Tag Archives: motherhood

My island

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It was lying in bed last night that I began to question why I started keeping this public record of my experience of motherhood. Our windows were open to the summer air, a light rain fell and, understandably, I was feeling contemplative.

Casting my mind back, I thought in the very early days, it felt like this island of my old self in amongst the physical and emotional wreckage that having tiny twins had left in its wake. It linked me and my immediate alien state to the controllable and intellectual life I had known before.

As the months passed and life took on a new and less exhausting structure, my motives changed. I enjoyed hearing other people’s thoughts on what I was writing, and the idea that it gave them an insight into our life with babies in a new country, without me having to spend hours I didn’t have to spare on the phone.

Ever since my new life has come closer to my old life – intersecting professionally in at times quite a surprising way: my work takes me back to the office I sat in daily before the children were born, to the city where many of my friends still live, to the odd evening in restaurants I used to go to before I knew the less romantic reality the patter of tiny feet at 5am really meant. Now I am very busy and I have plenty of islands guiding me to myself.

So perhaps this record has become less essential? But, I thought watching the silhouetted leaves play their game on the curtains, it hasn’t: it’s just that its purpose has changed. No longer purely an overly-stylised record, nor a reminder of what I could do before my mind was addled with sleep deprivation, it has become a precious space for me to reflect on being a mother and what that means to me.

It is where I work out how I feel about certain challenges put in my way. It is where I muddle through how I ‘should’ be dealing with certain three-year old challenges to my desired status quo. High-blown as this may sound, I believe it is where I make note of my ideal of motherhood, in such a way that helps me act like that too (most of the time at least). Indeed, I would even go so far as to say that in writing this blog I possibly become a better mother, which is most likely why I persist.

Now enough pontificating and time to collect the children from nursery. Words are easier than actions.

May Day Outing

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To satiate any hungry grumbling we first ate cake in the greenhouse – the children picking raspberry jelly off the top. “That’s a pretty tree, Mama!” they shouted as the ran away from us down the path. Looking at the colour seeping back into their peaky cheeks, I felt like Heidi’s grandfather ordering a strict diet of creamy milk and wholesome bread for the ailing Clara. But here, with the skyline of the city still in sight, where the goats don’t produce, it was jelly and cherry blossom that did it.

The thought to be so adventurous with our bank holiday outing had not occurred to me. A friend with a car and a dog-earred copy of a city tips magazine for children suggested heading to the edge of the city, where the Botanic garden is wild and children can roam free. As I sat squashed between the car seats, knees up to my chin, I realised a hard winter and two years constrained by early twin motherhood had made my ideas for days out rather cautious and unambitious. This was the spur I needed.

All afternoon the children raced and whooped and pulled up wild flowers in their sticky fingers. Emboldened by the wide expanse of open sky, they pointed at the man doing tai chi in the distance and began to imitate his slow and loping walk. Hilarity ensued. It turns out playgrounds are not enough for city children. Hamster wheels on a human scale, they are too prescriptive for real excursions.