Out the other side

On three years of motherhood - and a different kind of guilt

I’ve been a mother for three years now. Give or take a week and a bit.

There is so much I could write about what I know now but didn’t before my son arrived. However, an awful lot of it would be repeating what many mother-writers have discovered before me. (Which is not, for the record, a dismissal of the need to explore such things – only that this newsletter is not quite the right home for it. I thought this, recently, was excellent.)

‘Matrescence’ – the anthropologist-coined term for the process of becoming a mother – has had a bit of moment lately, largely thanks to an interesting-sounding new book of the same name, by science and nature writer Lucy Jones.

I wrote previously for paying subscribers about how I feel increasingly comfortable with my mum-self, when for a long time I didn’t.

And, as we celebrated our son’s third birthday, on the cusp of the pre-school era, it really does feel as though something has resolved; settled in place. Perhaps my matrescence is finally complete (a mere six-and-a-half years after my first positive pregnancy test…)

This is not to say my mother-identity will not continue to evolve, backslide, or face new challenges, only that I wonder if I’ve come through the painful, tender part of this transformation?

There are lots of possible, tangled reasons why: why now? For one, I find parenting more enjoyable with a child who is learning to talk. (Language, as Miranda Ward put it elegantly here, ‘has been a homecoming’). For another, my matrescence ran in parallel with the pandemic. In terms of seismic identity shifts, it is hard to know what is one and what might be the other. Perhaps – with not a little irony – I am just not much of a baby person. Perhaps this would always have been the case.

But recently what I think has made the biggest difference is an easing of the guilt I carried around after Edward was born.

Guilt and motherhood is a well-worn seam by now. But this was a lesser-known variant: I felt guilty because I was a mother.

In the newborn days, I would have said I felt guilty: but in a specific, contained way. I felt guilty when I thought of others who were still trying to conceive or who had also had multiple losses. Just as I’d felt guilty over my successful pregnancy, while fertility treatment was abandoned during the first wave of the pandemic, while other women were having miscarriages diagnosed at scans they attended alone.

I was, therefore, conscious of how much I was sharing of my new life as a parent on my social media or with friends who I knew were a few steps behind us on this particular path. I made efforts not to over-share or to over-complain.

But I think, back then, I would have estimated it to be a small part of my internal, maternal landscape. With hindsight, I can see all the ways it shadowed much more than this one, specific context.

When we announced our fifth pregnancy – roughly halfway to term – and later when Edward was born, we received such an outpouring of love, it spilled way beyond my capacity to accept it.

People sent things (things I still treasure). Sometimes they were things that had been crafted by hand. They came from people I hadn’t seen or spoken to since university. And from friends’ mums. Work colleagues of my husband’s who I’ve not actually met. There were more messages on my social media than I could reply to, even though my days were mostly spent scrolling, trapped beneath my newborn. People I’d met online asked if they could send us something – to the point where, in a moment that now feels deliriously grand, I put up a request on Instagram that rather than gifts, people could make a donation to Tommy’s, the pregnancy and baby loss charity.

I spent a not-inconsiderable amount of my time when Edward was a newborn trying to handwrite thank you cards*. I felt guilty for not sending them sooner. I felt guilty as I wrote them out to people whose babies I knew I had neglected to get presents for, in the aftermath of our miscarriages.  

But, ironically, those thank you notes were, I think, one of the few baby-related choices I allowed myself to luxuriate in.

Elsewhere, I made decisions for my new life, my new mother-self, as if with one eye half-shut, peering through my fingers; too afraid to give it my full attention or to commit too hard to the delicious, cringey-ness of new parenthood (especially as a person who is somewhat online). I was a lottery winner who didn’t know what to do with their newfound wealth.  

I didn’t do those ‘milestone’ card photos of Edward as a baby. I told myself it was because I find the trend mildly obnoxious. But I wonder now if it was really out of guilt: guilt bound up with knowing how much pain those ‘I am three months old today!’ pictures once caused me.   

A photographer friend gifted us a newborn shoot – and I am so grateful she did because I treasure those pictures now and I would never have arranged such a thing for myself.

I recently sorted through my maternity clothes for the first time, and it was like sifting through the belongings of a stranger. Strange colours. Brands I would never normally buy from. Barely considered, compromise purchases, all of them. Likewise, before Edward was born, I didn’t buy myself a single new thing to wear post-partum. And not because I assumed all my pre-pregnancy things would soon fit again.

Some of this, of course, is knotted up with the particular superstition you inherit after reproductive trauma: not wanting to jinx anything. As if I was telling myself that if I did just the bare minimum, perhaps the vengeful gods-I-don’t-believe-in would not notice, and leave our good fortune unpunished.

But I also wonder if I was trying to atone for something I couldn’t quite identify yet. When I think back on my behaviour in the first year of Edward’s life, it looks increasingly like the behaviour of a penitent.

Alongside the hard stuff, there is so much joy in babyhood – and I allowed myself only crumbs of it.

Because here is the core of the matter: I didn’t feel I deserved it.

(Perhaps this seems obvious to absolutely everyone but me, at this point, but as the novelist Alice Jolly puts it in her memoir:  ‘people think you become a writer because you have knowledge that other people don’t possess. In fact, the opposite is true’.)

And we’re steeped in narratives and ideas around who does and doesn’t ‘deserve’ children.

‘She doesn’t deserve those kids’.

‘Those children deserve better’.

‘You shouldn’t have children if you can’t afford to pay for them’.

‘Why have children if you’re not going to look after them yourself?’

Then there’s the dominant narrative – medical and otherwise – that miscarriage is always an act of maternal rejection. (Not necessarily true, as I believe someone has explained in a book...) 

Add to this the way we frame fertility stories: media fairytales of formidable endurance. The ‘not giving up’. The miracle babies. Modern morality plays about patience and forbearance rewarded. Which was not how I saw our story at all.       

It’s a rich tapestry of stuff to f*** with your head.

I felt keenly (still do) that I was no more deserving of what has turned out to be an almost-Hollywood ending – the house in the country, the against-the-odds baby – than anyone else. All those other people playing reproductive roulette. All those for whom it does not work out. We had tried no harder. We didn’t earn our fate any more than they earned theirs.  

It has taken me these three years to appreciate that just because I am no more deserving than anyone else, does not mean I am any less deserving.

And we, all of us, deserve more than crumbs.

* This – as I try to tell friends who’ve since had babies – is madness. Don’t do this. Get a single photo card made up and printed online if you really have to. Or don’t. Just don’t.