she is underdressed for this 15-degree weather; she is on the precipice of doing an acrobatic back-flip off her grandad’s arms. Almost the entirety of my processing systems are wondering if she is okay simultaneously across at least three and a half dimensions; will she will eat an avocado now, or an egg, considering the dosa failed at breakfast but the blueberries worked as a snack; if she will sleep now without me nursing her or if I have to find a spot to nurse her to lull her to sleep; if her dysregulated yowling is a function of her teething pain, her hunger, her having skipped a nap, or if she actually just needs a hug and cuddles. And my heart and viscera can’t seem to stop calling up images and stopmotion clips of the things she does when I am with her, even when I am in a park before my zen-tree, trying to catch a break: spin fully to face me and reach for my chin with her tiny little palms as if to be sure I am really actually there; look up momentarily from her activity cube to note that I am reading and declare “bukkk” with a slight tonal upswing; or cling to my shoulders and hips with all fours as her dad offers to take her from me so that I might catch a hot coffee or shower.

I try to breathe in the scenery but instead hear her gurgling and giggling from earlier this week, when I was tickling her sides for a photo with a cousin. I try to put my phone away and be in the now, only to be waylaid by the notifications of her birthday photoshoot.

I no longer know what it means to be my self anymore.

I have never been more content. I’ve also never been more restless. I’ve never been more confident. I’ve also never second-guessed myself this much. I’ve never been this anchored in myself. But I’ve also never felt more unmoored. And I’m gobsmacked at the richness of the contradictions that make up this experience.

I am exhausted. But I barely switch off from mothering even now, as I sit by my self in this park, because my being, the mind and the body, hook line and sinker are quite literally working for two. I am sleepless. But I can hardly descend into the heavy foggy sleep befitting of this exhaustion because I am wired now to wake up to the slightest sound of her movement or discomfort. I miss the outdoors, but I am barely even here - as I sit before this magnificent tree - because I find myself writing my first essay as a mum, and what is it about? The wild roller coaster ride that is mothering, of course.

Yet, this mothering loss-of-self is alchemy. I have energy even when I’m bone tired, and I have fight in me even when I feel defeated. I find that I exist beside my moods, beside my baggage, beside my setbacks, and beside my flu, aches or exhaustion — to be a parent to her. And as a happy consequence, as a person to myself. I feel worthy because the universe trusted me with the wellbeing of a whole other being and forced me to go permissionless into it. As a result of which, I just began to go into everything else permissionless as well. For the first time ever, I feel power and courage, even though our world is ordered to make mothers feel powerless and afraid.

Who knew that mothering would be the cure to every existential angst and insecurity?

I promise I don’t get a commission from the Babymaking Bureau of the World! But real talk: baby making and baby loving has been a hard thing I did not expect to feel such gratification from and gratitude for.