Heartbreaking relief

A story about a glimpse into the future of the new, old me.

A couple of years ago one late afternoon, I was coming back from the shops, or the library or the park. Polly was in the buggy, bare feet kicking in the sunshine. I was wearing shorts and a bright t-shirt, ignoring the bellring of anxiety in my stomach, the one that told me that bedtime was impending, but I wasn’t to get much sleep. 

We were in the height of a really awful sleep stage Polly was going through. She’d fall asleep at 7pm like a dream, but then wake every 30 minutes until 11pm. She’d then wake in 1-2 hourly increments until 5am when we’d get up. She wasn’t fully weaned yet, so we were also still breastfeeding every 45 minutes - two hours. I was spending most of my days solo, Will having gone back to work months ago. I was working, too, across socials for a high-maintenance agency that seemingly wanted me on call 24/7. Well, it’s not like I wasn’t awake to be available for them, eh? Although this period of godawful sleep was short-lived (around 10 weeks), it’s haunted me since. Forget the newborn stage, this was worse. 

I was absolutely cuckoo, leaving the house in slippers, not able to follow a TV show, wasn’t eating. How I managed to actually work is beyond me. I remember meeting a friend in Soho and feeling absolutely manic, an energy I didn’t have coursing through my veins as I tried to enjoy a rare evening away from my baby. I remember one night going for a drink with Will, my mum looking after Polly for the evening, and feeling abject RAGE at a man at the bar who suddenly laughed loudly. Anger that he could be so selfish being so noisy, when the baby was asleep, forgetting entirely she wasn’t actually with us. Everything during that time period revolved around sleep. Despite the fact that Polly has now slept through the night for months, every night I close her bedroom door and say a little prayer it will never happen again. 

But that one day, as I turned into our cul-de-sac, I saw my neighbour. She told me she’d just returned from a weekend away, a hen party I think it was. She looked healthy and sparkling, smiling at the memory of a hectic weekend with her friends, while her smiling two-year-old peeked out from behind her legs at me. 

Conversely, I looked grey, despite the summer sun. My weak frame was disappearing by the minute, not nourished by the three or four Belvita bars I shoved in it a few times a day. So I looked at her, and could not FATHOM a life in which I could look or feel like that ever again. 

Wasn’t that kind of life gone? A few snatched evenings out with my husband or friends here and there, sure. But a weekend away? How was it possible to leave a child who needed me so frequently, so deeply? But here was living proof, standing in front of me, that one day it might be possible to take more than a couple of hours to myself. 

And now, two years on, I’m counting down the months to attending my own friend’s hen party abroad. I can be further away than touching distance from Polly without feeling the visceral buzz of anxiety under my skin. She’s independent, happy to go to nursery and will have a go at anything. We’re still breastfeeding - but it’s not the full-time job it once was. What was hard is no longer, we’ve moved on to the daily challenges of being two (please can you just put your shoes on x 21245). 

I imagine the future much more than I look into the past - her first day of school, family holidays, her prom - and think of how much time and excitement we have ahead of us. I also look forwards, because looking back is just so painful.

A picture of her at a few months old will catch my breath in my throat, the grief roiling up as I mourn the little her who was here so briefly, before she became her next iteration. I miss being covered in food as we journeyed weaning together, a small bowl of yoghurt becoming a full-body sensory experience for us both. She uses her own little set of cutlery now, expertly spearing her food before telling me: “I’ve finished now Mummy, thank you.” 

No stage of motherhood is forever. And that is both a relief and a heartbreak.

The relief I find in regaining time to myself to fill my cup contrasts with the notion that in doing so, I’m not spending time with her. I used to keep my dressing gown next to my bed at night, so I could throw it on, on my way through to her bedroom when she woke. Now, it’s hung back on the door hook because, yes, I sleep. But it means I don’t get to feel the sensation of her warm little body throughout the night. She doesn’t need me to sleep. 

The brilliant Jessica Bradley wrote in her recent newsletter that “trying to mentally prepare for before having a child was to tell myself to expect parenthood to be a series of little deaths, and that I’d do better to not be tempted into mourning them all.”

But that’s exactly what it feels like. Living in the moment, day to day, the routine steady and the same, the same, the same. Until I look back and realise the little girl sitting in front of me isn’t the same at all. She grows up, up and away from me every single day. 

So, I smother her in kisses, tell her I love her, marvel at the size of her growing feet. And I carry on feeding her, a remnant of her baby days I’m loathe to let go of. I won’t stop feeding her until she me wants to. Like most everything else, it will be her choice.

I can’t imagine a time when she doesn’t think we are the funniest people on the planet. When she doesn’t scan a room for me to check I’m still there. When she no longer asks me to sing Baby Shark or do the Macarena in the kitchen, over and over. When her little feet no longer scamper through to our bedroom to poke her Dad (“Wake UP Daddy, it’s time to play!”). 

But even if I could, I wouldn’t freeze time. That is to say, although a glimpse at a picture of a three-month-old Polly can have me feel physical pain and suppressing the urge to sob, I know that there is so much more to know and learn about her. She’s got so much to come. And I’m so lucky to be experiencing every single part of it. 

But they don’t teach you about this kind of heartbreak in the antenatal classes though, do they?