Mná

Women

The sixth of January was Nollaig nmban; women’s Christmas in Ireland. A day when women would be given a rest after the busy period of Christmas; a single day off from all of their work both seen and unseen. In our home it is actually my male partner who carries the heavy load. It is he who cooks and cleans so it’s a funny day for me given that at Christmas, just like other times of the year, it was him who cooked our meals and did the washing up.

Since our child  came along my main role within our home  environment has been nursing him and supporting his sleep; my partner has removed every other  household chore from my mental load, for which I am immeasurably grateful.

Our son has always wanted to imitate his father—the second he could crawl he was dragging his toys back to their basket; once he could walk he was trying to turn the hoover on to clear up our living space; he’s already learning to make pastry for veggie sausage rolls— he quite literally wants to walk in dada’s boots.

And what about his mama? How is my son seeing the closest woman in his life live? What matters to her? How does she spend her livelong days? Is she happy? Is she content? Does she sing her own song? Do joy, magic and love settle in, anew, inside her each day ?

I became pregnant , gave birth and spent the first stage of postpartum in a global pandemic that changed the way the world looked beyond anything I could really put into words. I’d lost most of my income, had not seen anyone I knew for over a year, and had walked the same two fields on repeat for a period of time that even now, looking back, feels like it simply could not be true.

The picture above is the first time my son slept in a pram. He was 15 months old and this was only the third time he had been in a pram.

For the first 15 months of his life he cried his heart out if we tried to place him in a pram, a crib; anywhere other than touching us (mostly me) was too much for him—so new to this big world—so brand, brand new. He breastfed almost all day every day for almost a year; even now he still nurses lots. Being close to us both, me especially, is his chosen way; I am his safe place. I have mothered him in this his chosen way—gently; firmly attached—since he arrived. It is my chosen way too, and I am so lucky to be raising him alongside a partner who feels the same, who understands that this type of parenting builds secure bonds between child and caregivers; allowing the developing child to grow in their own ways, at their own rate. It has been, and continues to be, beautiful but it has meant that I have spent an awful lot of time responding to a small person’s needs for almost two years.

Before he arrived I was one of the most independent people I knew. I travelled, worked, spent time in nature —and much more— completely alone. I craved it. My independence and my identity as a woman felt so finely interwoven. I wrote about an incredibly important solo trip to Copenhagen and in doing so began, slowly, to realise how important time alone meant to me as a woman. Since becoming a mother, my sense of being a woman has changed irrevocably.

I’ve come into a much deeper, kinder relationship with my physical body. I may not have the time to walk, run, swim or practice yoga anywhere near as much as I did before but I have learned to respect this house of me in ways I never thought I ever would. To be a woman can often mean to be in constant learning and unlearning with your own body and it’s needs while strangers comment on, make decisions on and violate that body. As an Irish woman I simply don’t have the heart right now to run through it all again; what our bodies & hearts ; our minds & souls, have been put through: what women here and worldwide continue to be put through. On this small island alone two women were murdered in their own homes over Christmas. Three beings lost to (likely) male violence; one woman was 15 weeks pregnant. May they rest in deep and light filled peace.

Something I was not expecting to happen after giving birth was that I would suddenly become fearful of particular things I hadn’t been fearful of before. Before my son was born I didn’t think twice about camping alone in the middle of nowhere; about walking home alone in the dark in cities I didn’t know; about taking risks that now feel utterly unthinkable. Is it the responsibility I feel for him; the need to be safe and well no matter what so as to be there for him? Is it age? Is the collective and personal trauma of the last few years? Or is it simply that motherhood has made clear for me in ways that nothing did before, just what it means to be a woman in a world like this one?

It matters to me that I raise a son who knows, respects and loves himself and every being he shares the earth with. One who is free from the chains of what I see as deep inter generational trauma that manifests itself in things such as the violence we are witnessing against women. I’m so conscious of the ways in which I choose to live since I had him. I am the first woman he has been close to, and at the moment he sees that I respond instantly to his every need ( rightly so.) But what about as he grows always from us into his own being?

How to ensure he knows that I have needs, too, and that they deserve to be respected? How to find ways to give voice to those changed needs in this new stage of life? How to navigate it all in a way that supports his emerging self in kind, fair, empathic relations with the world around him?

As a woman, as his mother, how do I ensure I mind my own self well enough to ride  the storms that are  ahead of us all? How do I keep myself strong and gentle; hopeful and loving, despite it all?

What does it mean to be a woman?

Those Mary Oliver words come back to me, over and over; their hushed wisdom.

‘Improbable, beautiful, and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.’…

And so I remind myself that everything has its own season. Bravery, courage; these things look different at different times of our lives. So, too, does beauty; we ourselves are ever evolving, ever changing, we are ebb and flow in all it’s fullness. I no longer go away alone, I do almost nothing alone actually, but this season is one in which I’m growing in ways it takes caring for another person — especially one so small I think— to bring into being. My sense of what it means to be a woman has shifted so hugely; what exactly does my son see the woman closest to him doing every day? As well as caring for him I am trying to work in the small pockets of time that fall into my path. I had to return to work the day my son turned two weeks old. It was harrowing but necessary as a self employed creative still caught up in a global crisis that we had, and still have really, no real understanding of. Of when, if ever, it might end. If things would ever return to what we had previously called normal. I had only just published my first book, with no launch, no events, no idea how it all would go. I had to try,  I felt I owed it to all of the people involved in that book to try to help it find its way. And actually I needed to feel that there might still be room for me in that old world. I have worked almost every day since he was born. It is not how I imagined it would be but I think I wouldn’t change much of it. I’d really love him to see me doing a little more of the things I love apart from work but we try our best as a family to ensure we all find ways to fill our tanks up.

I realised recently I’d been spending far too much time aimlessly scrolling social media when actually what I want to do is dive into the words of others with a coffee in hand so I’ve been encouraging my son to have some solo reading time, me by his side doing the same. Instead of talking myself out of daily journaling as I’m so tired when he goes to bed I’ve been doing it alongside him in the winter garden; him in navy waterproofs, me in matching boiler suit. It feels so important that he sees that I need to do this even when facilitating his favourite part of the day.

When we’ve been in our van house hunting, instead of worrying about other things I should be doing; I’ve been throwing myself into the icy sea to the encouragement of my partner and a close friend. When I return to our van , soaked through and more alive than ever before, the look on my son’s face let’s me see that he needs to see his mother like this; he appreciates that this side of me is as equally valid as the one that holds him as he cries, laughs and all in between.

My art looks so different these days because I am different too; it’s like looking through fogged over glass now when I look back at that other person I once was, the ways in which I spent my days. I have heard it said that all mothering is a form of grief and I feel this so deeply in my bones.

Nothing lasts forever in this wild kingdom and I am trying to turn up for myself and him the best ways I can. I have become to view womanhood now as a hydrangea. There are so many variables with this flower; soil type, shade, sun, water. And so many different stages of being beautiful.

This photo and the previous one were taken in the same city as each other—my hometown of Derry— in totally different stages of my life from each other, and from now. The first was in the first home I shared with my partner, in the first summer we spent together. I had only just started to stitch myself back together from the loss of self that accompanied leaving the city I’d lived in for seven years, the city that held all my friends and memories; identity and reference. Back then I never imagined feeling like me again; like how I thought being a woman should feel. The one straight above was taken just before we left Derry to move to where we now live. I’d signed a book deal, had gone sober and felt I has reached the best stage of my life imaginable. I’d slowly started to make peace with the thought that I might never be a mother; something I’d never know I wanted before I fell in love. Such polar opposites in ways of feeling in myself but both full of the sense that somehow womanhood was a fixed, constant thing I somehow needed to bolt down inside me. It is not, of course, and looks so different to each of us from the other; so different to our own selves at different moments in the same life.

Just yesterday, as the day began to give itself over to night, I pulled my hat on and made for the front door. My son began to cry for me; ‘mama, mama’. Last week I was with a friend for an afternoon and he still talks about the choo choo that took me away. ‘Don’t worry’ , I heard his dada tell him as I opened the door and pulled on my boots. ‘Mama needs to see that lovely winter sky, that’s just something mama needs to do’, I heard my partner tell him, calming him down by lifting him up to smell the squash he was roasting us all for dinner.

That night, before bed, instead of telling me about the orange choo choo (it was green), he laid his head down on my lap and said ‘mama sky, nice’, and stayed there until his orange truck called him, softly, from the other side of our small room.

Thanks, as always, for being here. If you’d like to support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Or you can buy me a coffee if you’d like. With gratitude x