On being a mother to a new baby, but not a ‘new mom’

If I reflect on my experience of being a mother for the first time, it was like the roar of crashing surf as a storm surge hits the cliffs, while being an ‘again’ mother sounds more like waves lapping on a sandy beach bay as the tide swells. It is calm. Serene. Uncomplicated, and has an inevitability. The frustrations, uncertainties, fears and lack of context I felt with Anna simply don’t exist anymore.

I don’t try to control nap-time because I know now that nap-time is outside of my control. If a baby needs to sleep enough, they will communicate that to me, and otherwise I will do my best to attempt to put them to sleep within a window of time I feel is appropriate. If it doesn’t happen, life goes on.

The baby eats, often pouches of pureed nonsense, but more and more the family table foods that will eventually become his normal. He sometimes has to cry for a minute longer than his sister did, because now I have double the amount of tiny people needing me, and the same amount of hands. This is also fine, because no one can get exactly what they want all of the time.

There are many things I appreciate about being a second-time-rounder. I don’t jolt awake at night to make sure James is breathing quite as often as I did with Anna, which I did constantly. I know what to ‘expect’ in terms of milestones and phases, and I know that no matter what I expect, I am personally in control of none of it. Biology, genetics, the agency of that tiny person are far more powerful than the wishes of a mother.

In freeing myself from some of the more anxiety-inducing experiences of that old New Motherhood, I find myself loving Baby James in a completely different way. My love for Anna as a small baby was a sort of euphoric and exhausting mess, tinged with sleep deprivation and insecurity. I loved her profoundly and obsessively, partly because of the lack of knowledge about how and when she would change. I had to love this version of her completely, commit every ounce of experience to memory, because I didn’t know when and how she would change. I had no other baby to compare her to, no other experience of being a mother. Most significantly of all, her personality is so vivid and intense, everything I gave to her, she demanded of me a hundred fold more.

My love for James comes with security, knowledge, maturity, experience. I know that he will change, and roughly when and how, and that is perfectly ok. I know that I am competent and a good care-giver, so my love for him isn’t tinged with insecurity that I need to love him the most of all in case it isn’t enough and in case I amn’t enough. Because I know that for a small baby, their mother can’t be anything but absolutely everything. Their first landscape to climb all over, their first source of absolute and pure connection. He is also most conveniently an easy-going and contented little soul, and so he doesn’t expect more of me than a squeeze and a kiss whenever he needs it. He is happy with his lot, and that allows me to take a deep breath and to be content too.

There’s a lot in being a mother of a new baby, but in being a mother of a new baby again, that is something completely different.

Life in Lockdown - January

We're approaching the end of the first month of 2021, and, excepting the ongoing nightmare that is Covid, it hasn't been terrible. I've always loved the new year, new beginnings, a clean slate. The idea of it and the lived experience. This year is strange and different of course - until we get the vaccine sorted it's going to be hard to travel, probably worth avoiding altogether. In the spirit of the lingering pandemic I kept the Christmas tree up until it was a crumbling, dry shell of it's former self. The sparkling and twinkling lights helped enormously. 

Weather-wise it's been a cold and windy one. But more importantly, we had our first snow! It lasted but a day, oh but what a day! Anna sled, made snow angels, a snow man, we had snowball fights and just walked around the park in awe. I waiting all year long in 2020 for snow, checking my weather apps daily, so 2021 so far has *not* disappointed.

Our little home endures, given the circumstances. We're plotting and planning for the coming months and really thinking about what our game plan is for the coming year. Big changes are afoot and I'm excited to get up and get on. Of course I'm hinging a lot on this vaccine coming through and being the saving grace we need. I just can't see how life can go on in this constant lockdown  

Perhaps the biggest change for me that's come this year is a change that's needed to happen for quite a while now. I spoke to my GP (quite unintentionally, as it turns out) about mental health, and I'm making a definitive shift towards improving my mood and bringing myself back to a mindset that allows me to be my best self, for myself. 

Happy New Year - The Year That Wasn't

I lost a day somewhere this week It makes little difference, considering the year that's in it. Baby James had a 3 day fever from Stephen's Day, that might have something to do with the blurring of time and space. 2021, eh. What is there to say, honestly. 2020 feels like the year that wasn't. We ended 2019 on such a high - got married, packed up and sold our house, moved country. New opportunities, new beginnings. 'Making a better life' we called it.

So happy, so full of promise and hope, so naive. 

The year was begun with much anticipation. Ringing in the new year with my closest friends, flying on New Years Day, waiting for social security numbers, hospital scans, kindergarten spaces, unpacking our shipped boxes. I would try to get a job before the baby came. I might find the time to write a paper. Alas, dear reader, it was not to be. We did manage a lovely 3rd birthday for Anna in Meath in March, and that was the end of the road for us.

I don't want to be self-indulgent, many people have experienced losses this year. But it would be disingenuous to say that the only losses that 'matter' are the ending of lives. I can appreciate greatly how loss and death and grieving affect individuals and families. But there are other losses too, and we have a right to mourn them. 

The loss of first meetings of newborns, and maybe more profoundly, of last meetings with loved ones at the end of their life, in spaces of restful dignity. Of new friendships blossoming, visiting old friends, big weddings with lots of dancing, going to pubs and cinemas and galleries, of travelling to sunny destinations for a bit of a break, hugs, job opportunities, any opportunities, time to write and think and reflect. It's been a hard old year, hasn't it. 

But I suppose you have to look on the bright side. I learned some profound lessons about myself, I'm sure we all did. And there's a lot about life and all the messy things in it I'll never take for granted again.

Happy New Year, here's to something better than what came before.

Amy xo

Starting 2020 with so much hope

Looking Forward to Christmas

Weird one this year, lads. Weird one. Most people who know me know that I am a great lover of all things Christmas. I give myself permission to blast Christmas music from November 1st. I decorate cookies, put tiny ornaments on every surface. I live for the joy, the peace, the goodwill towards all men. I am, as I write, wearing Christmas-bow earrings 

But this year, as it does for many, Christmas feels a little different. All our Christmas 'stuff' is in boxes in another country. My children won't get to hug their grandparents on Christmas morning (in fact, all grandparents but one haven't even met Baby James yet). There's a lot about this season that's hard. But I'm under no illusion that this feeling is unique to me, nor that this sense of detatchment from how it 'should be' is different from a feeling that people the world over feel every day, pandemic or not. 

I struggled to write anything at all this year. Personal, creative writing has been a huge part of my life always and I've missed it. Somehow, continuing to show up for Christmas even when I'm feeling mixed feelings about it is a part of trying to overcome this creative funk I can't seem to get out of. I've been slowly but surely finding my old joy-loving self, but it'd be a lie to say she's been with me a lot this year. I'm doing my best to focus on celebrating the good times together with my dear little family - the cookie decorating, getting our tree, making clay ornaments, dancing to All I Want For Christmas Is You, Anna's endless questions about The Good List, the Nativity, twinking lights. 

This is an ode to Christmases, well wishes to have a celebration filled with Christmas movies and cake, and a wish for a more hopeful time in 2021 and onwards.

Peace and joy xo

For the Love of Blogs

Oh dear dear me, it has been a year. I used to so love writing blog posts. I had a think about it while I was in the shower earlier, and I've been bloggin on one platform or another for twenty years. Yes, since my first Myspace page had that little blog section in the top right hand corner. Over the past year, I have, like many people in this world, been incredibly sad. Sad, frustrated, overwhelmed, any number of less-than positive emotions. So I didn't write, I didn't share my stories the way I used to. 

I realised this morning that I miss that, that absolutely normal, often mundane practice of writing a blog post and talking about the silly stuff of life. It's been an important way for me to keep in touch with friends and family, and this past year I've found myself slipping further and further away from them - taking longer to reply to messages, not reaching out when I would love help or support, in many ways isolating myself emotionally as well as (obviously) physically. 

I started up a Wordpress blog for the purpose of discussing topics relating to the more 'academic' side of my interests, but to be honest I couldn't be bothered keeping that up at this point. I'm going to re-share those posts here, and then I'm just going to keep on writing here. This blog The Feel of Home, has been with me for so long that I'm just going to share those posts here and I'm going to keep writing about the topics that resonate most with me - being a mother, 'home' (what does that mean these days, when I live in a glorified Airbnb miles from home), muddling through life. 

Welcome back, friends. Thanks for sticking around. Sorry I never write back. I'm just very sad right now, you see.

On breastfeeding and The Algorithm

Happy #nationalbreastfeedingweek. I've been breastfeeding humans for going on 3.5 years. I never expected this, to be honest. I’ve immensely enjoyed my experience because it’s helped me bond with my children. I am a person who enjoys strategies of convenience and breastfeeding is very very convenient in my life, at this moment in time. It helps me get more sleep, my children seem to have gained a lot from the experience, and I can be smug in the knowledge that I have vastly exceeded the WHO recommendations on infant feeding.  So I'll take that as a net gain. 

But this post isn't about actual breastfeeding, #fedisbest, 'shaming', conversations how and where and when a person breastfeeds, any of that. They're all part of discourses around the fact that mothers feeding babies is part of a highly emotionally charged and politicised agenda centered on women's bodies, sexualisation, care, work and value. Instead, this post is about how my experience of being a mother is mediated through social media content, and how that is visually and affectively controlled by The Algorithm.

 I do think there is a tendency for people to amplify the importance of the significance of the experience they are going through. That’s just human psychology. This is important to me = this must be important to those around me, and ultimately be important. The algorithm that controls what we see on social media is very good at honing in on the things it thinks you want, or at least the things that are similar to you. So my online experience is dominated visually by images of parenting, pregnancy, babies, children. 

Instead of using social media as a form of home interior, food, political banter escapism from babies and toddlers, my social media landscape has become an endless scroll of mothers, babies, tiny baby booties, those wobble boards and Grimms rainbows everyone insists are 'heirloom' items, but are actually just unnecessary and very expensively hand-painted pieces of wood. 

And while, yes, I love the baby things in my own life, I don’t want to necessarily think about it all of the time. I don't want my social media experience to be dominated by it. Because it’s all about balance, isn’t it. Babies today are children tomorrow. Breastfeeding is a moment in time. Tummy time is given over to algebra and learning musical instruments. One minute it’s baby led weaning and the next it’s olives and steak (and then maybe back to softly mashed foods eventually, anyway, when you get much much older).

What I’m trying to say is that its all life and it’s all beautiful and messy and joyful and all-consuming, in a sense, but it’s also important to keep it all in context. And being in this perverse, highly intimate relationship with social media that we all are means constantly negotiating your boundaries with it, reflecting on how it presents itself to you, and how much of yourself is enough to give.

x

Starting over again

It's now been a week since we moved back to Copenhagen. We loved living here when we were younger, and are now overjoyed to be back. I think Anna will thrive there, and in the long-term it's the best way for our family to progress and grow. 

It's sad, of course, to think of leaving behind family and friends, and that we won't see them every other week as we do now. But the reality is that sometimes hard choices have to be made to move forwards. The cost of living in Ireland for people in our position (with young children) is prohibitively high and you're either cash-poor or time-poor, no inbetween.

So for now, are the foreseeable future, we are back. We're now in that awkward in-between stage of setting up bank accounts, getting a bike, setting up social security numbers and registering Anna for kindergarten (!) and all of it.

I know blogs are mostly dead, but I'm going to keep writing, like I always have.

Not very typically Danish, but omg they have Dunkin' Donuts in the Central Station!
I love donuts. Anna loves donuts. We're donut people. 

On valuing our own contributions as parents and carers.

I've been reflecting a lot this year on two things - firstly, just how hard it is to be the main carer for a smaller child. Their physical, emotional, creative needs are vast. They grow and change a mile a minute and there's no way of keeping up. You're just along for the ride. And I say this as the parent of an incredibly independent little kid. It's just such an exhausting, never-ending job. Anna is also still breastfed, which puts quite a bit of physical and emotional pressure on me to 'be there for her' in a lot of ways. 

Secondly, I've been thinking a lot about my own biases about what constitutes 'value'. It took me all this time, 9 months, to accept that the work I do taking care of Anna is valuable and that I do not need to qualify my 'so, what do you do?' responses with justifications. I really thought I needed to. I thought people who think badly of me for not being in paid work because, I suppose, I thought badly of me. But enough time has passed that I've accepted that the work Anna and I do every day (playing, mostly) is genuinely important. 

What's more, I've been doing my own empirical work on the topic. I've spoken to dozens and dozens of parents, grandparents, people from all walks of life and cultures (that's the joy of seeking out difference rather than staying stuck in your bubble, I suppose). Do you know what not one of these people has said to me? That I should go back to work. Not a one. All of them expressed very clear opinions about how wonderful and precious a time the early years is in a child's life, how much of an honour it is to be there with them to go through it alongside them, and how quickly this time ends.

So for now, I've made my choice. I do believe we should all contribute to the betterment of others in whatever way possible, and my way, for the next few years, is to be with my small people and be their greatest helper. If that isn't adding value, I don't know what is.

On My Little Daughter, Who is Practically a Woman Now

 My daughter, Anna, is 20 months young. All through her early months I wrote little blog posts as a sort of catharsis. In those days she was still small enough and immobile enough that, balanced on a breastfeeding pillow on my lap, or nestle in the crook of my arm, I could wield a laptop or a phone well enough to jot down some thoughts. Which I did, hunched over in the dark, right from about Day Three. I've never been keen on sitting still and I don't think that's an admirable quality.  

There was a lot of breastfeeding in those days, weeks, months, sitting and waiting and holding her while she slept, and thinking about all the other things I might be doing, used to be doing, could be doing. I found it incredibly frustrating at times. I spent a lot of time thinking about what it would feel like when I wasn't bothered by it anymore. But by and by she changed, because eventually everything changes. 

One of my most cherished discoveries in recent years is the singer/composer Tom Rosenthal. He has two particular songs that just feel so much like my early thoughts of being a mother. In the first one he laments 'just as I thought you could not sleep, you slept', in the second he asks 'a lifetime of trouble, but how could I not love you?'.

How perfect are those sentiments, for a parent wonder if their baby will ever sleep out of their arms,  who comes crashing into their world and turns everything upside down? And how perfectly they encapsulate a memory you can hold onto when those experiences are long gone.

Life update as we enter the closing phase of 2019

It's been a minute. It's been several minutes. If I'm being totally honest, taking care of a toddler in a full-time capacity while doing all the other bits and pieces I do has left me with no time. I've been with Anna at home full time since January, since I quit my job, which ended up being an utter disappointment. 

It was meant to be my gateway to academia in Ireland, but it quickly became evident that the job wasn't going to provide me with any networking opportunities and probably no tangible outputs I could put my name to either. I was crushed. I was isolated in my work, stressed out dealing with constantly shifting childcare arrangements, and the emotional aspect of leaving my child with other people all day was just more than I could handle at that point. It just wasn't worth it, so I quit. 

In January I had a miscarriage and that was tremendously emotional, so I was grateful to not have to worry about getting up early, packing lunches and taking passive-aggressive phone calls. A few months passed in a haze of...lots and lots of crying and lying there, if I'm being totally honest. Cognitively, I understood that what happened was not a huge deal - a first trimester miscarriage just isn't that uncommon. But my hormones went crazy afterwards and that caused me to struggle. Plus, we're allowed to grieve and perceive what our bodies go through separately from what we understand to be true about health in a general sense. 

But a lot of good things came out of the year. I worked on my friend's campaign in the local elections, and helped support female candidates in my role as Secretary of Labour Women. I helped to successfully set up our local Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann branch. I started teaching tin whistle and acted as Treasurer. We did a few musical performances  The book we wrote as a culmination of the project I worked on for my PhD was published (it's open access, have a read!). I did some research for a Union and we published a report on the state of the childcare sector for its' workers in Ireland. It was picked up by all the major media outlets, I spoke on the radio and in the Dáil. We didn't get the concession we were asking for, so the fight continues. 

So now we're entering the final few months of 2019. There's a lot of life-changing things coming up, and I can genuinely say in retrospect that everything at the start of the year has helped prepare me for the new and exciting challenges that await. Also, on a completely superficial note, I am incredibly excited to start the Christmas music and scented candles (I've promised myself I can begin as soon as the pumpkin has to be thrown out. Any day now).

Amy xo