Update! Baby!

Hello lovely Patreonites! Patreon-knights, Patreon night people and day people, I have a baby! I have had this baby for about a week, and only now am I starting to feel like I can be trusted with the written word. (I am still on ‘maternity leave’. Though why I feel compelled to put it in quote marks when that’s exactly what I am, is weird and says something about legitimacy that I’m sure I’ll be capable of articulating some other time.)

Thanks for all of your lovely messages, I’m sorry I haven’t been able to reply Particularly to the worried ones. I am well.

I will have to decide some things over the next few weeks (and months, and decades), about how to include or not include or titrate this experience into my work.

One thing I was thinking of doing once I’m winding back into Productivity, and finding that fabled balance between the work I love and being living scaffolding for a soft skinned life form, was some late night voice recordings during feedings, or Night Feed Thoughts (yes, NFTs, I thought that would be funny. Is it funny? I don’t know any more) with some of the thoughts that have come to me to tell my child in those lonely, intimate, absorbed, time-warped strange hours. (Is this just a podcast idea? I think I mean to put it up on the Patreon only) Not discussing motherhood, but rather as a side product of the project as a whole. I think having that as a loose thing might be interesting. Let me know what you think and I’ll start experimenting.

At the moment I have been either Staring blankly into the middle distance, singing to my baby, (which at the moment makes me cry to do about 65% of the time) or talking to my U.K. friends on the phone, because it’s that or read my book on my kindle/phone (real books a no go because of not having enough hands or light) and given that I would rather talk about profound ideas to my infant daughter than disconnect from the exhaustion and extremeness of emotion, possibly a late night ramble is the go.

Which isn’t to say disconnecting from intense things isn’t a legitimate impulse, too. Plunging into books and out of the world has been a coping mechanism of mine for a long time, providing as it does, without major side effects (other than being bullied at school) protective distance, a set of tools for framing and articulating emotion into the realm of words and out of the realm of your guts. I will always defend fiction, and particularly unserious fiction - which is there to serve and delight its readers rather than the ego of the writer. I just want to maintain unbroken eye contact with the small stranger who recently made her way out of my body.

That said, I’ve always slightly envied people who can bear to be Very Emotional. (While also often being embarrassed by them, like, multidirectionally, like they should be less so and I should be more so). When my mum died, I called her family and friends, and was very focused on the task at hand, in order to get through it. Just concentrated on the words that needed to be said. It wasn’t a surprise to the people on that list of people to call. When I told most of them, sisters, friends, they thanked me and gave condolences, and then hung up, and I assume felt their emotions on their own time. Her friend from university, Janie immediately burst into tears. Immediately. And it was such a relief to me, in that stretched dry agony of a moment, that drought of shock and grief, for someone to just… burst into tears. What a gift.

Anyway, that’s what being postpartum is like. Like being Janie all the time. The combination of physical shock hitting you in a sort of full body boxing glove and obviously just a massive overdose of emotionbondinglove hormones and then the philosophical and practical ramifications of being fully responsible for one whole life and death entering the world in all its complex fractal impacts.

All of a sudden, after a lifetime of being able to say ‘Thankyou’ to an input and then walk away and react later, I am now constantly and completely subject to huge tides of emotion. I am overwhelmed with all of the emotions. It’s a lot - giving birth feels profound in a very practical way. As a fact you get very close to the edge of life and death and then you think about the place of memory and inheritance and existence and the universe - which manifests as staring out to sea singing the songs my mum sang to me and weeping uncontrollably.

That said, I also cried at a quote on a chocolate wrapper, so maybe it’s just a reaction to a major physical thing and not that deep (it is probably both).

By the way she makes the most adorable little sounds when she eats.

Physically I will talk about some other time. Overall, the feeling of numb shock from birth has worn off a little bit so I feel less like a full body impact/ hamburger meat anymore and it’s more individual pains.

I’m definitely thinking about the luck of being in the Public Health Care System in Australia. In the modern world, giving birth is not the life and death matter that it used to be, though you are still signing up for an unquantifiable amount of physical damage - you’re essentially agreeing to a minor car crash and you don’t know how you’re going to walk away from it. So the luxury of free world class care is magic.

Anyway all of which to say I’ve had a baby and what’s the formulation? Mum and bub both well

Xx

A