Posts Tagged "dark places"
Make friends, make friends, never ever break friends
I am curled in a ball on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket, my face turned away from you, my eyes tight shut against the glare of the artificial light of our early morning.
Vague sounds of the television and your quiet play and chatter filter through but don’t penetrate past the armour I have so carefully applied this morning. You are just noise to me. I wish you weren’t here.
I wish I wasn’t here.
I feel bruised. My body pinched, pulled, rearranged. A night of being your bed, comforter, punching bag, drinks dispenser, toy, as you worked through your rage and despair and frustration and all of the other things that seem to plague your nights. I wonder at what point last night did I finally shut down? At what point did I stop hearing the crying and just switch off to the writhing, grasping, angry little body in my arms. At what point did you stop being my baby and become something I had to endure? It was before exhaustion took you, finally, that much I know. Long before. Your stamina long eclipsing mine. My head hitting the pillow numb and empty.
I feel nothing now. My body moving on auto-pilot as I was woken from a sleep only just begun. I am cold, my skin prickling, as if the emotional drainage of the night has taken all my body heat with it. I shake, I shiver, wrapped in my cocoon and in darkness.
And yet even now, in my dark place, the mother synapses fire again. Ears on alert for sounds of distress and need. I hate that the instinct is so strong, that even when I want to disengage it holds me. Even now blissful nothingness is beyond my grasp, however much I wish for it, as anger burns hot in my chest. Dull but there, keeping me from icing up completely. I suppose I should be grateful for it. Grateful for feeling something. Because what kind of mother feels nothing?
Wrapped in shadow I am concious of time passing. All too soon the sounds of contented occupation begin to morph to sighs and little murmurs of annoyance. It is inevitable.
And then.
Movement. A shuffle. Warm fingers feeling there way beneath my covers to find my face, probing but gentle, searching for a connection and a response.
“Mama”
I am defrosting. The guilt is creeping back now. A familiar friend. Guilt that I seem unable to perform such a basic a function as enduring your need for me. Guilt at my weakness, at my selfishness, at my inadequate limits. Guilt that I am not enough, never enough for you. Guilt that I could ever wish you far away.
Turning, I pull you up and under, your body settling into my shape. I cannot yet look at you but your eager grin hovers an inch from my face in the half-light, your breath heavy and sweet. You wriggle your way through my defences, seeking out my bruises and my hurts with gentle hands, your fingers pushing their way through my hair to stroke and sooth and pat: movements learnt from being their recipient so many times.
You lie still for only a moment, but it is long enough for me to feel a rush of love so strong and deep it takes my breath, releasing in one low, shaking sob, that makes my body move and throw off the cover to let in the bright light of the dawn, here at last.
And I hold you close to me, breathing in your smell and your warmth and your life as the long night drips off me, and you begin to chatter with your nonsense words, telling me of your plans, about the red car that just drove past and that the dog from next door is awake and barking hello, and how you’d really like some breakfast please.
I take your hands in mine and plant a kiss on each small palm and look up at you to smile. Breakfast. Yes.
Read MorePlease Send Wine and Cake
*WARNING: In line with my honest disclosure policy and commitment to blogging with integrity, I should warn you that this a whiney post*
Kai is going through a phase.
At least, I think he is. It could be teething, it often is. I fear not, however, I fear that this is just HIM.
I never realised this about babies, before I had one that is. I figured that they grew and stuff (obviously), but I never realised THEY changed so much. Their needs, their personalities. That periodically they would become demon children from hell as they transitioned to a new stage.
Kai I think is in one such transition. After he started walking we had a month where he was absolutely delightful – everything was fun and exciting and interesting. We’d spend all day going on adventures and discovering the world from an upright position and all the many delights it had to offer – puddles, pidgeon chasing, running with wild abandon through the shopping centre and trying to steal things from shops. I loved it, and, as I always do I stupidly, rested on my laurels and thought “Ahhh this is lovely. THIS is what Kai will be like now. Life shall be good from now on”.
And then came this week.
This week where the my lovely, smiley boy was replaced with Lord of the Nazgul, complete with ear piercing shriek which he proceeded to unleash, with tears and biting and hitting and thrashing around, roughly every 7 minutes.
Here he is in all his glory:
NOTHING has pleased this boy this week. He doesn’t want to play, he doesn’t want to go outside, he doesn’t want to make dens on the sofa, or build things, or colour. He most certainly does not want to take a nap. All he wants to do is shout at me with nonsensical words, throw things, attempt to scale the furniture and get his mitts on every type of easily breakable thing in the house. Every trip to a public place has resulted in a prostrate, screaming child, and me trying to wrestle him, plank-like, into his pushchair by pinning him with my knee and fending off well-aimed kicks to my head. I am THAT mother, smiling wanly and embarrassingly, as the world looks on slightly pityingly obviously wondering why I seem unable to control my child and worrying that his head seems to be covered in rather nastly looking bruises (from throwing himself backwards and hitting it on every protruding edge in sight).
Our routine has gone to pot. Again. This is the other thing you don’t expect as a parent. You are told that routines are important for a child so you do your upmost to settle into a consistent rhythm of eating and sleeping. And it works, beautifully, for about 6 weeks. Two months max. Then you find they suddenly change the rules – they want to get up earlier, or aren’t ready for bed at the same time. They need less naps, or shorter naps, or more snacks. And you are left running to keep up.
I HATE these times. They never fail to make me feel incompetent, insecure, useless and doubt every single aspect of my parenting.
Of course, it will settle again, it always does. But in the meantime I am in my own personal hell and miserable with it. I’m still so tired anyway, with my blood pressure all over the place (turns out that’s why I keep falling over), and I’m having to spend my days wrestling with a small, ferocious ball of rage.
The worst thing is that he is always as good as gold when in the company of others, like his grandmas, so meaning they don’t really understand what all the fuss is about or why Ant and I periodically take on a grey, shrivelled look and look at our child slightly fearfully, worried he might ‘go off’ at any second.
God only knows what’s up with the child. I fear a lot of it is frustration – we had a similar patch just before he learnt to walk. He is obviously so desperate to communicate, babbling desperately and earnestly at every moment. Shaking his head and gesturing wildly. But what ever developmental thing that needs to ‘click’ to make talking possible just hasn’t happened yet. He struggles to formulate more than a handful of basic words although understands nearly everything you say to him. You can almost see him, trapped in this little body of his that hasn’t quite caught up to his brain. It’s no wonder he’s so angry really, I think I would be too.
Luckily time heals all ills, no doubt he WILL learn to talk eventually and this frustration will ease and all will settle again. Until the next thing of course.
And in the meantime, I’m left with this…
Please send cake. And wine. I mean it. For the love of god. Please.
I’m sure you’ve all been there. Any advice always appreciated xx
Read MoreNot what I thought
Postscript: 19th October 2009
It’s been a couple of weeks since I wrote this post and I still can’t quite get over the incredible and supportive comments left in response. I didn’t think before writing this – just poured it out and then had to summon up all my courage to hit the ‘publish’ button. Thank you so much.
My friend Scary Mommy is running a ‘Search for a Scary Mommy’ contest:
What is a Scary Mommy, you ask? I believe a Scary Mommy is a mother who doesn’t leave the house wearing lipstick at all times. A Scary Mommy loves her kids to death, but will admit to feeling totally overwhelmed and exhausted by the gig. A Scary Mommy doesn’t really care what other people think, and a Scary Mommy thinks that all mothers win when we admit our weaknesses.
I think this is my Scary Mommy post.
I hope you who are reading it for the first time can relate to it – seems like a lot of my regular readers could. And hearing that “yeah me too” made me feel more ok with myself than I had done for a long time.
Thank you for listening x
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Before I had children I had an assumption about how it would go, how I would feel.
I would love them. I would love them totally, utterly, unconditionally. My patience would know no bounds, my selflessness would be instinctual and ungrudging. This magical connection would happen instantaneously the second I clapped my eyes on them and it would last a lifetime. No challenge would be too big, no detail of their lives would be too small or go unappreciated.
I never knew it would feel like THIS.
I read a post by a fellow blogger recently that made me cry. The lovely Insomniac Mummy wrote a beautiful piece about the love she feels for her son, describing unconditional love and the many perfect intimate moments between the two of them. It was the kind of love that I had dreamed about having with my child.
But it made me cry because I found it hard to relate to the way she felt, the feelings she described.
Now don’t get me wrong. I love Kai. Oh god do I love that boy. In fact I completely under estimated just how much I would love him – it has knocked me sideways these last 15 months. It is almost painful the deep love I feel for him; that tangible connection I feel to him; that sense that he is mine; as much part of me as my own head and as essential and fundamental to my existence as breathing.
And yet it is not a fairytale love. At times it is dark, it is agonising, it unravels me and balls me back up again over and over, every minute of every day. It has changed me, and continues to change me. Challenging the very nature of who I thought I was. For although I feel that deep sense of connection, that feeling of ‘knowing’ him so completely, at the same time he sometimes feels like a distant, unreachable, unknowable mystery that I will never fathom. He is separate to me in a way that is isolating and confusing.
I don’t know how to be a good mother to Kai. That is the truth of the matter. Since the very first day he was born he has pushed the limits of my patience, tolerance and empathy, descending on our lives with the force of a unstoppable hurricane, turning our heads and our hearts upside down. His needs have always been so intense, so uncompromising. My whirling ball of energy and curiosity, forward motion and fierce independence, uniquely co-existing with a fundamental dependence and need for closeness, contact and comfort that I never could have imagined.
Sometimes it is so easy to love him, with his infectious smile and spark that has everyone around him glowing. His affectionate, attentive nature, constantly surprising and delighting us with the strength of his personality; his dogged refusal to be anything but himself.
But at other times it is not so easy. The battles and the refusal to compromise, expressed through tears and screams and bites and flails and fights. The unrelenting neediness and constant demand. These are the times where my love for him is tested, where my worth and suitability as a mother is brought to bear.
I feel I fall short in these moments. I try, god only knows I try and I push through it, but dealing with the inevitable feelings of anger, impatience, frustration and failure are some of the hardest tests of character I have ever had to face.
And yet…
And yet. There are moments of stillness. Moments of tired heads rested on laps, of soft hair and soft cheeks. Of little hands that seek out and grasp my own, holding on with a tenderness and a pure need that melts my pain away. Of intimate smiles and tender kisses, of foreheads that fit with perfect synergy into the nape of my neck and I know that there is no where, no when I would rather be, or am meant to be. Right here, right now; holding desperately on to this boy I love so much and wish I knew how to mother.
I wouldn’t change him. Not one tantrum or one sleepiness night. I honestly wouldn’t. He is perfect in his imperfection, in his complexity. He fills me with both awe and bafflement and pride in equal measure. And the fact that I get to be the one to watch him grow and mature and learn and develop feels like a privilege and a gift I would never pass over.
So no. I do not have a fairytale love for my boy. I cannot hold up as a bright example as do some mothers that I so admire seem to able to do with so much integrity and conviction. But it is unconditional. If only because I fight so hard to make it so, because I refuse to let it be any other way, however much it tries to pull me off course. It does not come easily. But it does come – I hope that is enough.
The eloquent Nobel Savage tells me it gets easier. She too faced dark places in her journey with her girl and she’s stepping blinking through the tunnel and out the other side.
I hope so.
But in the meantime I am happy to be here. Happy to be on this adventure with my beautiful, perfect little monster.
I really am.
