Before / after

and the in-between of motherhood

In the lead-up to having a baby, and even when she joined us earthside, I was arrogantly opposed to the notion that I was ever going to change. 

For reasons I’m still figuring out, I wanted to keep control of ALL the things when I had Polly. The house, the work, the relationship, the friends, and, of course, myself. 

I used to flip out of bed in the mornings as if I hadn’t just experienced a birth that consisted of 26 hours of howling and mooing, ending in a forceful eviction, a second-degree tear and an episiotomy. 

Just want to tell this girl to go back to fucking bed.

I hoovered the house still bleeding, my stitches aching, like I’d had more than an hour and a half of consecutive sleep since my tiny daughter came into the world, alert and mewing.

I sat on brand new client calls as if my husband and I hadn’t just spent a week in NICU, staring glassy-eyed at all the Baby Loss Awareness posters in the tiny room they put us in while they gave our baby her third attempted lumbar puncture to see if she had Sepsis (she had).

I went to Brooklyn Beckham’s SuperDry launch in Oxford Circus a week later, my breasts leaking into doubled-up pads as I sipped champagne next to TikTokkers and tried to ignore my body absolutely SCREAMING at me to go home. 

21 days after giving birth, at Brooklyn’s launch. Fucking lunatic (me, not him).

From the minute she arrived, I showered, dressed, put on makeup and, well, just got on with it. I never even took one nap.

I was still me. The baby had just…arrived.

Part of me knows that some of this was a trauma response. I’m always good in an emergency. But most of it was that I wanted to hold on to as much of my previous life as possible. I wanted to do it ALL.

God, how I look back and wanna weep. I want to shake myself, kick myself in the shins for not properly leaning into matrescence. For pretending, so foolishly, that I could simply just pick up and carry on like nothing had changed. Not changed, not different, not boring at all! Look at meeeeee! What a disservice to Polly.

I wish I’d just stayed in fucking bed.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but my friend and colleague Rose Stokes posted something recently that put into words my feelings better than I ever could:

“Not only do we romanticise mothers as heroes, superwomen and almost supernatural in their ability to sense their child's needs and wants,” she said, “but we also consider motherhood to be boring, drab and have even come up with a pejorative word to describe its dullness: "mumsy".

Mothers are highly praised on a surface level but put down just as easily and ridiculed for their lack of ambition and their tendency to moan. I guess we can thank misogyny for that.”

And the kicker:

“I wish I'd celebrated the shift more rather than letting tired misogynistic perceptions of my life take over.”

Read the full post here

Oh, how I wish I’d not let those perceptions take over. 

Look, I can’t go back now. I’m not a new mother any longer. I’m not her, she is not me. She’s gone. What I CAN do is lean heavily into the shift NOW, grab it with both hands: the shift, the juggle, the dizzying highs and the crushing lows of what it means to be the mother of a sparkling, independent, stubborn two-year-old. 

I’d say it took me until close to Polly’s second birthday to truly deep it all and just simply…let go.

I still care, of course. I like my house to look nice, I work really hard, I do my best to maintain my friendships, I dress and put makeup on and sometimes I do like to go to swanky PR parties in Central London. But most of it is secondary. It’s background noise.

Like Rose says in her post, motherhood demands a rebrand.

Consider this my rebrand.

---

Hello, if you’re reading this. I haven’t written a post for So Basically, Like for almost a year. I’ve been in a blizzard of motherhood, work and not much else. The creativity I so enjoy has been on the back burner, but I fortuitously found myself with a little block of time before nursery pick-up.

Truth is, I have so many things I want to write, but I’ve been out of the game for a while. While I’ve been on the benches, other writers have written such beautiful things about motherhood that could have been a stream of consciousness from my own head, and I often tell them so. I’ve felt intimidated to come back. What good would my voice add?

I did forget though, how much I enjoy reading about motherhood. How comforting I find it, that we’re all singing the same songs, walking the same beaten track.

I’d like to join in again.

---

I’ve been deep in client work for many months, but I have managed to carve out a little bit of time for journalism.

If you missed them:

I wrote about my Body Dysmorphic Disorder for Glamour, which was shockingly painful to do

I wrote about why “child-free” zones on planes may not be such a bad thing for The Independent

As always, thanks for being here x