I’ve been subconsciously scripting a maternal ABECedary. Every day I add new terms to my vocabulary, about uncertainty as well as hope
Sure, he may have fallen asleep, but will he wake up precisely two hours later or will he begin to stir in an hour from now? I have no way of knowing, so I try to work in the in-between, I try to fall out of time. Representation pic
It’s 2.39 am. On Sunday the clocks settled on summertime in Europe. I remember the hour. I was putting our child to sleep, and right when it should have been 2 am, it was 3 am instead. I felt, once again, like I had slipped into a rabbit hole and fallen out of time. This feeling has been somewhat synonymous with motherhood. There is the weekly count that serves as a qualifier for age. Today our child is five weeks old. This carries certain physiological and psychological connotations. He has achieved certain developmental milestones solely by the virtue of having been alive outside of me for a specific time frame.
Ever since his birth, however, he and I have been in the process of aligning our bodies, and this synchronising gesture takes place within and outside of time, simply because his heart beats at a different pace from mine. It always has, but until five weeks ago, it was still nestled within my womb. The attempt at harmonising our individual paces means I must inhabit time differently, think of day and night as conflated. And yet, this has been the most challenging aspect of caregiving—being alert at these post-midnight-early-dawn hours. If the last five weeks are anything to go by, I shouldn’t be afraid that he will stir or wake up at this moment after I have turned him in and he is secure in his crib. But the anxiety persists. Because falling out of time has involved having to make peace with the unpredictability of his movements; the fact that he has a will that is independent of my own, has a hunger that is dependent on me for satiation and is yet sovereign.
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Having gotten used to sleeping continuously from about 10 or 11 pm until at least 8am, even until the very end of my pregnancy, I find the interruptions disruptive to my consciousness and enabling of the cumulative exhaustion of mothering. Sometimes, especially when I am putting him to sleep and he is collapsed within the wingspan of my arms, his breath steady, his eyes closed, I think of these two terms: maternal surrender and maternal suspense.
In fact I feel like I have been subconsciously scripting a maternal ABECedary. Every day I add new terms to my vocabulary. The origin of maternal surrender can be traced to my time with our child at the diaper changing station in our bathroom. Having learned, during our first days together, that he responded eagerly to music, I often have music playing on Spotify on my phone. I usually choose one song and then let the algorithm decide what to play next. That’s how I came upon Laura Marling’s beautiful song, For You. I didn’t know until this morning that it is possibly meant for her daughter, but I was drawn to the first few lines from the chorus: I thank a God I’ve never met/ Never loved, never wanted (for you). I could relate to it. It was in the early days of my pregnancy that I found myself praying, not in the usual Catholic way, uttering pre-formed, pre-learned words with a wish-fulfilling function, but rather in the manner of Simone Weil, beseeching the holy divine only for grace.
In the last few days, as we continue to sync our pulse, I have found myself continuing to pray, asking the holy divine for the grace to be able to surrender, to relinquish the desire to control our child’s behaviour, to instead have the patience to administer to his will, to not force him to sleep if it seems evident he would rather be awake; to not impose a feeding schedule but allow him to announce his hunger, to listen better and to embrace my role as someone who must cater to his needs until he is capable of administering them himself; in other words, to nurture him to the point when he can function autonomously and to continue, until that moment of futurity, to respect his will.
I’ve found it’s less frustrating if I prioritise him instead of hoping for him to be accommodating of my schedule. I think that is what I mean by surrender. The suspense is an extension of this not knowing exactly what will unfold from one minute to the next, therefore, giving up the desire to over-plan. Sure, he may have fallen asleep, but will he wake up precisely two hours later or will he begin to stir in an hour from now? I have no way of knowing, so I try to work in the in-between, I try to fall out of time.
It is five hours later. He slept from 2.15 am until 5.30 am, which felt like a blessing. It is now a few minutes past 8 am. I hear him stir. I have no idea what today will bring. I have been thinking of patience not as a virtue but as a muscle that is strengthened through practice. I theorise about the texture of maternal hope—I imagine it not as life getting easier but a growing in confidence as I recalibrate my priorities.
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
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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