on bath rocks, giving birth, and hating people
Tonight, I washed my son’s hair, and I knocked an entire bag of fizzing rainbow rocks into the bath. It had been a gift for my daughter from a friend, and she had generously allowed her brother one rock with all the solemnity of an old woman handing over an ancient map to endless riches. (I may have been playing too much Uncharted 4.)
Moments after parting ways with this incredible gift, my daughter’s stupid mother destroyed the rest of them. All it took was a rogue elbow. Twenty to thirty small, and, as it turns out, very fizzy, rocks. All gone. It took about ten minutes to stop foaming and our bathroom looked like the aftermath of a unicorn explosion.
So I promised to send Daddy out to buy a new bag of foamy rocks. And I WhatsApped all my closest mother-friends and relatives with the tale of my failure (civic duty: all mothers must share these moments to make other mothers feel less crap about their own mistakes).
I’ve just been sitting in the bath with my own bath bomb (an apple-pie scented Christmas gift I didn’t end up giving. Ridiculous choice for a 32 year old. I smell like Hubba Bubba).
And I’ve been thinking.
Seven-and-a-bit years of motherhood so far and I can now laugh at myself for these sorts of things, which is a stark contrast to the early days, when I once burst into tears because I forgot to pack baby wipes in my changing bag during a ten-minute trip to the supermarket.
Looking back on it, the whole process of birthing is actually insane. One moment you’re a (fairly) autonomous person, walking around, doing things roughly as and when you want to. The next moment, you’ve somehow survived what feels like being ripped in half on minimal pain relief, only to be handed a tiny little squealing thing and left to your own devices. It was as if someone had just removed my heart, swaddled it, and popped it into a little box next to me.
Me: ‘But — that’s a part of me. That’s like my actual heart.’
Them: ‘Yep.’
Me: ‘But wouldn’t it be safer actually inside me? Like away from germs and sadness and terrorists and stuff?’
Them: ‘I’m sorry. It’s just standard procedure.’
Me: ‘But it’s terrifying!’
Them: ‘Yes! That is the natural way of things.’
And that is what it is. In those first few hours, I sat alone in my cubicle in the dark, crying, exhausted, bleeding copiously, in tremendous amounts of pain, not knowing where the sink was to get clean water for nappy changes, not able to move, listening to other mothers trying to soothe their wailing babies while our impossibly perfect child slept in the cot next to me.
And I was texting.
I had an old brick-phone back then. I was a smartphone-avoider for quite a long time, but not really out of choice, more because we couldn’t justify two expensive phone contracts at the time. In 2013 I still had a phone that sent text messages and made phone calls. It didn’t even take photos. There was no ecstatic Instagram birth announcement. There was just me and a little white rectangle. Tap-tap-tapping to my husband at 3 in the morning and risking the wrath of several other mothers.
I’m not saying this is the way that every person feels. But it was how I felt after what was quite a stressful and lonely labour. And I had to express those feelings to my husband via a series of frantic messages. ‘I’m scared’ and ‘I don’t want to be alone’ and ‘I can’t find a midwife’ and ‘breastfeeding hurts so much, is it meant to hurt this much?’ and ‘I think my painkillers have stopped working but there’s no-one around to ask for more’ and ‘this is the one moment in my life so far where I have needed you more than anything and you are not allowed to be with me’.
(Second sidenote. My Mum likes to tell the story about how she gave birth to my eldest sister alone, as my Dad was in the Navy at the time. ‘I went through the whole thing, just me and a midwife,’ she says, with perfectly justified pride. So I never have the balls to complain about those first few lonely hours around her.
Also, shoutout to the 2020 mothers walking through pregnancy/birth in impossible circumstances. You are all amazing.)
I came home. I learned how to be a mother one day at a time and came to the realize that achieving perfection is not necessarily the same thing as expressing love. I took my daughter outside for walks on my own, even though that scared me to start with, as I was so certain something would happen to her.
And time moved on, as it does, too quickly.
I had a second baby. This time, the midwives would believe me when I said ‘it’s almost time to push’ and they would respond by looking me in the eye and saying ‘alright lovely, let’s pop you in the birthing pool’ rather than ‘but it’s not time yet so you can’t’ (as though I had some sort of control over this). I would face new scary things (taking a newborn AND a preschooler for a walk on my own) only this time I would photograph the whole thing — on my smartphone.
(I actually still have this picture. It’s in a frame. It’s a silly picture really because my daughter’s hat is almost completely covering her eyes and you can barely see my son in the pram, but every time I look at it I remember how triumphant I felt at the time, bundling them both up on a frosty morning and stepping outside.)
Time moves on. I started writing for fun and then for a job. I started studying again. I got diagnosed with a sucky chronic pain thing. People came and went from my life. I reconnected with old friends. I shifted politically and spiritually and generally in incremental steps that you don’t necessarily notice until later.
My kids grew and grew and continue to grow. Today they built an obstacle course out of cushions, played Hogwarts, argued, read books, and had a slightly too exciting bath.
We parented through a pandemic (or rather, we are doing it right now).
A lot has changed, is what I am trying to say.
And I sort of wish I could go back to my dumb-phone days.
In that one moment in space and time (Bristol, 2013, postnatal ward), I needed connection. My stupid little phone wasn’t enough. Chris, an exhausted new Dad, didn’t have the answers I wanted. I needed to know the things: did breastfeeding get better, would I always feel this scared, when can we go home?
But more importantly, I needed to know: do other people feel like this too?
In fact this is a big part of why I started writing again in the first place. To express ideas and to connect. To tentatively say ‘hello, I feel like this,’ and to hear people say ‘oh yes, I feel like this too.’ And this is what the internet offers. An instant sea of other people who are just like you.
It makes you feel less alone.
I needed that for a long time. I still do. But this year, something has changed. Whether lockdown has turned us into caged animals looking for people to argue with, or whether the world being so scary has made people turn on each other, or whether I’m literally just noticing how bad it is for the first time, something has definitely changed for me. Whereas in the olden days of the internet I would read a conversation like this:
Person 1: I like circles.
Person 2: Oh yes, I also like circles.
Person 3: I like circles but I am quite partial to a square.
Person 2: I’d like to hear your reasoning about the square thing.
Person 3: I mean, I quite like the angles?
I started reading more things like this:
Person 1: I like circles.
Person 2: Okay but have you thought about squares?
Person 3: I personally think circles suck and if you had broken into my home and slapped my grandmother several times across the face I would be less insulted than I am right now.
And then eventually this:
Person: I like circles.
Person 2: You’re a **** and you deserve to die.
Person 3: Here’s a back catalogue of all the terrible things I think you’ve done. I look forward to you losing your job, social life, and reputation.
Person 4: Hey person 1? I sent you a picture of my naked penis for some reason. Can you check your DMs
(I’m sorry, this is becoming really tedious.)
Just so many arguments. And really depressingly, a lot of arguments from communities that I expected better from. So much hatred of other people. And it becomes so, so, so draining. The next outrage. The next scandal. I just can’t deal with it. Especially this year when going on Twitter or Facebook made me want to scream
‘THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE DYING A DAY. WHO EVEN CARES ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT ANYONE LIKES CIRCLES. WHAT IS THE POINT’
And so this year has got me thinking about the value of taking all this information into my brain and whether those things deserve to be there or not.
So the one thing that I wanted (online connection) has gone awry somewhere along the line. And it’s really down to me to figure out how to deal with this. On the one hand I am a freelancer and do rely on social media for any sort of self-promotion.
And there is so much joy to be found online. Genuine friends and communities that actually manage to function with a lot of hard work and commitment.
So it’s not like I think all of the internet is bad. If you can push past all the filters and stuff it does actually show us a pretty good reflection of ourselves (collectively). An unflinching look at the bad parts as well as the good.
It’s just that the bad bits have become too much. I can’t watch more people tearing into each other over things that don’t matter. It’s too much, it’s hurting me, it’s addictive, it’s making me feel sad on a daily basis.
Something that was designed to connect us to other people is actually making me really, really dislike people.
Which sucks.
So I’m gonna try to, you know, figure this out. 2021 needs to be a ‘healthier mind’ year, I think. I need to put some sort of parameters in place that will enable me to connect with others whilst not taking in meaningless arguments and panic-inducing 24/7 news updates.
And this was an epic blog post without a proper meaning really.
Well I guess I’m wondering what I’m always wondering.
Do other people feel this way?
If you’ve made it this far, wow and thank you and happy new year and stay safe.
I’m logging off for January (and possibly beyond?) for a bit of a digital detox. (If you want to know more about this I’d really recommend the book Digital Minimalism, which is helping me to figure this stuff out without being preachy or massively unrealistic).
See you on the other side. ❤
