The myth of motherhood and the chaos of creativity

I found my fire the night I gave birth to my daughter.

After the delivery was all done, I finally had chance to unpack my birthing plan, the bottles of sodding essential oils I’d stacked in my bag, and the hypnobirthing book.

I’d always imagined I was fairly neat and dainty, a vegetarian with good table manners. But once pregnant I would roast whole chickens that I’d devour strip by strip, drive with a paper bag of burgers on my knee, and eat fish and chips so urgently that I would go and scoff them in the park so the rest of humanity didn’t have to witness my lack of control.

I was absolutely, gloriously, enormous. Like Mr Greedy, I couldn’t even close my arms around my bump by the end.

My stomach felt like a seed pod, striped in purple, ready to burst. There was, very clearly, absolutely no way that I would make it all the way to nine months.

I was just too colossal. And when my waters broke it was like someone had knocked the top off a fire hydrant. Everything was larger-than-life, dignity-free and full of verve.  

Labouring was noisy and farmyard-esque, dragging on for day after day. It was not going to be the few quick pushes some people had, and rather than go to hospital, instead I went for lunch with my friends, walking by Hammersmith Bridge and stretching over the concrete with the contractions.  

I went off to hospital that evening and tried to roar my daughter into being, but even the force of a thousand contractions couldn’t move her out.

‘She was a stargazer,’ the kind assistant midwife said afterwards.

She was facing upwards – the wrong way, stuck.  

When she was finally surfaced two days later, I was so exhausted I fell asleep in the operating theatre.

But I had a new assertiveness I didn’t have before, or certainly didn’t share often.

I don’t think I had eight unbroken hours’ sleep for another two years, and I bobbed around in a dreamlike soup of hormones, anxiety and the sense that the world is suddenly swirling somewhere overhead, while you have dropped out to a lower sphere, one full of village hall stay-and-plays and tummy time and chats to the pharmacist.

Not lonely, exactly, but certainly more alienating.

But motherhood has a strange form, and Mother’s Day brings that to the forefront, because mothering is always about your relationship to someone else.

How I interacted with my Mum as a child, teenager, adult, and now as a mother myself, is probably quite different from how my Mum remembers it.

How I think I fare as a Mum, and how my own daughter might appraise me when she is grown up is likely to differ hugely.

Who is to say whose version is the more accurate?

In the earlier years of motherhood, I nurtured a vague sense that my daughter might have got on better in life if she had another Mum than me.

She might have been happier if she had a Mum who wanted to stay at home instead of going back to work.

If she had a Mum who didn’t sometimes sneak an audiobook on her headphones because I couldn’t listen to any more CBeebies.   

I recognise it for what it really was, now – it was the tired worst-case scenarios of a sleep-deprived, struggling Mum who was finding it hard to do her best and impossible to do everything.

Any creativity I had was squeezed into family life; decorating our home, thinking up imaginative games, cooking, making her laugh. And weirdly, when I look back at photos, I barely recognise how I felt. I’ve clearly put lots of effort into my own appearance – my hair is blow-dried, I’ve got a full face of makeup on, and I’m surprisingly colour-coordinated. If my outsides were OK, maybe my mind would follow.

My creativity has gone into pulling things together as best I can amid day after day of wanting to pull the duvet over my head and go back to bed.

Those bone-achingly tiring days were an anvil on which I hammered out my patience, my gratitude, and my grit.

And now I do get the odd hour, in the early morning, or late at night, or during the weekends, to work on my own projects, I am as thrilled with my creative self as I am when my daughter brings home a carefully drawn picture from school, or writes a sentence in wobbly letters.

And after those tough years, I enjoy it all the more.

Look what we can make.