By Carlie Blume
@carliejblume
These days I find myself reflecting on when I had my first child. I think about that brief narrow of time filled with sleepless nights and the soft scent of a brand new human; the first year. When I look back, I think about how strange of a phase it was. Everything felt so sped up and slowed down all at once. Like a distant fever dream; gone just as quick as it arrived. And even though I struggled with maintaining my mental health and was often overwhelmed with the role of motherhood, I can’t help but cling to those soft, serene moments that existed beneath all the chaos.
But memory can be a funny thing can’t it?
The human brain has an extraordinary way of blocking out certain parts and bolstering others. When I think back to those first months of my daughter’s life my brain lingers but then naturally takes me to the phase that came soon after the fever dream, the beginning of the end of the honeymoon phase. It was when a slight shift occurred. Something that I can only describe now as an invisible bulk collecting inside of me. A culminating sensation that started to slowly grow with every milestone my daughter reached. And as she grew older I started to notice a few things about this newfound title of “mother” and how I fit within it and what this label was doing to my mental health. And l will preface of course—as many mothers feel compelled to do when they write truthfully about these experiences (an almost nervous tick brought on by fear of inevitably being judged)—that nothing changed regarding my love for my child. But something definitely started to feel a bit heavier.
I couldn’t stop worrying about how I might never live up to what others constitute as a “good mother.” It seems strange that I would even care what strangers think of me. And when it came to other aspects in my life I wasn’t in the regular habit of seeking, outward affirmation like this but I know that society’s projections, expectations, even colonisation of the word “mother” had gotten into my head. And still to this day I am never not aware of the variety of labels, poised in the wings, waiting to be slapped on my forehead at any given moment. For a long time, I wouldn’t even allow myself to hover over these thoughts for too long. They were far too tender and complex for me to sort through.
It was only when I started reading books that featured flawed, messy, complex mothers that allowed me to sit with my own tangled truths, write about them and ultimately even be okay with the mother I was or would never be. Books like Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante, The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith and The Change Room by Karen Connelly. These characters changed how I viewed myself as well as how I viewed other mothers, reminding me that like everyone else, mothers are human.
In the everyday world there are still so many women who don’t share their truth with one another. A lot of it likely has to do with fear and shame. A sense of failing at the task put in front of them. My grandmother always used to say to me that women hid these things because it wouldn’t be in the best interest of procreation and the human race to share how hard motherhood really was. But I see it the other way; we must depend on these uncomfortable truths for the sake of humanity. If our mental health quietly degrades and crumbles alone in a corner all for the sake of propping up a vision of perfection that doesn’t even exist, then we will get ourselves in far more trouble than we could ever imagine. This is why I will continue to seek out characters who question everything in their lives, who have at one point considered what it would be like to walk away from it all; mothers who continue to break then rebuild themselves, all the while fantasizing about that splinter of time in their past when they were a single body. A time when their mental and physical topographies weren’t roller cut into pizza slices, rationed out, passed around throughout the day and served to the lovely but very hungry humans they built their lives around.
And this is not because misery loves company. It is because these are the experiences that most accurately describe the true experience of motherhood. It’s not the social media humblebrags, the “life hacks”, or the jazzed up date night selfies or even the posts about failed Sunday morning pancakes. It’s the ugly tears, the hard won time to yourself, the feeling of never being enough, the fear that one day you might enter through that portal of reflection and linger a little too long, long enough to never be able to come back again. It is in those experiences is where real life resides.
Carlie Blume is a writer of fiction and poetry. Her writing centres on women’s issues, motherhood, mental health and the sexual politics within relationships and marriage. She loves crisp autumn evenings, Yacht Rock and Murder She Wrote.
