no. 51. soon will come

I wish you hadn’t been so fearful. So afraid of failing your baby, of letting him down, of doing something wrong. But perhaps you were even more afraid - selfishly, shamefully - of never getting your life back. Of losing something of yourself, an essence that felt like an identity chip removed from underneath your skin, the thing that told you who you were.  

I wish you hadn’t been so terrified. Terrified of not being able to get dressed or have a shower or make it up the hill before he needs feeding. I wish you hadn’t held on to those tiny limbs, and your sanity, with white knuckles and gritted teeth, nails always digging into palms. I wish you hadn’t held your shoulders up to your ears, wide awake at 4 am, panicked when the baby didn’t sleep or panicked when you couldn’t nap or panicked at why you couldn’t control how you were feeling. I wish you hadn’t wrapped yourself in invisible barbed wire, terrified of sudden movements, alert to catastrophe and danger at any minute, trying not to get scratched by all the sharp edges you imagined around you. 

Because now, 18 months later, you visit baby R, who is just 12 weeks old. She’s lying on her mat, all chubby legs kicking and big eyes blinking. Her mum looks tired but happy. She’s laughing, at ease. She’s not in denial about the slog. She cherishes baby R. She loves the stillness, the naps on the sofa in front of the TV, the closeness. You’ve had a baby but you don’t recognise this, you didn’t know it could be like this. And as you spent the Saturday afternoon together, watching baby R be put into her sling on her dad and drift off, and as you drank champagne and ate pizza, you had a painful realisation. Of all the things you didn’t - couldn’t - see when your baby was a tiny baby. Because you were so afraid.

Back then, you were unable to see that the only way through this was to lean into it, not, as you did, resist change with all your might, panicked and paralysed by the terror of what was happening. You certainly didn't see that the tighter you held on to what was, the harder it was to let it go, and the harder the days and the nights would become. Tragically, you think now, you couldn’t always see the wonder, the dazzling constellations and galaxies that orbit a new baby because anxiety eclipsed lightness, and darkness infected your bloodstream, your brain, your lungs. 

You couldn’t even begin to imagine that when you got shots of your old life again, some things hadn’t changed at all. When you finally sat in that hip eatery waiting for a friend you looked around and everything was just as it always was. The earth hadn’t crumbled; you had. The world hadn’t disappeared; you had. And it would all be there waiting for you when you got back on your feet.

You couldn’t see that tiredness can make you cry for days and dark winter afternoons can crush your soul, and you couldn’t see what was coming down the line - that soon it will be light at 7 pm and soon you’ll be writing words on a laptop. And soon is a word that expands and contracts but always comes good on its promise - soon will come. But you couldn’t see any of this. You could only see the ways your world was getting smaller. And it was too soon to see how he had made everything infinitely bigger. On New Year’s Eve, you felt so blue because, as you typed into your notes, what had you achieved this year? And as E watched the fireworks from the bedroom window at the stroke of midnight, a realization hit: you had kept your son alive for his first year on earth.

You couldn’t see the biggest achievement of your life. 

But now, 18 months on, you can see a bit more.

You can see that you were so much better at it than you gave yourself credit for. You can see how brutally hard some of those endless nights were, and not because you found them hard, but because they were hard, the hardest thing you’ll ever do, and you can see how you powered through, night after night after night. 

You can now see that holding on to a previous version of yourself is a fool's errand and that someone else is beginning to take form. You can see that you’ve taken a beating. Your body is not the way you want it to be. You don’t always know what to wear anymore. You’ve hollowed yourself out with worry and anxiety. Work is slow and hard because you have no time and no self-belief. You look more tired because you are. You can’t recover and rest if you are ill. You can’t complain if you’ve had no sleep. You can't see the people who make you feel like you because they live in a different city and that means something different these days.

Yet you can also now see that you are capable. So very capable. That your body is a miracle, and that your creativity has found a new voice and even if you are confident in nothing else, you know you love your son and you can do what he needs you to do. You can see you still deserve tenderness, kindness and patience. 

And you can see that this is all taking so much longer than you thought it would, and you can see that maybe it never really ends, but you know - even in the middle of a fucking sleep regression - you’re doing your best. Each day you try again, swimming upstream with everything you’ve got, trying to figure out how to make it all work. Each day you build anew and in the rubble of all that’s been, you can now see things for how they are; a body and brain transformed, a herculean determination not to give up.

So here is the light coming in, warming those worrisome bones. You feel an echo of strength as you unfold your limbs, straighten your back and wash your face. And you know now, that even on the days when you’re still frightened, now you’ve learned to live with the fear, you can finally see what is there; a little boy made of magic, and, in the distance, a path through the woods. 

Some great things: 

Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China by Yuan Yang. I found this fascinating and moving. Yang, an FT reporter, tells the story of China after Mao through the stories of young women and their families. It is a feat of reporting and offers incredible insight into the radical change in China over the last 40 years. It’s also incredibly inspiring. The lengths some of these girls, and later young women - especially those from rural China - take to follow their dreams is remarkable. 

America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids to save the world’ by Jenny Kleeman in the Guardian. A wild read. Surely just another American cult, where everyone - namely women and children - pay a brutal price for men’s ego. These men happen to be billionaire tech bros who seem quite comfortable with also being racist. 

Show Me A Hero, Now TV. Count yourself lucky I haven’t devoted 1800 words to this. Because I could have done so very easily. My writing hero David Simon (The Wire) takes on early 1990s Yonkers, New York, when the city is fighting over where to put much-needed public housing. This is a story of public housing but it’s really about race as white residents refuse to allow the new housing, which will house mostly black families, in their neighbourhoods. Oscar Issacs plays a very charismatic young politician who tries to build a career in the middle of all this. It is peak-Simon; an array of compelling and fully-formed characters from all corners of the socio-economic spectrum, representing a full range of views and with all the conflicting characteristics of humanity that Simon paints so very well. It is both witty and wry and poignant and heartbreaking. It is also utterly fascinating to watch in the post-Trump era, and arguably suggests that Trump is at least 40 years’ worth of political disgruntlement fashioned into one frightening spectacle, a monster a long time in the making. Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy said F. Scott Fitzgerald, which is exactly what Simon has done.