22. “mum”

I burst into tears unexpectedly in my psychologist’s office: ‘He’s not my baby anymore.’

His body is long; his hair is long. I pull on a curl and it springs back, like the creeping tendrils of the passionfruit vine. Like the tail of a pig - an animal he seems to like.

My son likes farmyard animals, like all children. He pouts his lips exaggeratedly when I make the ‘moo’ sounds he likes. Like the sounds I made in labour. He imitates us more and more. He says ‘gone’ when something falls to the floor; approximates ‘cockatoo’ when one appears at his grandparents’ kitchen window. ‘Got you,’ he parrots, when his nana catches him in the hall.

I watch him sleep beside me and recognise the hardness in my chest as grief. Suddenly my son has become a toddler; suddenly my baby is gone. In the last couple of months he started to bite me with his two little teeth, grazing me roughly while he fed. I yelped, he laughed, and like that it became a game. It hurt. I cried.

He loves other people. Lights up for his dad, his grandmothers, grandfathers. Uncles and aunts. Puts on a good show; the kind of baby that makes people want to have a baby.

‘I know it’s a good thing,’ I say to my psychologist. ‘It’s good for him to need other people. I know it means he’s secure, I know it means it’s safe for him to lose his shit at me. I know it’s good. It still hurts me that he says other people’s names but he doesn’t say Mum.’

She reassures me that it’s common. I know. I know I know I know. Still.

I’m still at the centre of his orbit, but for the first time recently I felt it stretch beyond me. I’ll be honest: I panicked. I’ve spent the last eleven months adjusting to being needed with an intensity unlike any other - and that’s not even counting pregnancy. It’s humbling, to surrender completely in body and mind to the needs of another, only for them to need more than you can give.

I hate the word ‘humbling’. I use it so much these days.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the ability of mothers and children to wound one other.

I hold myself against the image of my mother I held as a child and feel the weight of expectation like so much water overhead. It will be a long time until my children understand how ill-prepared I feel for the task of mothering them. As long as it took me to understand.

It takes a whole childhood and more to learn how human your own parents are.

What a sucker, I think lovingly as I look at my son.

Last night he said it. Mum. Mumumumumum. Not like baby babble  from a few months ago. He looked at my face and I looked back at his, little puffer-fish lips mouthing ‘Mumumumumumum.’ It felt unreal. I cried and he blew raspberries on my wet cheeks, saying mumumumumum in his soft sweet voice.

Sometimes a circle closes and you don’t even notice. Sometimes you can feel the circle closing around you, keeping the outside out. Keeping the inside in.