Selfhood beyond being a mother

Now, I am able to sense when I am running low on empathy, or the moments when I need to empathise with myself more firmly. Representation pic

I've been thinking a lot about thoughts. The privilege of having them, of accessing them, of processing and fine-tuning them, and to subsequently create art from the residue. My poet friend Suguna asked me over a video call some weeks ago if I was having any, since I became a mother, and I told her I never stopped having them. When I allow myself to drift back to the beginnings of the postpartum phase of motherhood, the soundtrack is always Lauryn Hill's To Zion, because it was playing on loop in my brain as I went through all the urgencies of the time and I wrestled with sleep deprivation. I found in its strains all the courage I'd forgotten that I'd left in storage, alongside patience and boundless love. I was also simultaneously recounting to myself all the details of my experience as I was in the throes of it. I was narrativising and improvising at the same time, as if I were the originator and audience of my thoughts. I always regarded this to be my strength, this penchant for alchemising my bodily and intellectual sensations, rendering them in verbal form, making it consumable.

Yet, if I were to point out one significant alteration in my process before and after therapy, it's that the still-unhealed version of myself rarely exercised enough agency in situations… I performed the role of lead protagonist in my telling of the story - but someone to whom things happened, people happened, not necessarily someone who drove the narrative forward or exerted a consciousness or even defiance in the face of all the emergencies with which I was constantly confronted. In retrospect, I think I was constantly in survival mode. Maybe it was exactly what I've been reading about recently - I was exhibiting symptoms of a dysregulated nervous system. I was so sure I didn't suffer from anxiety, but in earnest, I had simply normalised its manifestations. Not feeling, or rather not allowing myself to feel, my emotions was my coping mechanism. It was how I was able to continue to function.

I've been thinking about my therapist a lot these days. Because at some point, in her attempt to address my anxieties about motherhood, I remember her telling me that, in fact, being a parent was not so complicated, one has to learn to be attentive to a child's needs and be in service of them and offer them love. Now that I am in the thick of it, I can attest to how all of this doesn't necessarily come naturally, or, to phrase it differently, can be very challenging when you want to continue to experience your selfhood while practising a form of reverence towards your child. There are many moments when I cannot tell whether the source of a particular bodily sound is him or me. Because we sleep and wake together, we are conjoined in our consciousness. It's so easy to martyr one's selfhood while mothering. If you decide, from the onset, not to bother with the assertion of boundaries, for instance, and to always put your infant's needs above yours, you're already on the path to losing your subjectivity. This is why having thoughts, allowing them to enter your brain and to play with them as you nurse, change diapers, or make ridiculous faces to encourage your baby to coo is so vital. It reminds you that you are more than just a pair of breasts, more than just a caregiver. Recognising the validity of these thoughts helps you access your emotional temperament. It helps me be a better mother.

I am able to sense when I am running low on empathy, or the moments when I need to empathise with myself more firmly, and the instances when I really need a time-out and should ask my partner to take over. Balancing having thoughts with mediating my will is not always easy. I have found it less frustrating when I follow our child's cues and facilitate his needs rather than impose upon him my desires and my will.

At the gynaecologist's dispensary the other day I saw my empty uterus. It felt like a loop had closed, considering last year, in early June, it was at her office that I saw our child in embryonic form, his nascent heart beating with a rhythm entirely its own. It was a moment of elation to see him stirring inside me - all future, all possibility. I've been thinking a lot about the uterus as a site of female subjectivity, past, present, future, lost and marginalised. It's part of my ongoing research. It's the one notional space all humans that have ever been born have inhabited. I've been thinking about what that means. Is the uterus the only meaningful notional homeland, so expandable, its contours capable of shapeshifting, its lining an invitation to host life?

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.