A lot of recent scientific research has confirmed that the maternal brain gets significantly altered postpartum. There is a literal rearrangement that happens that explains the brain fog feeling many women have reported across time. I find myself forgetful when it comes to many logistical aspects that have to do with my work, but if you ask me when my four-month-old is scheduled for a nap, I can calculate the exact time frame, based on when he woke up. I can intuit his behavioural changes before they even manifest. For instance, one week before he began rolling over, I knew he would reach that milestone.
There’s something magnificent about this brain alchemy that offers coping strategies and helps you prioritise your task list. Each time, though, I forget something on the professional front (yesterday, I totally blanked out about a meeting I had agreed to at noon my time), I remind myself not to be too rough on myself. It happens. It doesn’t make me unprofessional, just a freelancer who doesn’t have the luxury of not working.
Since this is my second time around, a do-over, so to speak, I feel admittedly more confident and less fazed by it all. For a while, I was convinced it must be so for everyone… There must be a universal rule that says that the second time around, everything is easier, but many mothers with whom I have chatted about this told me point-blank that their second was way more difficult than the first. One friend referred to her second-born as a monster who cries constantly and refuses even a pacifier. Another told me her second-born is a terrible sleeper. Another said hers was simply too hyper. Maybe the second child falls easily into the trap of comparison because the first child sets a standard by which to contrast and differentiate. Then I think the second child is perhaps different because you, as a mother, are different, altered and transformed because of the fact of matrescence. Even a year after my first, I will still be busy ‘becoming mother’. With my second, I am already that.
This means, sometimes, that it’s a bit easier to be somewhat audacious. Two days ago, for instance, I shamelessly picked up a copy of a book that had been calling out to me from my bookshelf. It was a purchase I made alongside other books in English, which, given where I live, I had to order online. It was likely I had even read it before; my mother brain couldn’t remember. But its slim size, its blue, cloth-bound hardback cover with text laid under the title felt arresting. It was Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know. And the quote on the cover reads ‘To become a writer, I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to just speak in my own voice, which is not loud at all.’ I told myself that just how I had managed to write a book two years ago in the in-between time I managed to find while my firstborn was asleep, I would read this book whenever I could. Surprisingly, as I write this dispatch, I have barely two pages left to finish the book. And what a satisfying, soul-fulfilling read!
I’d forgotten about the immediacy with which Levy’s words leap off the page, the flourish with which she renders her subjectivity, her consciousness, and her memories. There’s a precision to each sentence, a sparing, poetic undertone that comes from deeply wrestling with one’s thoughts, the consequence of her ability to perhaps both trust and doubt herself. No one ever tells you that self-trust and self-doubt are like two sides of a coin. You need to strike the right balance between both. Now that my firstborn is three and a half, I want to model for him the idea of having hobbies and taking time to pursue leisure.
So, I decided to simply read while he was chilling with me on the lawn of the swimming pool, listening to audiobooks while eating a snack and doing the occasional somersault. To my delight, he seemed to respect my decision to read, not once asking me to put down the book. I read furiously, turning each page in a kind of frenzy. I frequently wanted to underline sentences that felt magical, instead, I just continued reading. But this one bit, among others, stayed with me, from the very beginning, when Levy remembers waiting with other mothers to collect her children from school: ‘Now that we were mothers we were all shadows of our former selves, chased by the women we used to be before we had children. We didn’t really know what to do with her, this fierce, independent young woman who followed us about, shouting and pointing the finger while we wheeled our buggies in the English rain. We tried to answer her back but we did not have the language to explain that we were not women who had merely ‘acquired’ some children — we had metamorphosed (new heavy bodies, milk in our breasts, hormonally programmed to run to our babies when they cried) into someone we did not entirely understand.’
These days, the distance between me as a mother and the fierce independent woman I used to be feels less colossal. I wonder, though, if the gap will ever be bridged, and the self I had to shed in order to accommodate life will ever re-inhabit my maternal body.
Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She posts @rosad1985 on Instagram
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