From non-mother to mother: the scale of the change is almost unspeakable, says Guardian columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
Illustration: Tomekah George for the Guardian.Last modified on Mon 25 Apr 2022 17.51 BSThad been supposed to file two more columns in this series in advance, before taking some leave, but five weeks ago my waters broke in spectacular fashion – the way they do in films, the way the NCT woman said you really didn’t want them to break. “It’s too early,” I kept saying, again like some cinema cliche.
And so the boy, the bairn, is here . I am still adjusting to the fact that he is no longer inside me, that I thought I had five more weeks of kicks and punches, how I never got to see the reverse imprint of his hand on my skin. Anxieties about Covid notwithstanding, I loved being pregnant with him, and we’ve been catapulted into the fourth trimester without quite being done with the third.
During my week in the hospital, I kept seeing glimpses through windows of the most beautiful spring skies, promising a world outside for the both of us, if he would only breathe and feed on his own. After a few days I realised that I was not a prisoner, I could go out for a walk. In the lift I joked with a man about a discarded hat and how gross it would be if one of us put it on, and I was grateful that I could still hold a conversation that was not about my baby.
At the same time, he is everything, just as I am to him. My boy who could not wait, but whose eyes are scarcely open. Love,, set him going like a “fat gold watch”, but it has taken far more treatment than a “slap on the soles” from a midwife to give him a healthy start in life. In the small hours, in the bluish darkness of the ward, I sat next to his incubator and tried to remember lullabies, but amid the fear and the love and the painkiller fog the words had all vanished.
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