Anna Kisby: Best and Worst
The best and worst bits of being a mother
are one and the same for me. It’s having the ultimate responsibility: nowhere to hide, nowhere to run to, no calling in sick, no emigrating, no emptying the bank account and doing a runner, no not-tonight-dear-i’ve-got-a-headache, no scrapping what you’ve done and starting again from scratch, no excuses – you are held in place, you are tethered to the earth.
In labour…..Crossing the seafront road we pass Henry Allingham – 1st World War survivor and the world’s oldest man – leaving in his funeral hearse. In 2 hours time she will arrive.
At the lowest most impossible point, when I absurdly, mulishly say ‘I can’t do it, I can’t’, the quiet watchful midwife with the beautiful cow-brown eyes speaks, ‘I see lots of dark hair. Feel’. I reach down into the pool and feel – between my legs the clotted tendrils of her hair float free. It feels the way seaweed feels, brushing my legs when I swim. Now, everything is certain.
I plunge and plunge and I’m the only one there until she is here and I grip her greasy duck-down body, her head above the water between my breasts, and look into an open howling mouth at some hardy gums.
Curiously, the first thought I have is: ‘That is where her teeth will be’. And I think what I meant was – in that shocked moment – ‘She will eat. She will speak. She will laugh. She will sing. She exists.’
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
We fight. We fight over how to deal with Ella waking every 3, 2, 1 hours – leave her to settle, pick her up, feed her, is she really hungry, is she teething, is it just habit, do we break the habit, do we comfort, does N stay or go, who needs sleep more, me or him?, we fight to be generous to each other ‘I’ll take her’, ‘No, no, you sleep, I’ll take her’.
One night – it’s probably 2 or 3am and we’ve already woken several times – I suggest he sleeps on the sofa because he has work in the morning. He doesn’t like to do this, he says sleeping separately is ‘a giving up on our love’. I like that he feels this, I call him ‘a soppy old thing’ – but sometimes needs must. I badger him. He storms off with a dramatic parting quip ‘See you in 6 months then!’. He feels kicked out of his own bed, not needed. The next day we laugh about this, giggle over his drama-queen flounce. We rarely fight in the daytime. In the daytime we do our healing.
