bone opening

‘after glacial opening, are the bones still moving? there’s a need for closing, a platonic offering’

Alongside these feelings of needing permission to have a baby, also came the doubt in how to talk about it. How to share without shifting the focus, posting irrelevant or ‘mum’ content. The idea that I had to pretend to be exactly as I was beforehand. Cue the most intense and transformational time of my life.

As if becoming a mother, growing a life and experiencing the glacial moving, bone opening of birthing a human isn’t enough to completely and utterly change me, the knock on effects which followed were even more profound. I hadn’t realised that I lived with anxiety, and that I had developed a hard facing control system to ensure I never felt out of control. In hindsight it was clear as day in my relationship, our battle of live-in-the-moment husband and need-to-plan wife had been there since early days, but my children were the ones to show me the mirror, because infants do not stick to plans.

When my daughter was about 6 months old, I was spending most of my time tucked away at home in a small rural village in Sussex. I didn’t drive, and my two and a half year old had not yet spent any time in childcare. He was only 9 months when we had gone into lock-down and it just felt like he still wasn’t ready. I started having panic attacks, out of the blue with no discernible trigger. Everything would spin and my chest would tighten. When I look back now I see those events as a spectator, as an out of body experience.

Once these attacks had become regular I decided to start speaking to a therapist. On our first phone call I told her that I had small children. She replied by saying that often our own birth can be brought to the surface when we give birth to our children, she said, for example some people are born with the cord around their neck and therefore can experience panic. I burst into tears. I was born with the cord wrapped around my neck, I felt like I’d unlocked some secret to my nervous system that I hadn’t known for nearly 30 years.

The following therapy sessions taught me a lot about myself, but most noticeably and most profoundly was my rather adept ability to intellectualise my emotions. As a songwriter I have always used my writing to hide away all the sad and painful things in my life, so I don’t have to feel them. Well, children don’t come with that filter and you can not run away from them. They will make you walk through those feelings and they will make sure that you learn to sit with them so that they can learn how to, too.

All this to say- once you start to become less afraid of those feelings, you become less afraid of the things that illicit those feelings. So what if someone thinks you’re a bit ‘mumsy’ on instagram, rehearsing for a show with kids running riot in the background? That is exactly what my life looks like most of the time, and if I’m afraid of others seeing that then how can I possibly raise my kids with any integrity of self.