It’s been an hour and 3 unsuccessful transitions to the cot from our chair.
She is tired, we both are.
There is sick in my hair from yesterday and I want to shower, I desperately want to clean the last 24 hours away but she needs me completely.
One day things will change.
Those words give me hope on the harder days, and ground me in the perfectly imperfect ones.
When she is sick, everything stops.
Everything I need to do, the routines, the things that usually matter, how life looks day to day.
It stops, and a sudden attunement kicks in like no other.
The way her lethargic body feels against my own.
The rhythm of her breathing.
Her feeding patterns.
The things that no longer make her smile, and the faded light in her eyes.
It’s not just the sleeping on the floor next to her cot with one eye open.
It’s not having to do everything with one hand.
Or the house that looks like a tornado has ripped through it.
It’s not these things that weigh you down in fatigue.
It’s that all encompassing powerful attunement, the bond between a mother and her baby.
Where their heartbeat is your heartbeat.
Their cry is your cry.
Their call in the night has you moving before you’ve even heard it.
It’s the living, breathing, and thinking for another.
The worry and love tangled in the deepest connection.
She is still clinging to me, only calmed by my skin, some kind of superpower in itself.
And when I sit here in this exhausting intimacy, with my stained robe and matted hair; I think about how one day things will change.
And then I remind myself how I feel when I get sick.
How even now as an adult, when I think about it,
I still just want my mum.
We’re doing important work here.
So that when things do change,
that feeling of healing in love, and love, and love,
never will.
Shop the early motherhood poetry collection here