014. The Most Promising Season

It hadn’t seemed possible to me at the beginning that the beginning would be something I might miss.

May is my favourite month. It’s the most promising season of the year, when everything is briefly possible, almost-about-to-happen. What gets me most of all is the light. Its warmth, its familiarity, the way it catches on the new leaves of the trees and turns them almost translucent at certain times of day.

No coincidence I suppose that I met my husband in May, that my son was born in May, even though he wasn’t supposed to be.

He was born three years ago. Whenever I think of his birth I think of the hospital room where we spent the next week, he and I, and I think of the light. I keep returning to that room, which once felt like a prison. It surprises me: a pang, a faint sense of homesickness for the room, for the late May light coming through the window, even for that trembling fear of the unknown, for the smell of sanitiser on my hands as I brought them to my mouth to eat another dry sandwich at odd times of day and night while my baby, born suddenly after all those years of trying, slept under strange blue lights they said would help him, and did.

For three years now I’ve been thinking about forms of homesickness and homecoming, without really appreciating that the whole time time has been passing. It hadn’t seemed possible to me at the beginning that the beginning would be something I might miss, or that forgetting and yearning are so closely linked, one always eclipsing the other. But the light of this season is my reminder.

Sometimes, now, we cycle to the botanic garden. I’ve been taking him here for so long, since he was a newborn and I pushed him around while he slept, fed him in the shade on a bench by the fountain. Now we sit outside the cafe and share an ice cream. He has passionfruit sorbet and I have vanilla, and sometimes I dip my spoon into his and sometimes he dips his spoon into mine. At night he tells me he loves me, or that he isn’t tired, or that penguins live in Antarctica. Language has been a homecoming. I have found motherhood infinitely easier and more pleasurable since we have been able to communicate through words, though I also recognise it as an assertion of his own power and agency, a moving away from me and my imposition of desires – no, I don’t want that, no, I want to do this instead.

I keep coming back to that room, that light. The strangeness of that time, the way it is now bracketed by the bustle of normalcy. It is almost inaccessible to me now – was it really that way? The dreamlike quality of the days, which at the time were steeped in anxieties both specific and diffuse, has mellowed now, a druggy haze. (And the background hum: pandemic pandemic pandemic pandemic. How can we keep forgetting? All those women alone on the ward sobbing, hands held by midwives in plastic gowns and surgical masks, when can we go home?)

Somehow in my memory, in that room, I am both more and less put together than I actually was. I lost my mind, I left my body, for hours at a time, floating in the unknowing expanse of sleepless day-night-day-nights. If you’d said then that I would feel like myself again I would have laughed: impossible, impossible! But of course I do, now. I have for a long time. More or less. Certain things have left me, or come to me, certain things have shifted. The self is a landscape in motion, after all; no stillness, even when the specific direction of travel is not possible to perceive. The whole time time has been passing.

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What I’m reading

For a long time I have not been able to read, not properly, not like I used to, and for a long time I blamed it on the baby, and then on the impossibly delicate balance of work and raising a child and sleeping and eating and exercising and all the rest of it – where amid all that would I fit in reading time? I don’t think I can blame any of that now, I can’t blame anything except for the fact that I’m simply out of the habit. I’ve forgotten how to read. Except that recently, finally, four books have grabbed me and held me:

I read all of Lucy by the Sea in one sitting, on the plane from London to Los Angeles, while my kid watched about eight hours straight of Paw Patrol. If anyone was going to pull me out of a reading rut of course it was going to be Elizabeth Strout, whose writing makes me feel simultaneously comforted and wildly exhilarated. And then, after that, Weather by Jenny Offill was exactly what I needed – funny and sharp and tender and spare. Writers & Lovers by Lily King is making me actively look forward to reading each evening, and its depiction of Boston in the pre-smartphone era is an added nostalgic bonus. And Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Cacophony of Bone, recently arrived, is thrillingly beautiful.

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ADRIFT, my memoir about uncertainty, (in)fertility, and swimming laps, is out in paperback (and hardback, and audiobook…) You can buy it from your favourite bookshop, or via any of the links below:

Blackwell’s | bookshop.org | Waterstones | Daunt

If you’ve read and enjoyed it, please consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon – it helps more than you might think. Thank you! x