Motherhood

What time is it, Mr Wolf?

Mental health, Motherhood

I’ve just finished Dolly Alderton’s book Everything I Know About Love, a beautifully honest, funny love song to her 20s and to her coterie of female friends. It wasn’t one of those happy, jaunty love songs though – rather a gritty raw one; she suffered, she shagged, she loved, she got dumped, she drank, she worked her butt off. She says near the end, as she approaches her 30th birthday, how it’s the ultimate cliche – but she didn’t think aging would happen to her.

I am more than a decade down the line, and yes, I didn’t think it would happen to me either. Jennifer O’Connell wrote a great piece in the Irish Times the other day; it made me laugh. She mentions the ten-year chasm between her imagined self (32) and her actual self, around my age. And I reckon many of us – not just deluded middle-aged men – spend a lot of time feeling aged 17 or whatever age cut us most on the inside, no matter what we look like on the outside; no matter what age we are. Perhaps we feel like a child whose toy has been snatched away, or a teenager sneaking a thrilling fag when we hear a heady, resonant song from our youth. Or we might feel full of the perfect, arrogant daring of our early 20s, when we were pretty sure we were going to change the world.

As old man time ticks on, women are left in a wondrous pickle because we all, inside, fucking love getting older – and mostly, outside, hate getting older. I’m expecting a knotty, vastly irritating wrestle with aging because I have always looked younger than I am. I hated it in my teens and 20s. I was never taken seriously, always asked for ID, always treated like the baby of the group – a role I played up to without realizing that it was retarding my development into womanhood. Men tended to speak to me as if I were a child, and if they fancied me it made me a little suspicious because I wasn’t womanly, only girlish. In my 30s, looking young was a badge of honour – people looked twice when I said I was 35 or 36, saying I looked about 22. My childlike personality, its resolute static, added to the whole effect.

Really, I was just terrified of claiming adulthood. I thought it was for other people. Older people. Now, I’ve entirely skipped a significant portion of adulthood and moved directly into middle age. I’m kind of ok with it. Definitely great to be alive, yep. After three children, all the accompanying sleepless nights, and some bloody shocking health shocks along the way, I look every single one of my nearly 43 years. I love to feel my age but yes, there is, shall we say, a small (and it is small) dissatisfaction with actually looking my age. It’s damn hard for any woman to be all pioneering, marching to the mantra of ‘Yeh, alright, I’m wearing my grey hair with pride, even on my vagina,’ and there are women who are doing that and I totally want to be them. Honestly.

In front of my nieces at the weekend, I kept adjusting my language. They were obsessed with my boobs and belly and breastfeeding, pointing and poking and prodding – and I really had to counsel myself to not say anything negative about my aging body. I want them to think it’s all great. Even though I don’t necessarily think it’s all great.

I want to. But I don’t.

What do you know?

Meditation, Motherhood

‘My mind is back now,’ said one of my boys last night, bounding up the stairs after a lengthy tantrum because I’d switched the TV off. Interesting, I thought. How the hell did you know that you’d lost your mind when you went to that electric, crimson place of no reason? Then I just said, ‘I’m glad it’s back,’ and I continued feeding my one year old, one eye to my mono-milkable boob with its steadily dropping supply.

So you know that you had lost your mind, here, in the murky, marvellous waters of early childhood? And, of course, you don’t know yet that the ability to cognize such a deep and sensible thing will totally disappear on you, to resurface well into adulthood. If you are lucky.

Wow. How many other things do we ‘know’ at one, two, at three, four, five – then lose completely as we grow, as we learn to cue and curb our behaviours and cater to what we think people want from us? Do we know that we are whole – that we are born this way? It’s plain to see, I’ve seen it in all my babies: they are whole. We were whole, then perhaps our psyches split into hundreds of shards, different personalities we try out, different ways of being. Do we know that we are good? Because there can be no intention to be ‘bad’ when you are so young you remember the sound of your mother’s heart in the womb. Do we know that time is not linear but spherical, always now, never then and never tomorrow?

What do we know about love? Do we know that we are love, until someone unwittingly dismantles that reality, for some children much sooner than others? And do we know about belonging? That every single one of us was born with the same right to be here, with the same potential in our tiny sacred souls and with equal importance to the unfurling of the planet?

We know, we know, we know… in infancy we know so much. Right now I’m thinking it’s absurd that I meditate, that I desperately search for slivers of day so I can be still, because essentially what it is I’m learning is how to be an infant again. To know I’m whole, to know I’m good, to fall into the whirl of time and just be in it – to love – and to belong.

Three boobs

Meditation, Motherhood

I sometimes look down at my belly and a character comes to mind from one of those old Seventies American cop shows. He’s an amalgam of them all: a good guy, he likes doughnuts with his coffee and he says things into his walkie talkie like ‘Mac, we gotta prawblem heeyah.’

Because postnatally (oh alright, prenatally too), I pee a lot, I get lots of glimpses of my belly all day. The cop says: ‘We gotta do somethin’ bout this.’ Then the day goes on and I run around and I think, I’ll do that Tupler technique thing later. I’ll work on my transverse abdominis possibly another time. Note to self: must start doing something about this belly.

A few weeks ago, I was leaning over to put my jeans on and my son said, as if observing an orangutan in the wilderness, ‘Look Mummy, you’ve got three boobs.’ From where he stood, yes indeed it did look like I had three boobs. The usual two – then my stomach hanging down in a sort of cone shape. I had that diastasis recti thing in my last two pregnancies, where your stomach muscles split, never to find each other again unless you spend 20 hours each day doing some weird deep abdominal pulsing thing. I had an umbilical hernia too, which is where part of your intestine sticks out of your abdominal wall. That was a real gift, I must say.

Anyway, I look down at my tummy and think, yep, we’ve got a problem here, but I haven’t done anything about it yet. For a while, I went down the route of thinking ‘oh my body is destroyed but look, I have three darlings to show for it and it’s all been worth it’ – but the truth is I do mind what the hell has happened to my body and how radically it has changed since I had three children in four years. My poor body had no chance whatsoever to ‘ping’ back, because I let cravings rule me in pregnancy and ate far too many salt and vinegar crisps. When I did pregnancy yoga, it was mainly the kind where you just lay down and relaxed.

My strategy was ‘I’ll deal with it when I’ve finished having babies’ and now this Seventies guy eating a doughnut is on my back all the time but with no solutions. I work a lot on my mind because I feel, what with all the mental illnesses and neurosis, it’s fairly flabby. I meditate because it has been scientifically proven to change your brain, and I get such a kick out of that. You can change your brain. I love that. There’s so much hope in it.

Yet my body waits, quivering in expectation. When will it be my turn, it says. You can’t just be an ace brain walking around on two legs. Your body is just as important as your mind. Then it comes out with this cracker: We are one and the same, you know.

Notes on mortality

Motherhood

I had some conversations about death with my middle son today. Our neighbour’s grandmother had died, and the funeral is today. They love this neighbour, a young man who babysits often and plays the best, weird indecipherable superhero games with them. So the boys were concerned about him, and very interested as to where his beloved granny had gone.

I probably speak about death with my children a little too much, because there was a two-week period a couple of years ago when it seemed I was about to die. I suppose I want them to know that if I did, it wasn’t my choice to leave, and that part of me can’t die because it’s part of them. Anyway, I try to knock death talk on the head, in general.

But my middle son was on a roll today and really wanted some discussion around the idea. ‘When you be dead, are you dead forever?’ ‘When I be dead, will you be dead? ‘Can we all be dead holding hands together?’ ‘Can we be dead but then be statues in the museum?’

He sat in his car seat in the back while I answered (Yes. All things going as they should, yes. No, but that’s a touching yet incredibly distressing idea. No.) We drove on for a bit in silence, and he stared out the window, deep in the kind of thoughts that only a three-year-old can have. Then he said quietly: ‘But the heart never dies Mama. It can’t.’

On cue, we stopped at a red light and I turned to him. ‘Where did you…? Where did you get that from?’ I said, looking at him. He is as pretty as a bluebird, this child. ‘My brain told me,’ he said matter-of-factly, gazing out of the window again. These children. You think they are speaking mostly gobbledygook as they try to carve sense out of the world with their limited, lisping vocabulary – then they break out these showstopping lines that sound like something an ancient sage has come up with after a hundred years meditating in a cave.

The light turned green and we drove on. ‘I hope I die with blood bleeding all over me,’ he added, in a tone that can only be described as glee. He is a little boy, after all.

Beach speech

Motherhood

We found a little cove today, an inlet somewhere along the Wexford coast. I’d let the boys be adventurers and explorers, knowing that the hundred metres or so of rocks stretched out before their childish eyes like a vast, undiscovered planet.

They forged on ahead, bravely leaping and slipping and climbing, their tiny legs goose-pimpled from the chilly breeze that whirled in from the Irish sea. I lagged behind, so they couldn’t see me but I could see them, in that way we do when we want our kids to think they have at least some freedom. ‘We are con-splorers!’ the eldest shouted to the wind, while the younger straggled behind, stuffing as many rocks as he could into his pockets for later contemplation. ‘EX-plorers,’ I couldn’t resist yelling, briefly blowing my cover. ‘We are CONSPLORERS,’ he shouted again, and I watched with love as he navigated the rocks and the rock pools, because this eldest son often approaches outdoor things with trepidation. The younger, weighed down with his rocks, spied me and roared, ‘C’MON Mama! We have CONSPLORING to do!’

‘It’s…oh never mind,’ I muttered to myself. I threw off my shoes and started to follow them, resisting the urge to tell them that it was time to turn back, we had gone too far down the coastline. Then, we turned a jaggedy corner and found this small, sweet cove. It was rocky, and the sea in it sparkled deep green, not blue. A crab, with one leg missing, scuttled into the water. Time stopped. I smiled and feasted on the look in my eldest son’s eyes, because I knew right at that moment he felt like the first person in the world to have discovered that beach. I knew that inside his head a door had opened forever: I am an explorer, and I find the most beautiful things.

I kept quiet for a while, then my usual beach speech came out. I can’t help myself, it happens every time I am on a beach. ‘This is my favourite place to be in the whole, wide world…’

‘Mama?’ The triumphant explorer interrupted me before I really got going about the sound of the waves on the shore, the shells, the marbled stones, the sand and how it tickles your feet with memories from the past and promise for the future. ‘My favourite place in the whole wide world is Smith’s Toys Superstore.’ I looked down at him, started to give another speech about nature and how it’s the best, then stopped myself and grabbed his hand. We picked our way back across the shoreline, and the cove faded away from sight.

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Bloom

Motherhood

I want to tell you today about the first time my first son smiled. Every parent probably has a gooey story about seeing that first smile.

With my other two sons, the smiles seemed to happen in increments. It sort of seemed like they had always been smiling. Maybe they had been doing it with their eyes, or maybe because I had more than one baby I didn’t specifically notice when their faces first opened up to the world. Perhaps I really noticed my eldest son’s first smile because I had all sorts of post-natal mental illness at the time, and it was like someone switched a powerful light on in the room, briefly. I don’t know.

Anyway. We were snuggled up in bed one cold, grey January morning. It was dark outside, it seemed the sun would never rise that day. He was seven weeks old. I’d just fed him. I propped him up on some pillows, and turned to put a cardigan on to start the slow descent downstairs, where I would spend the day figuring out how on earth to be a mother. I stood up, bent to pick him up – and then…

Honestly, do you know those clips in nature documentaries, where they’ve sped up the frames so you can see a radiant flower go from bud to bloom in a few seconds? It was exactly like that. He grinned. Toothless, he gurgled and grinned even wider. He shone. His face beamed, he smiled straight for a good two minutes. He stared at me, straight in the eyes, and grinned even more. His face was exploding with love and happiness. In a small pocket of precious time, the two of us grinned and gurgled at each other for what felt like infinity. It is etched onto my brain, as transcendent and transformative as the moment of his birth.

I don’t know that he was particularly grinny because he’d picked up that I was not, or he immediately felt the power of something that would reliably connect him to other people for the rest of his life, but it was a moment of exquisite beauty. So pure and perfect, my tiny little newborn, woken up to the world.

I picked him up, padded downstairs and made coffee, the grey of the morning transmuted into light.

Dances with wolves

Motherhood

‘Stop using your wolf voice Mama,’ said my eldest this morning. What a great way to describe my asshole voice – the one that comes out when I have been unable to control my temper.

My son was having an epic tantrum. He wouldn’t tell us why he was so upset. I ran downstairs, dripping wet from a snatched morning shower, to crying so heart-wrenching I thought something truly awful had happened. Like, he’d lost a piece of Lego or something.

I did that thing that is the opposite of the story from Aesop’s Fables, The North Wind and the Sun. Do you know it? I think about it weirdly often. The tale really struck me as a child. Basically, the wind and the sun quarrel about who is strongest. The wind, as is its wont, was blustery and forceful, convinced it would be the one to get a passing traveller’s cloak off. He loses it and blows as hard as he can, but all the man does is pull his cloak even tighter. Then – you guessed it – the sun gently shines. It glows and winks and burns brightly. The man throws his cloak off.

So, yes, I did the opposite of that. I kept saying, ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ whipping myself up into a foul and impatient mood. Eventually I forced him to tell me through blackmail – you know, this one: ‘If you don’t tell me now X will happen’.

He answered. ‘Daddy poured milk on my cereal’. Wolf voice came out in force. ‘Are you (insert nearly a swear word here but I managed not to say it) joking me?’ His eyes widened. The milk and cereal were forgotten. There was a frigging wolf in front of him.

I think about that Aesop’s fable a lot as an adult because I keep having to learn the same lesson repeatedly. Being taught it once just doesn’t cut it. If you are forceful and shitty – with your children, with anyone – things will backfire on you. If you can tap into some level of light within yourself, and let that illuminate your reactions, then your children (your spouse, your boss, your friends, whoever) will automatically shine back in response.

You’ll get some time to feed the wolf before it bites, too.

I will scream and shout

Motherhood

How do you deal with toddler tantrums? Actually, are they really toddler tantrums? My baby has them and my five year old has them. In fact, I have them too.

I *almost* had one this morning when the google maps app thing on my iPhone 1) went mysteriously silent so I couldn’t hear the directions but had to assimilate them into my being while driving and 2) Took me on a weird, ill-thought out goose chase to a house which was less than 10 minutes’ drive away but nestled, camouflaged, in a maze of tiny streets.

It’s the small things that derail you when you are trying to hold your shit together as a parent. God, kids are really cute and all – I mean, they are ridiculously cute with their baby bellies and their lispy half-baked sentences – but there’s nothing adorable about tantrums. This morning, I was treading on eggshells, terrified of upsetting the three-year-old because I have a cold and therefore my coping strategies are down. It didn’t work, he pulled a record of one tantrum every few minutes or so for the whole first shaky hour of the day.

I’ve learned that if I lose it after he loses it, he will lose it even more and we will be upping each other on our losing it into infinity. It’s no good. Meanwhile, endless patience sometimes feels like giving in. He’s being unreasonable, and bossing me around. I could be raising a brat. Both of my older boys do this ‘Uggggggh’ guttural sound when they are angry, which they ape directly from me. I mean, these children just copy us a lot of the time. Yes, they have those absurd and explosive tantrums unique to toddlers, but they are still little carbon copies of us.

It shocks me that many of the reactions I have to my own children are precisely the ones my mother had with me. We imprint our ways of being on our children every moment we are with them and once knotted in, they are hard to unravel.

It’s a lot of pressure isn’t it?

I hang on to meditation like a life buoy in an ocean of dodgy learned behaviours, automatic reactions, and those adult-y tantrums which are so much more restrained – and so much more dangerous. I hang on to it for dear life in the belief that I will have a hope in hell of changing my brain, and therefore teaching my children a better way to be in the world.

The (four) barbers of Seville

Meditation, Motherhood

When my eldest son and I came out of the cool, hipster new barbers’ near where I live yesterday, he hung his head and quietly said ‘I look like Violet Beauregarde. But that’s ok.’

Well, it was not ok with me. He wasn’t going for his first school photo today with a retro 20s bob – no way! Being afraid of confrontation as I am (meditation is not a panacea) I took him straight to another barber. She assessed the situation in a fraction of a second and barked out ‘I don’t do corrections here. No way. Cutting kids’ hair is hard enough.’ We left.

I took him to a third barber, who looked at my son and nodded sagely. I thought no words were needed, really. It was clear that my son’s awesome, shaggy cut had been hacked into a style more suitable for a grande dame of fashion like Anna Wintour and not a 5-year-old at the tail end of his Junior Infants year. I turned for a moment to the other two boys, who were running wild with clutches of free lollipops in their hands, and by the time I turned back, this barber had merrily hacked off all of the hair on one side of my son’s head.

So this is when I totally lost it. Something exploded inside of me, an absolute fireball of foul temper. A beat passed. The barber looked at me, scissors hovering over the child’s head. ‘You didn’t want… short?’ he asked hesitantly. No, no, no I raged and wept internally. In real life, I calmly said, ‘Ok, you must have misunderstood me. We need to even it up now and make the best of it.’ But then, I legged it – three straggly, sticky boys in tow: he’d brandished the buzz cutter thing with clear intentions to completely decimate what was left of my son’s floppy, wavy blonde hair.

We went to a fourth barber. He was a broad and big man called Teeno. He took one look at Kit’s hair, shook his head, whistled, exhaled and said: ‘Let’s fix this.’ He gave my other two sons cars to play with, he made me a coffee. His lollipops were shaped like feet, so the boys were beside themselves. He made my (patient) son’s hair look normal again.

Meditation boosts this thing called adaptation energy. It gives you more rope to work with before you snap. It’s all relative; I get that hair is not a big deal. But before I started a regular meditation practice, I would have probably lost my temper at barber No.1, barber No.2 or barber No.3. I’d most likely have cried when barber No.3 lopped the entire side of my son’s hair off. And I might not have been quite as ecstatically grateful when barber No.4 – Teeno the Conqueror – remedied the whole mini-saga with lollipops shaped like feet, coffee and some skillful cutting.

Having that little bit of extra rope elevates your daily life, making things easier for yourself – and so for everyone around you.

Boob talk

Motherhood

Breastfeeding really bloody hurts when you first try it. Newborn babies feed for hours on end. If you want to breastfeed your newborn you are going to need a lot of help because it involves much sitting down while they clamp on and feed for an absurd amount of hours. It’s very ‘bonding’ or very restrictive depending on how you look at it. If you have other children and want to breastfeed a newborn, and you don’t have anyone to help you, I seriously don’t know how any of you do it. If you do, you are absolute champions.

It’s ok to breastfeed after a glass of wine. It’s ok to breastfeed when you are on antidepressants. It’s ok to drink coffee and breastfeed. It’s ok if when you try to pump milk nothing comes out. It doesn’t mean your supply is low, it means your boobs don’t like pumps. It’s ok if you hate pumping. If you are a pumping icon, good for you! Pumping can be really handy, because if you breastfeed and you want to get a break, it is great that you can hand a bottle and a baby to someone. Anyone. Go get some sleep.

It’s ok to breastfeed and also give your baby formula. It’s ok to breastfeed and let your baby have a dummy, too. After you’ve breastfed your newborn for six weeks or so, suddenly the unsustainable never-ending feeds ease off and feeding can become much more enjoyable, as you get a break in between. It’s ok to breastfeed in bed with your baby snuggled next to you and if you drift off to sleep while you are doing so, that’s ok too.

It’s ok to flash your boobs in public so you can breastfeed. On that, after you’ve breastfed more than one child for an extended period, your boobs are probably not going to look great. (Visual: nipples can stretch.) It’s ok to say that you don’t particularly like breastfeeding. It’s ok to say you love it. It’s ok to breastfeed for a short time and then switch to formula. It’s ok not to even try breastfeeding at all. It’s ok to feed with formula.

As long as YOU are ok, it’s ALL ok.