On the weekend I take off C’s nappy and it’s dry. It has been four hours since her last pee. A cold wave rushes through me. I call to Ricky and begin to cry. “We need to take her to the emergency room,” I say, though C seems quite content. “She’s dehydrated. She’s not getting enough!” I send a message to my lactation consultant and then to the midwife, begging for input. Neither responds. We settle on giving her a syringe full of milk, which she promptly throws up. Shortly afterwards she wets her nappy then goes to sleep. I try to figure out what happened. I seem to have told a story to myself, and then told the story to the lactation consultant and Karen via WhatsApp, which made it seem true, or truer. The story was that she was starving, possibly dying. It’s so hot, and the fan keeps shutting off during the long hours of loadshedding. It is so easy to dehydrate. And I didn’t know before that she was hungry and losing so much weight, more weight than any other baby. I swelter, use my tai chi fan to cool C while I try to read her signs. Heat and fear build up, filling the room like an odourless gas. After we change C from her big vomit, I am disgusted with myself. How will I possibly do this? I am too afraid, too unmotherly.
Days, then weeks, pass. My mother leaves. I cry. C visibly grows. Each day her eyes are open for longer. She begins to clock our faces; her body begins to take on heft. Her eyes are a slate grey blue, like the ocean just before dawn. A starry white jags out all around the hard dot of her pupil, which dilates and contracts as she feeds and in which I see myself, bobble-headed in outline. It is as though I were looking at my reflection in a spoon, strange, strange to be this creature’s mother. I watch as her eyelashes grow out from tiny stumps, am held by her miniature hands with their anti-knuckles dimpling inwards.
C is so utterly herself, so full of her own body. Even when she’s wailing she does it with a kind of fullness, her face crumples, her lower lip turns down, her eyes shut tight, all pulls in like the suction before a blast and then her mouth opens and a high wahhh comes out, her tongue making the top of an o and modulating the sound with short curls so it vibrates and pulsates with the rhythm of her breath.
We bounce on a purple exercise/birthing ball each evening as C fights, wails, moans; the sky outside our western windows throws the die of birds, then bats, and C struggles and stares out, bounce, bounce, bounce, now there is a stream of colour and cloud, giving us orange or pink or yellow, bounce, bounce, bounce, and C makes short desperate cries and then remembers herself and starts wailing again, the sky fades to grey, to dark blue, to black, bounce, bounce, bounce, C stares out in abjection, bounce, bounce, bounce, then, finally, almost always, sleeps, at least for a time, and the moon waxes and wanes, inching down our cottage panes as we bounce, bounce, bounce some more, to make sure she casts off these shores properly. When we stop bouncing our lower backs make us stagger, but we always keep C afloat on a cushion of arms and air, as though on a gyroscope, lest we wake her. When she sleeps, she is like a well-tied bow.
I am most surprised at my lack of resentment for her, though she keeps me from all the things on which I formerly spent my time and energy. She creeps into my sleep so that I can no longer ever fully find it, but instead we ride together in the night, deep and shallow, as I feel her stir and stir myself and offer a boob so she can drink and feel nothing but part of the stream that pushes the water wheel that makes the miller’s stone turn to ground down into a fine powder everything I used to be.
I find, against all expectations, that I enjoy motherhood. It is very, very slow, very rhythmic and simple – simple but difficult. It is not complex. There are only six things that C could need, and I can give her all of them: milk, sleep, a nappy change, play, help with discomfort and love. The demands are unrelenting but doable. Time is marked in the weight of a full breast, the length of a nap. My days stabilise: I spend most of the morning in bed, then migrate to the lounge to what one friend called my “nest” – “Still there I see,” Ricky’s business partner comments. I am deeply offended. Am I being lazy? Am I doing this wrong? Yesterday I was in exactly the same position. But I like it. I like the sameness, the simplicity. I like the nest of cushions, watching the light move across the room, putting C on her stomach till she howls in protest, then turning her on to her back again.
I am perpetually cut off from the water bottle or tea, from the nut bar just out of reach. My phone, not brought to this location, or not brought close enough to me, tantalisingly buzzes. But if no one is home, I must simply wait, wait for C to wake or finish feeding or for someone to bring me things. Over and over I make as though to grab my phone, or a book, or the water, and am thwarted over and over. Oh, yes, I’m stuck. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I’m an automaton, forgetting and being reminded. It is like meditation – oh, yes, my breath, oh, yes, I’m meditating, forgetting and coming back, back and forth. The reaches of my life are no more than an arm’s length, or less, no more than a hand’s length – or how far you can reach with a baby’s head balanced on your wrist. I am hungry often, thirsty, bored. Things go quiet. I am quiet, quite stuck, listening to the squeak of the rocking chair. I find I think very little. Time stretches, arches it back, settles down again. I nod, drift, but almost never fall asleep in the day. I seem to be constantly alert – not in the way a traffic controller is, but in the way a motion sensor light might be, off but always detecting, ready to flick on.
At first, in the first few weeks I marvelled at myself. I was not exhausted – I was tired, but I was fine. I could function very smoothly and efficiently, feeding and rocking and changing. What’s all the fuss? I wondered. Why are mothers so moany? But the almost total lack of deep sleep slowly begins to flay me. I become skinless, raw, sore. This is not tired, or even exhausted. I’ve been both of those. This is not something that a good rest or a strong cup of coffee could fix. It is not something drugs could fix. My muscles become heavy. I become aware of my wrist, which pats, pats, pats (I even sympathy pat when Ricky holds C while she cries like you would automatically press the brake on the passenger side). It is not sore, my wrist, just used, used up. My body feels dull and heavy. My arms remember her weight even when I’m not carrying her. My pelvis drags. I forget words, concepts, whole chunks of my mind slough off and fall into the void forming in the middle of me. The sleeplessness skins me and works into my muscles and bones, and an inner void gobbles my pruned synaptic pathways, my faculties and capacities, growing ever outwards. Soon the nothingness will meet and I’ll wink out of existence, like in the Never Ending Story.
Sometimes Ricky takes C after I feed her and I stumble off to the room to lie down. I cannot read, the words blur almost immediately, but I also cannot sleep. I put a podcast on then come to during the sign off music. I have not been asleep but I’ve not registered anything that’s been said. I worry about the messages I’m giving my subconscious. I lie between, hazy, hooked into my daughter’s nervous system, wired to her, already sitting up when Ricky walks in for a feed. (When he was working on his project I’d leave C with Ricky in a car seat on his desk for one sleep in the day. Invariably, I knew, or my body knew, when she had woken up. My boobs would begin to pour, or I’d just get a feeling and walk over to find her beginning to snuffle for food.) I feel I will die if I do not get real sleep, but I don’t.
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