It’s me, hi…

Wow. I just had a look at my blog and it’s an actual YEAR since I last wrote something here.

Last year I became a mother and tried to juggle going back to work at three months postpartum alongside writing. [Aside: I tried without success to use my paltry e-bucks to win the lottery so that I could mother and write in the way that I wanted to. I’m still waiting for the SA Lotto to call me to say that my winnings are too large just to deposit into my bank account.]

It’s hard when you’re an a-typer and you’re trying to live each element of your life at 100% capacity when in reality becoming a new parent means something has to give.

So what gave? My writing.

Truthfully, this was the thing that I was most worried about when becoming a parent. Writing, for me at least, requires immense creative life force, but it also provides vital nourishment to me and my mental wellbeing. I believe that writing every day is helpful to your writing practice, and I believe that you need dedicated time and space to do it. The ideal writing experience for me is time alone in a quiet-ish space (preferably with coffee and chocolate nearby). I know that I write best when I’m in tune with the world and when I’m out and about interacting with it (read: eavesdropping with vigour). I write best when my brain has chance to drift a little bit. When I’m living a sort of balanced life that involves decent sleep and exercise and where the other parts of my life are properly scheduled and time-managed.

You may have noticed that none of the above conditions are compatible with parenting a newborn or infant. Instead, you have sleep deprivation, exhaustion, adrenaline, breastfeeding fatigue, an erratic schedule, no time to yourself, and a lot of time at home, in your house, consumed by the emotional and physical rollercoaster you have just climbed onto.

I did not find the adjustment to motherhood easy.

I do not cope well with poor sleep, with learning on the job (I prefer to do my learning in advance so that I can show up and be good at things), or with an unpredictable day. I struggled with postpartum anxiety and intense fatigue.

In The Crying Book Heather Christle muses that she worries not just that she may have a colicky baby, but that because of her own propensity for tearfulness that she’ll become a colicky mother. I epitomised that. Both intense tearfulness and uncertainty felt characteristic of at least the first six months of having a child. Mombrain was real for me, both because of the inequality in parental leave that meant I was shouldering the majority of the baby caregiving and domestic load like so many other mothers around the world (at least those in heterosexual marriages as the evidence shows), and because there was a real sense that my brain and whole person were oriented differently now, primarily at protecting and soothing my baby, and not at writing or using words.

I am, like so many people, a slave to the culture that upholds productivity as virtuous. Doing nothing, or not doing any of the things that imbued me with cultural capital as I was accustomed, left me feeling adrift. This was true even though I had read What Mothers Do, Especially When It Looks Like Nothing and knew that this was just a phase. This was true even though I knew that the research shows that the act of being physically and emotionally present for your newborn and infant is beneficial both for you and for them.

If I wasn’t writing, I wasn’t a writer, and so then who was I?

When a poet visited me early on in my motherhood journey to collect a copy of a book and I said that I felt compelled to write everything down so that this liminal period felt meaningful she said ‘how calvinistic of you.’ More recently I saw an instagram post that said ‘how can you be useless to capitalism today’ and whilst it felt like early motherhood was exactly that type of radical anti-capitalist act, where your value is measured in minutes spent with something rather than producing anything, I’m well aware that the domestic inequality that renders women primarily responsible for this type of care is in fact vital to the functioning of patriarchal capitalism and has always been. So relaxing into motherhood has not felt, well, relaxing.

I also feel like the creative life force that I had so often dedicated to writing was rerouted to parenting. I found the same thing during my first trimester of pregnancy. The pressure to write – the sensation of having something creeping at my consciousness demanding to be expressed – just evaporated. I wasn’t even that interested in engaging with creative things like books or series or art or Instagram unless they were related to parenting. Mothering felt all-consuming. I launched a book early last year but I didn’t have the energy to properly participate in marketing it, or publicising it. I wasn’t awake or sensible enough to read. My life felt like it was on creative pause.

Time has passed since that initial immersion into the ocean of parenting. The desire to write is here now, but the financial and emotional pressures of parenthood often mean that I’m doing other things – paid work, parenting while my child is sick, etc. At the yoga studio I sometimes visit it says on the wall ‘What you bless blesses you.’ I was not blessing creativity. Then last night in a period of mindless Instagram scrolling I saw an E.B. White Quote: A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper. Oof.

Today I had a little time and space to write. And this is what came out. Hopefully it won’t be a year before I’m back writing here again.

How are you? What has happened for you in the last year? I’m interested to hear.