There’s a kind of personal essay on the internet that I devour every time I come across them; the kind of essay where a thoughtful, intelligent woman who is also a skilled writer and loving mother describes, often in forensic detail and with searing honesty, exactly how hard it is to be both of these things (as well as so much else) at the same time. They write of the incompatibility of the literary world and small babies, the difficulty in finding the energy and time to think and the way they feel fractures forming along the borders of all the different parts of themselves as the newest part - often mother - invades and conquers all the others.
After reading one of these essays, I sit and think about how I can avoid this kind of fracturing in my own life. I think about my wonderful, supportive husband, my talent for list making and organisation, the time I save myself by just not ironing any clothes. I shut the tabs and I open the word document with the fragments of my work in progress, determined not to waste any more time. Because in January, probably only days apart, I will give birth to my first baby and my first novel, Dark River, will be published. In January, I’m going to become one of those women trying to plaster over the fractures in my identity, trying to bring mothering towards writing and both of them towards all the other things that I am.
The thing is, I’ve already found pregnancy to have a fracturing quality on my mind as well as my body. It hasn’t just been the sickness and the tiredness, it’s the redirecting of my attention through a fractal lens that shatters every one of my thoughts and scatters them to the winds. I used to think that pregnancy was essentially a slightly uncomfortable queue for your baby. Now, just over halfway through, I realise it has turned me inside out, with my new skin shocked and raw and unsure of how it is supposed to handle the world. And every bout of nausea, every craving, every fluttering somersault of the creature in my belly reminds me that it’s not over yet.
I’ve wanted to turn to fiction, which is the place I always go to to see if I’m doing this humaning thing right, but I’ve found very little. There are births, and sometimes miscarriages or stillbirths, occasionally infertility, but I barely came across the humdrum magic of pregnancy, let alone this feeling of transformation, until a dear friend gave me Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
I was already entranced by the language, the easy swirl of the Scots dialect and the way he describes the majesty of the highland landscape where his Chris Guthrie lives; but this bit, where Chris lies on her land and thinks about how her life is about to slip away from her, forced me to read it over and over again:
‘No night would she ever be her own again, in her body the seed of that pleasure she had sown with Ewan burgeoning and growing, dark, in the warmth below her heart. And Chris Guthrie crept out from the place below the beech trees where Chris Tavendale lay and went wandering off into the waiting quiet of the afternoon, Chris Tavendale heard her go, and she came back to Blawearie never again.’
And I thought, that is it, that’s how I feel, that’s how it really is.
In my novel Dark River, I write about two women with young sons who do everything they can to escape catastrophic climate change and give their children a home. The women of the worlds I’ve made are not just mothers - for no one is ever just anyone - but their children and their motherhood are a fundamental part of their identities. What are they trying to survive for, if not for their babies, for their futures, for someone’s future, somewhere? It’s a question we can’t help but ask ourselves as we watch the children line the streets of cities rather than the corridors of schools, demanding a chance at some kind of future.
I just don’t feel like myself, I told the midwife. Everything feels different. She smiled. Lots of women say that, she said. But you just have to kind of go with it. She looked at her computer and tapped away at her notes there before turning back to me. You have to grieve a little for who you once were, and then you’ll find you’ll be able to surrender to the you who’s going to be a mum.
I wonder if grief is really the right word for this feeling, this shapeshifting, topsy turvy, utterly ordinary experience. I don’t really feel sad. I feel lucky, and I feel in awe of the biological processes that are taking place inside me, without me doing a single conscious thing to direct them; and I feel completely besotted with this tiny being that has done nothing yet to merit my devotion except exist.
But then I think about the writers of the essays and I recognise that there is grief in between the words, a guilty kind of grief that I’m not sure is the lesser for the writing of it. I wonder if I will someday feel that way, when motherhood has settled into something more mundane. And the only way to answer that is to watch the changing of the seasons and the growing of my child and wait.
So the autumn has begun with a day and a night of equal length, rain that falls in sheets onto the seedlings I’ve planted in pots in my new front garden, and I settle down in front of the half-finished novel that has been tugging at my heart and my conscience for months now. Waiting for my book and my baby to finish burrowing in the darkness, ready to emerge with the light after midwinter.
By the grace of anything in any realm that’s listening, this time next year I will pick up a shiny conker nestled among the crisp, bronze leaves carpeting the grass and I will hold it out for my child to clutch in their fat, sticky fist as we amble through a park in the pram. People will have read Dark River, and maybe they’ll have found something in it that speaks to their heart. The new novel will be finished, and maybe some of the other projects I’ve been dreaming about will have stepped out of the shadowy corners of my imagination and onto the blue light of my computer screen. And somehow, I’ll be both mother and writer and all kind of others too; even though I cannot yet see what those women will look like inside my skin.