Trailblazing love
an honest reflection on motherhood and postnatal depression
Felix, little rocket man, my rainbow baby.
Today is his 35th birthday. Thirty-five—how is that even possible? But if you saw him now you’d still recognise him from his baby photos (apart from the beard—now, I mean).
He was the baby who came six years after my stillborn daughter. I walked into the same corridor in labour and one of the midwives remembered me from the first time. That maternity hospital has been demolished now, an overgrown desolation of waste ground. But Felix grew, Felix thrived.
Golden the beautiful.
I nurse you, my newly born son, my first living child, shielding your ear from the sound of the Iraq war on tv. I feel acutely aware of mothers in the land I watch being bombed, clinging tightly to their babies as I do to mine—imagining little hands just like yours, pearly fingernails ingrained with the dust of war, arms outflung at the sound of explosions. My heart hurts. I know those mothers will gather their babies in, croon lullabies into their ears even as bombs rain down on the inadequate shelters in which they hide.
I heard a shelter was destroyed. Mothers held dead babies in their arms under the rubble.
The pain of being helpless to protect you is overwhelming.
Not my son, not mine. I feel every mother’s despair.
I lean over you, my firstborn son, the way those far away mothers will lean over their babies, sheltering them with their bodies in death. I weep into the silken floss of your hair. You imbibe my tears.
I sit beside your cot at night, you hold my gaze steadily until your eyelids flutter and lower. And I try not to weep, not while you’re awake. I try.
You grow. I observe our reflection in the mirror in the darkened bedroom, you in your sleepsuit, your head on my shoulder. Are we real? I want you so much, but I feel distanced from myself. Who is the woman holding you? We’re too fragile, the world unstable. But I love you, I hope I can make you feel that. It’s real, my feeling, even if behind a glass barrier.
You grow into a sturdy toddler, stepping determinedly across the floor towards my outstretched hands. I start to heal from my postnatal depression. You’re funny, you make me laugh. The weight on my shoulders lightens. I should be so happy.
I watch the news on tv. Rumblings of war now emanate from Yugoslavia. One conflict replaces another in the media. War is predominant in my mind again as I cradle you, my sleeping boy, my golden-haired-one. My stomach swells with your newly formed brother, and as you doze in my arms, he kicks both of us to announce himself: I’m here too.
The arms of love.
5th July 1993
We went to the seaside yesterday and he had a ride on the ‘little wheel’. Sitting all alone, his small face set in courageous anxiety, he clutched the safety bar and uttered the single syllable “Mam” every time the wheel descended. My heart reached out to him. I’m so aware of all the times in the future that I won’t be capable of saving him from fear and pain.
In the future I might look back and, on the surface, observe that I am a good mother, managing alone with four children. I’ll choose to focus on the times I gather you in and read funny poems to calm us all down when things get heated – I’ll recall the chapters of Little House on the Prairie and Harry Potter; Five Children and It and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe I read to you each evening, putting on the characters’ voices and making you laugh. I’ll picture tucking you tenderly into bed and kissing you goodnight. Sending you to school scrubbed and tidy (ish) in the morning.
This is where, if it were a film, colour might drain out of the picture. Everything is a see-saw, the good balanced by bad. I go into your room and lose my temper, screaming at you to be quiet. I smack your bottom. Do you cry? I can’t remember. I’m sorry. I’m worryingly close to another episode of depression. Is that your sister waking up? No, it’s you talking to your brothers. I go in again and read to you for a while, some chapters of The Wouldbegoods. You all enjoy it and go to sleep happy but I’m suffused in self-shame. I wish I could be better.
This is the evening of the day I discover your brother has been knocked over by a car! The two of you haven’t told me, afraid I’ll be cross because you didn’t use the pedestrian crossing on the road. He picks himself up and you both arrive back from the village shop with whatever food item I’ve asked you to fetch; you do your homework, eat your meal. It’s only later when the headteacher of your school telephones, having reached me on her list of parents who have a son matching your brother’s description, that I find out what’s happened. I check your brother over for bruises, give him Rescue Remedy, arnica and sweet tea and put him in a warm bath. He’s surprisingly unscathed but I’m not. And I won’t be more than twenty years in the future, either.
The ghosts of your childhoods haunt me, the spectre of the person—me—who has grown in my mind into a deranged mother, holding on by a thread. I was always good at masking.
You are a man of thirty-five now, tall, self-assured, kind and intelligent. You tell me you love me as I do you every time we speak on the phone or the rare occasions I get to hug you in person. I don’t think you remember how erratic I was, or at least how erratic my diary tells me I was. Perhaps it seems worse because I only wrote in it when I was feeling sad, guilty or lonely. But you, Felix, you are well, you are whole, you are a tribute to yourself.
a few years ago on an East Yorkshire beach.
a scribble I made of Felix at six months old.