Blueberry Bowl
How one small but nurturing ritual kept a family connected despite struggles with paternal post natal depression and breastfeeding.
Every morning I woke to a bowl of blueberries by my bed. Tiny pools of water still visible in each upturned crown; sweet remnants of his attempts to wash any badness away. The bowl, the blueberries, the water — all of it serving as a reminder that he had been here not so long ago, before softly closing the door behind him.
He’d read somewhere that they might save me — the blueberries that is. It was a hope he’d felt able to cling to whilst notions of colostrum and meconium drifted by the wayside. The blueberries he could do.
It became a ritual, a fragile link that kept him tethered to us while his mind wondered further and further away; numbed by the highland malt saved from our wedding day.
It didn’t matter whether the myth was true — the blueberries did what they needed to do. From him, even a placebo was enough to make the panic in me subside.
Yet still, I turned over and peered into your basket, searching intently for the rise and fall of your breath… again… and again… and again.
Out of reach, another cup of tea would go cold.
I held you to me and you would search out my nipple, suckling intensely with innate skills I could not fathom. I would close my eyes and will my hormones into action, inviting the physiological responses that would deliver to you what you most needed. In my mind I coaxed wave after wave of milk, manifesting the undulations as I rocked you; trusting in my body and believing it would provide.
But the visualisations turned out to be yet another placebo, and I an imposter — unlicensed in my practice of motherhood.
Somewhere else, he was placing three stones deep into his pockets. Each one a responsibility, the weight of which were his alone to endure. He’d etched your name onto each stone — anchoring himself to you, the purpose of his pilgrimage. He would soon begin his first ascent… a clock ticking on us all.
Anxiously, I tiptoed around you, immobilised by uncertainty and fear. Afraid to wake you, but even more afraid of your not waking. Rooted by this paralysis, I silently surveyed you, trying to decipher what strange magic had given you life.
How had we accomplished such a feat as you, existing in such ignorance as we did?
Though they warned me against it, with a feather-light touch, I repeatedly ran my fingers over you, needing to feel that you were real. I saw, but failed to perceive the time-lapse of your skin growing looser, finding only beauty in you, even as your cheeks grew hollow.
Frozen but for the palpitations coursing through my body, I longed for the sound of the doorbell and the momentary release it promised. Alone with you I was lost, unable to function as the person I had been and unable to morph into the mother I wanted to become. I offered you the breast at every sign of discomfort, unaware of the false promise therein, and unsure of what else to do.
On another land he was climbing contours with the rising sun. Ascending to the mountains peak, where he set down his first stone. A marker of your existence left to lie on the highest peak of his fatherland. He began his descent on blistered soles — unrehearsed and unconditioned, but indomitable all the same.
On the other side of the bed, out of sight of the blueberries, she laid you in a weighing sling. Glancing from her notes to the dial, she frowned.
By nightfall he was climbing again, travailing through the midnight hours. Two peaks to summit before the sun returned. His paternal sagacity lost to the darkness; illumination as yet withheld.
She drew your blood and I cried, already failing in my duty to protect you. You howled in protest and I clamped a muzzle over my screams — scared to question the wisdom around me — my instincts incompatible with their clinical ultimatums.
“Is this your first?” the consultant asked, his condescension punching deep into the tissue of my still-bruised womb.
Through the chinks of my ill-fitting armour, motherhood exposed my timorous core. Lacking the instincts for fight or flight, my indecision crystallised in tears.
They told me I should know things that I did not know, but that was where the explanations ended. A ticking clock echoed along the sterile hallway, interjected by beeping monitors and the distant sound of another child’s cry. I could not navigate us through this Kafkaesque nightmare for I was not armed with the requisite knowledge of motherhood.
Elsewhere, the curtain of night surrounded him and he searched out the cairns that would guide him. Many had lost their way in these fells, falling foul of the mountains trickery. Weary and disorientated, he too succumbed — unable to discern what we’d become. Ascending blindly, he scrambled beyond the vegetation, somehow emerging (against the odds) at the rugged, grey Pike. Here, on the rooftop of our birth-land, he laid his second stone.
Above the clouds, the night spanned infinitely and he reached out his hand to grasp it.
I took you home and closed the door on the voices, refusing to trust them as I trusted you. I placed you on my breast in defiance, unwilling to face the truth that I wasn’t enough for you. Feeling your restlessness subside and our bond strengthening, I closed my eyes on the creases and folds of your skin: the telltale signs of your hunger. I loved you in the most visceral of ways, and yet, I was starving you. I knew it now and this knowledge could never be undone.
Reluctantly, I offered you a bottle, unfamiliar and alien as it seemed.
My vision was a vignette within which you were all that existed. Unaware of his crumbling mind, I had left him, abandoned to the peripheries.
I should have fed him blueberries, but instead I left him unnourished.
He lost part of himself on his descent; a toenail that would continue to separate from him for years to come. The rest of his loss was less visible, metaphysical ebbs and flows, whirlpools in his mind exacting pressures on the bonds that held us together.
He’d fed me so I could feed you.
But I couldn’t feed you.
And I hadn’t fed him.
In the early hours he began his third and final ascent, his body destroyed but his will intact. His gaze, turned earthward, observed the brightening rocks beneath his feet. The rising sun throwing silhouettes upon the mountains beauty; imploring him to slow down and take a pause. This act — a moment of defiance against the ticking clock — a challenge to its authority and power. Reciprocating the awakening dawn in his clouded mind, the mists began to clear, paving the way for his final stone to be set.
He was out of time, yet still he stood — the silhouette of a man on a mountain peak.
We are all changed and none of us ready.
Such is the inevitability and truth of the Earthseed we grow.
The blueberries have moved to the table. Our three hands meet in the bowl. He passes the last one to me, and I pass it on to you. Above the bowl our eyes linger on one another, understanding that this is how we survive.
SHANTHY MILNE is a writer, journalist and documentary producer with ten years’ experience producing films focused on marginalised communities for UK broadcasters such as the BBC and Channel 4.
She now resides in Amsterdam where she occasionally writes and teaches documentary film making to undocumented migrants. She also serves on the policy council of Liberty — a UK based human rights organisation.
