Far Bird

C is four months old. I wanted to keep this journal up in present tense, as though these things were being marked as they happened. I liked the pace of it, the signal like a train stopping neatly at stations along the way. But what I have is indecipherable notes on my phone, some voicenotes to myself with C in the background, but most hastily typed messages, full of autocorrections and all but unreadable. Some are odes to her beauty, her preciousness; others are cryptic, suggestive but unclear. I feel this panic, this fear about this writing, about keeping up, and every day I think about it, mourn it, regret it and chastise myself for not managing to write, to note down. I am constantly vague and starting to get very angry. 

This is countered by an effusive and all pervading love that softens everything and makes it difficult to get anything done. C is constantly cute and funny, or else annoying and grinding, but either way I am willingly a slave to her. So to save her from its force, I direct my resentment to Ricky, who plays tennis “for his mental and physical health” in the morning while I silently cry with C moaning beside me in bed. 

She’s flailed much of the night. She and Ricky have had fine nights. Ricky sleeps like a redwood; C seems to windmill while perfectly asleep. It is only me who is awake. The phones click off their charging as loadshedding starts, and the printer beeps when it ends. I am aware, awake. My nipples are so sore. I do not want to give her any more breast, knowing she is not taking them for hunger, but for comfort. Can I not comfort you in another way? I withhold. She begins to scream. I offer them. She stops, for a while. 

I feel beaten, punched all night by C’s little fists. My nipples, wet from milk and her mouth, stick to her face as she slings her head back and forth, crushing them against her cheek which then sticks to the nipple which is yanked outwards as she tosses her head. I am angry. I am tired. I am scooped out. Pooped. C needs so much of me. 

I went to a mom’s group, but no other mothers came. It was just me and the convenor. She says no one listens to mothers, and fancies herself someone who does, but I’ve barely begun before she’s dishing out “have you trieds”: have you tried giving her the bottle? Have you tried leaving her with a friend? Having a baby empties you out and makes it difficult to remember the word “grapefruit”, but people seem to think it makes you an absolute imbecile. What?! A friend? Why… why didn’t I think of that? 

Still, she tells me about a book about how the French parent and it gives me permission to put my baby down. I’ve been holding her in my arms for four months straight, night and day, trying to find the line of myself, trying to feel where it is possible for me to be myself, though that self feels vague and guilt-ridden. I find parts pouring out of me. A saintly mother, deeply satisfied and tied to sacrifice, singing the baby to sleep; a depressed professor incapable of getting anything done in this house; and there, right on the far edge of my consciousness, flickering, a monster. 

I have been aware of this monster before, but now it is out in force far beyond what it was before C’s birth. When I pass a knife on the sink I – or, no, not I, the monster – imagines sinking it into Ricky or one of the dogs. This little flicker, a glimmer of an image that shoots across my mind like a star – did you see it? No? No, neither did I, I lie. Violent scenes like that, the knife running across a neck, or sticking out of a stomach. Easily ignorable, though also interesting. What is it? Who? Then, in exact proportion to C’s profound innocence and loveliness, the violence on the periphery of my consciousness explodes: hot coffee is thrown in C’s face, or her feet are put in the blender, or toothpicks are used to skewer out her eyes. Oh God! How could I? These images, these impulses flash on the edge of my consciousness, making my throat constrict. I have not yet stabbed Ricky or the dogs and obviously would never actually hurt C, but there is a part of me that is monstrous, murderous, finds in household objects weapons to torture and destroy. Is this all mine? I wonder if I am holding the pent up violence of generations of women, and especially generations of mothers. Or perhaps that’s just a way to dilute the responsibility for this terribleness. 

My therapist suggests it is the dark mother energy that I’ve flipped on by giving birth. The bottom side of the loving mother is the devouring one, a great unhinged jaw swallowing her children whole, or else, and I think this is more common, a stealthy straw stuck into the bodies of children and sucked on constantly by mothers who cannot be satiated, like Buddhism’s hungry ghosts: creatures with enormous stomachs and pinhole mouths. I feel this aspect sneaking into me. 

C will not take the bottle. We try every day. I pump 100ml which we decant into all manner of bottles with easy or difficult nipples, slow or fast flow, we give her milk in the morning, the afternoon, when she’s hungry, when she’s full, when she’s medium, by me or by Ricky, when I’m in the room or out. She is just confused by it, mouthing the teat with a frown. “Oh, well,” we say. “I guess we’ll try again tomorrow.” Every now and then I ham up some of the frustration I feel. I must feed C, who “snacks”, as one midwife said to me disapprovingly, about every hour or two, day and night. (We are told to withhold food to lengthen the time between feeds. When I ask my lactation consultant she says breasts are used for all sorts of things outside of nutrition, including, of course, comfort, and that I should consider carefully the repercussions of withholding.) I am needed. I am this child’s only lifeline. I cannot stop. I cannot go back to Zumba. I must, I have to, be around her all day and night. Ricky cannot do it. My mother cannot do it. Only I can do it. And I feel the power of this, the deliciousness of being the only one, and also of being able to moan about it, to weep to friends about the exhaustion I feel, about the intensity of it all. The feeding does genuinely break me, but I also thoroughly enjoy it. So I wonder if I’m somehow signalling to C not to take the bottle, so I can continue being both a hero and a martyr, and continue to blame her. This is the devouring mother aspect rising in me. (Even wondering if I am unconsciously controlling C is an element of it, as I centre myself and demand she is the sun revolving around me.) 

But this is not the same as the monster, that is something altogether less known or knowable, hazy, and because I cannot neatly countenance it, much scarier. It is associated with – though is not equal to – a molten rage I find bubbling in myself.

One morning I am in the dining room stuffing nappies while Ricky writes emails. C is on a little mattress on the table, batting the silly monkeys on her play gym. 

Ricky mumbles something to me but I’m listening to a podcast, so I say to him slowly, “Remember, I’m listening to something, so you’ll have to signal to get my attention if you want to talk to me.” 

I said this exact thing to him yesterday. 

“What are you listening to all day?” he asks. 

I pause, look at him. He is looking right back at me. Something stretches between us, then snaps. 

“Nothing,” I say, keeping my voice very low. “A podcast. Whatever.” 

“You know, it’s pretty rich you saying to me I should be more present when you’re always only half here.” 

Often when Ricky holds C he lets her cry or fuss much longer than I would because he’s on his phone playing word games. It makes me equal parts confused and angry: I could simply never not attend to her because her sounds affect me like a geiger counter alarm. 

After his comment I keep perfectly still, a half stuffed nappy suspended in my hands. A silence opens. 

Then Ricky says, “It’s maybe affecting C, this inattention.” 

Secretly I agree with him, or a part of me does. I feel guilty. Guilty for wandering back to what I was interested in before, guilty for not concentrating. I’m not sure what happens next. I think I scream, “Fine!”, as in Fine, I’ll stop listening to the only thing keeping me sane while I do the world’s most repetitive, unrelenting job. A sort of whiteness blankets me as I grab the nappies and C and shove off to do the chores in another room, but Ricky follows and continues to harangue me, telling me I may not model this kind of illogical hysteria to our daughter. I begin to scream. There are no words, just a full-throated outflowing coming from my pelvic floor. 

Many years ago I bungee jumped and was surprised at the noise I made as my swan dive turned horizontal. It was as though my body itself screamed, forgetting the ropes as it saw death in the arms of a far off river valley. I do this again, now, in my daughter’s bedroom, starting high, then descending. I find I cannot stop; it just pours out of me.

C dissolves into tears. Ricky picks her up and rushes out the room. I slam the door and continue to scream, feeling something shaking loose in the core of me. Ricky comes back in with C and tells me to stop it. Every time I start winding up another scream C cries harder. 

I yell, “Give me room!” and re-slam the door and make the sound a dog makes after it’s run over. Finally, I turn off the spigot inside me, take C back and put her on my breast. 

“Sorry,” I whimper. “Sorry, sorry.” 

C whimpers back. I feel hot and ashamed, but I also feel much, much better, though my throat aches. 

All my life I’ve been nice, or tried to be. Most of the time I swallow the scream. I want to be neat and compliant; I want to be kind, compassionate, good. So has my mother and her mother. Where does unsung fury go?