The Curious Loneliness of Not Being Seen
I know who I am. So why does it matter so much when other people don’t?
I am a mother. I have three children. I became pregnant with my first daughter at 17 years old and when she was born, I loved her with a fierce protectiveness that took my breath away. I looked at her chubby, perturbed, frowny little face and my personality, which was at the time so unformed and soft and nebulous, crystallised around it.
Although I became many things over the decade that followed — a student, a wife, a divorcee, a trainee lawyer, a friend, a runner, a lover — my various selves were fixed around one fulcrum. Mother. It has never not been a part of my adult identity.
I was taken aback, then, when one of my sisters made a casual comment to me last weekend, as we celebrated my youngest child’s fourteenth birthday. “Oh, but you hate babies.” Reflexively, and honestly, I said “What?! I do not!” and she replied, the devastating body blow, “Well, you might have loved your own I suppose, but I never got the particular impression that you…liked them.”
I was completely thrown. Nearly a week later, I have thought about that exchange every single day.
Babies are not any part of my world, now. Mothering for me involves completing sixth-form parental…
