012. In This Country

Everywhere I went, I saw other versions of myself

After my baby was born last year I spent a lot of time walking. I walked at dawn, at dusk, at midday, in all kinds of weather. The baby mostly slept, in his buggy, in his sling. I was often hungry, or thirsty, or had to pee, but I had learned to suppress these needs, which were secondary, it seemed, both to the baby’s, and to some deeper, more essential urge to go outside, to move, to be in the world again.

The other people I saw on my walks always seemed to have purpose. They were on their way to or from other places, they were meeting friends, they were standing in the playground watching while their robust, boisterous toddlers went down slides, they were, seemingly, unafraid – unafraid that they, or their children, would simply and suddenly dissolve, disappear, unafraid, unlike me, that they did not really exist anymore. 

A newborn seems so fragile, so impossible, and so does new parenthood. I could not imagine myself moving efficiently towards a particular destination – a shop, milk and bread, a bar of chocolate bought on impulse at the till, impulse! I hardly remembered what an impulse was, let alone what it might feel like to act on one. I could not conjure an image of my future self, standing at the slide, speaking to another parent, confident and recently showered; neither could I yet see myself reflected in the hunched figures of other new parents pushing buggies or sat on benches, urgently feeding their own small, strange creatures. I did not, in fact, know where I was in all this. Everywhere I went, I saw other versions of myself, the circular geography of the city lending itself to a kind of tour of my own past, but as for my present, well, she had no recognisable form here.

I had thirteen years of history in this place to excavate. I saw myself at twenty, just arrived, at twenty-five, at thirty. I saw myself most clearly just before my pregnancy, a warm, golden autumn, walking briskly to the library at lunchtime to spend the afternoon there, working on my book, which at that point was still just a rough draft, a hopeful thing, shutting my laptop as the closing-time bell rang, emerging into the sunlight, the bikes sweeping past, the air sweet and mild. I would stop at the Tesco Metro on my way home to pick up something for dinner, a cold bottle of beer maybe, salad greens, risotto rice, a single brown onion. My husband would still be making his way across London, starting the long journey home. He’d be late, of course, I’d listen to Radio 2 while I cooked, watch an episode of something stupid on Netflix while I ate. In the morning I’d go for a swim, I’d come home smelling of chlorine, my hair damp while I boiled water for coffee. 

The truth was that I was poised, waiting, about to leap, ready for change, that it would not have been feasible or enjoyable to be stuck in this routine forever and that I knew this even then – that, in part, is why it felt so sweet. But later, after the pregnancy, the birth, out walking, I would start to think of this particular autumn yearningly, in a way that did not immediately make sense to me until I recognised it as a form of homesickness. 

In one sense I felt that by giving birth I’d come home, at last, but I also felt in another sense that I’d become dislocated – from myself, from my body, from my past and also my future. I was not essentially unhappy, but I was not exactly comfortable, either. I didn’t recognise myself. It seemed impossible that I would ever recognise myself again, in fact. 

Myself felt like a distant shore that I was trying to reach, that I could see but not move towards.

The things I yearned for, when I began to catalogue them, were so ordinary: to spend an uninterrupted hour writing, to leave the house feeling that my body was my own, to go for a run or immerse myself in a body of water, to lie down in the middle of the day and close my eyes not from complete and utter exhaustion but simply because sometimes it’s pleasurable to do so; to drink my coffee in the garden, to tend to the garden, to dress nicely again, wear an outfit because I liked it and not because it was handy for breastfeeding or good for hiding milk stains, to waste time, to stay up past eight p.m. and not feel as if I was stealing something from myself, to sleep.

In TV shows, in books, whenever anyone got into bed and did anything other than sleep – read a book, checked their phone, talked to their partner, had sex – I envied them. I envied them so viscerally and powerfully that it was almost a sickness, almost hard to bear. How dare they, how dare they squander that opportunity. Never mind that it was fiction, never mind that in a few months I too would be back to wasting time myself, to taking it for granted. I was alone in this country, this strange sleepless land: other people understood, but no one, it felt, could reach me, how could they, I could not even reach myself.

*

In this country, no one else was ever any help. No one remembered anything! Friends who’d had babies not long before us could not seem to cast their mind back there, to that place they themselves had been so recently. They shook their heads, mmm, a vague recollection, oh yes, I do remember… but you could tell that they didn’t really remember remember, that is, they remembered in their minds but not their bodies. They didn’t remember details that seemed, at the time, terribly important to me: when had their baby hit certain milestones, for example, how had their baby slept at X number of weeks, how often had their baby fed, and how, specifically, had they been feeling in themselves at this point, or that one? 

I say this with no resentment, and as someone who now can’t remember any of it herself, except what I recorded. The forgetful country, which tricks you into believing that you’ll be stuck there forever, and then, when you’re not looking, when you least expect it, erases itself.

*

And then the homecoming. It’s hard to say when it happened, but it did. All those months of feeling like a stranger in my own home, my own body, and then suddenly there would be a flash of familiarity. One day I went for a run, leaking milk into my too-tight sports bra at an ungodly hour of the morning: it was only a little time, but I felt, finally, that I could afford it. One day I went and sat by the river and read a book for an hour in the summer evening light. One day I cooked dinner, for a change. One day I went for a walk with someone whose baby was even younger, even smaller than mine, and I realised that the feelings she was describing were feelings I had had, not feelings I was currently having; I may even have shaken my head, mmm, yes, I suppose I do remember…

There were lots of reasons that I began to feel myself again. Things changed when the baby started to sleep better – of course they did – and when he started to eat solid foods, when he became less dependent on my body for sustenance, when he moved into his own room, when he started to develop an active interest in the world around him, began to crawl and then to walk, and then to stomp robustly around the playground, to enjoy things like turning a bicycle wheel, pointing at birds, biting into a ripe plum, reaching out to touch a flower. I went back to work, then I went back to work full-time, we began to pay for a few days a week of childcare, I made myself build some time to write, or at least to think about writing, into my schedule, I began to swim again, we took a holiday, went to the sea for a few days, I walked to the shops, bought myself, on impulse, a silk-blend floral blouse which was particularly ill-suited to hiding milk stains: in other words the shape of our lives began to resemble itself again, even if it was different, too.

But what I really want to say is that while these things helped, the sense of homecoming also happened simply because it got easier, more comfortable, to be in this entirely new place – that in fact it wasn’t a homecoming at all, in the traditional sense, but a kind of homemaking, a settling in. It’s true, for example, that my body feels more or less like it belongs to me again, but it doesn’t feel like the same body it was before, either, of course it doesn’t, it’s slower, bigger, tougher, older, which in the end is no bad thing, but takes some getting used to.

It’s no good to pretend that I am writing this for the benefit of anyone who may find themselves, at this moment, in the forgetful country: when you’re there, reassurance is futile. And yet I’m writing it anyway, wishing anyway that it may bring comfort or hope, because what else is there? I would not say that I find it easy, now, or that I believe I’ve hit upon some kind of great truth about what it’s like to travel these lands. I will only say this: that I do not feel at risk of dissolving anymore, I do not feel that I can’t locate myself, and that I do believe that wherever you are, whyever you’re there, this will happen for you too, if you need it.

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Things I’m reading

I’ve been… struggling, if that’s the right word, with Twitter lately. This piece by Laura Snapes articulates some of the reasons why. I don’t know that I’m ready to give it up completely, but I also don’t know how to develop a healthier relationship with it. 

‘What do we lose as a culture when we make the tacit assumption that mothers will stop dreaming?’ So asks Rachel Yoder in this interview about her debut novel, Nightbitch, which I wanted to read before I came across this piece and now want to read even more urgently.

Not strictly speaking something I’ve been reading, but I listened Meg Mason interviewed on Francesca Steele’s Write-Off podcast (the premise of which – talking to authors about rejection – I love) on a run this weekend and found her incredibly funny and reassuring and inspiring. Sorrow and Bliss is next on my to-read pile.

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ADRIFT, my memoir about uncertainty, discovering the wilderness of your body, and swimming laps, is out now. You can buy it from your favourite bookshop, or via any of the links below:

Blackwell’s | bookshop.org | No Alibis | Waterstones

If you’ve read and enjoyed it, I’d be hugely grateful if you could leave a review on Amazon – it really helps. Thank you! x