a strumming

notes from a tired mother

‘Wake up Mama.’ 

But I’m already awake.

I was awake at 1.20, 2,15, 3.40, 5.10, 6, and now 7.

My infant son is host to vivid dreams.

I watch see his eyes, like arrows, behind their lids. Whatever he sees there makes him laugh or, more often, cry. And then he is awake again.

And, Reader—I cannot let him cry. Having wrested him from cosmic matter, having plucked him from the star-dusted skyline, I cannot leave him in the dark as his flushed cheeks grow wet.

And, besides: his cries make of me an animal. A hoofed animal, tearing up the loamy ground.

I am a cow with her forelegs in a ditch.

I am a lunatic horse braying against the walls of a barn that is burning.

The clean silver line of my C-section—a neat scar I stroke fondly in daylight—turns bright and searing. The dark pit of my womb is reaching out to reclaim him; to return him to the vigilant safety afforded by that red chamber. 

I am trying, but I don’t think I can capture the lunacy of my sleeplessness, which has now lasted almost two years. Nor the strangeness of the domestic dark. All it is: a healthy child, calling out for some primal comfort. And yet, it is here I’ve met my shadow twin. It is here I’ve glimpsed the wet rope of madness: it whirs by and I, having believed myself strong and quick, cannot catch it: I cannot grip.

I am awake and both the crying and the night go on and on.

I, too, go on and on.

‘Wakey wakey Mama.’

Leni Dothan, Sleeping Madonna, 2011, single channel video

I am reading Acts of Creation: on art & motherhood. I place my hand flat on images which I have never seen before but recognise—which seem to recognise me.

In Leni Dothan’s “Sleeping Madonna”, a video work in which a mother breastfeeds her child until they both fall asleep, I see that new facility which my body learned for me: to fall asleep upright with one or two limbs kept rigid so that my son’s head can stay resting in the dip of my elbow, his legs bent over my knee.

Marlene Dumas, The Painter, 1994, oil on canvas

In Marlene Dumas’ “The Painter”, I see a child marked by the stuff of Dumas’ artistic practice. A child who easily occupies paint’s kinetic potency.

Annegret Soltau, Ausgeliefert [Vulnerable], 1978, Gelatin silver prints with thread overstitched

In Annegret Soltau’s “Ausgeliefert [Vulnerable]”, I see a woman thoroughly compressed—bound—unto herself. The tethering thread is a reminder: this flesh is where you begin and end. There is nowhere else for your heart nor your mind to venture. This is what and where you are: a body, on a bed.

A bed.

I write these lines from the bed where my son is sleeping.

I know by the intonation of his breath he is about to waken, and I try to stopper the flow of my thoughts—beg them to be there, later. To wait.

The last time I wrote about my motherhood, I received a message from a painter I admire. She said, You can do both, meaning be a writer and a mother, it will just take everything you’ve got, all of the time.

Sometimes, sensing my depletion in the morning, my son will place a hand flat on my cheek. He will strum my lashes, and tend to me. When I do open my eyes I see him there, a calm observer. He pats my face, then—mild, but assertive—to let me know the night is done. 

‘Mama, wake up.’ 

Another time he traces, very carefully, the contour of my eyes and brow line. 

The seasons have changed, and not until 8am does his room brighten with daylight. 

But, this feeling of his soft touch along my lashes—it is its own immaculate sunrise.

*

WRITING PROMPT

Lie down next to another warm body while they are sleeping—choose any creature smaller than yourself, it need not be a child. Make sure the lights are low enough that you are squinting. Take a pen with very little ink left in its vial, and on the palm of your hand or the inside cover of a book, write and write and write.