Close the door behind you. DINNERRRRR. Have you got your coat? Why do I have to keep repeating myself? I love you. Where are you? That’s the last of the milk. Come here to me. Leave me alone. Morning, what did you dream? Are you hungry? Goodnight, my darling. I need some space. Shit. Where’s my phone? I’m exhausted. How can I help? You have half the forest in your hair. Please come for a walk. What did you say, what did he say? Look at that sparrowhawk. Are you well? I haven’t sat down all day. Can I pour you a drink? Go to sleep. Wake up. Sshhhhh.
This is our mother tongue, the language of home and hearth, the words we were raised on before we started speaking the language of power, objectivity and reason. It is baby talk, our native tongue, any way of speaking, writing and reading that has earth and savour, art and experience. It is the dialect I have chosen for this piece of writing.
‘‘The mother tongue is language not as mere communication but as relation, relationship. It connects. It is written, not by scribes and secretaries for posterity; it flies from the mouth on the breath that is our life…It is a language on the verge of silence and often on the verge of song. It is the language stories are told in.’1
A Conversation
Last week, I attended my first Birthing Circle, a space for women to share their stories of childbirth and early motherhood. An opportunity for us to speak in our native language, the mother tongue.
“My name is June2 and I have had seven pregnancies.”
June is a mother of three.
We could have left the room after the introductions, so rich was the storytelling in our opening sentence. But we settled into silence around an altar of spring flowers and candles. My intention for the evening was to listen. I confess to thinking I didn’t really need to tell my birth stories, sure didn’t I have three quick, natural deliveries?
The mother tongue, however, is a conversation. When the room filled with stories, I wanted to offer mine in return. I had not prepared anything, I did not have an anecdote or specific image from any of my three births. Today, I am 12 years a mother and it all seems so long ago. Is there any value in dredging the past?
I had a word rattling around in my mind - natural. I thought if I spoke it aloud, it might undam my stories of those wild, weary days.
‘A word rots, if carried under the tongue for too long.’ - Yvonne Vera
I spoke of the pressure inherent in the phrase She’s a natural when I felt like the most terrified, uncertain version of myself. My children shot into the world like bullets and no-one told me that my body would be blown to bits and bloodied. These natural deliveries were no less shocking the second and third time.
I had an image of myself this time 12 years ago, standing outside the hospital with a car seat full of baby, waiting for my husband to pick us up. It was a grey, wet day with people going about their business and I wanted to howl like an animal in the rain.
The Natural Way
When I spoke about what came next, I started to cry. The women of the circle got an incoherent account of my battle to feed my baby the natural way. Here is the story I tried to share:
The mother in the bay opposite mine had beautiful, blonde hair, silk pyjamas and a perfectly content newborn in the crib next to her. She was reading magazines, taking phone calls, applying lipstick. I was a shadow of myself in a cotton nightie and two odd socks. My son was howling and refusing to feed. There were clips on my nursing bra and another set on the nursing nightie, it was like cracking into a bank vault to access my breast. I was flustered, vomiting over the bed rail after the oxytocin injection I was given to hurry the placenta along. My husband had been sent home. The midwife was threatening to catheterize me if I didn’t pee, and all I wanted was someone to pull the curtain so I could hide from the perky blonde.
At five o’clock in the morning, a midwife took my son away so I could rest. She fed him a bottle. I don’t remember her asking if she could. Maybe she did. Just a wee bit to settle him, she told me after. I was six hours post-partum, and already needing intervention.
I had no idea what I was doing.
Fast forward two months. My husband and I are balanced on the edge of the bed, my son in the rugby position, nose to nipple, disinterested but starving. My husband drips precious drops of milk-I-pumped-earlier down my chest towards my son’s mouth. He is hot on the scent of his meal, mouthing desperately to be fed. Thirty mils later, he latches on, I freeze in position then curl my toes in pain. My husband and I Hurrah in whispers as I feed for ten straight minutes.
Simple mastitis, blocked ducts, periductal mastitis, cracked nipples, engorgement, blisters, ductal thrush. This is what natural breastfeeding felt like for me.
Are you still reading?
Offer Your Experience
‘I am sick of the silence of women. I want to hear you speaking all the languages, offering your experience as truth, as human truth.’
I have a photograph of my son, aged five months, under the water of a swimming pool. It is very Nirvana. Every time I look at it I remember the cafe upstairs where I tried to feed him under a big hood of a thing designed for a discreet feeding experience.
At one point, the two of us were under the hood. It was hot and my chlorinated nipple was distasteful to him. Please, I begged. He kicked out, ripped off the covering and exposed my chapped nips to the general public.
I want to tell my younger self how fucking brave she was to set up a feeding station, on her own, in the dingy leisure centre cafe when she was feverish with infection and desperately sleep-deprived. I want to say, ‘Go home. You don’t need underwater pictures, you don’t need Gina Ford or Jo Jingles or soft play, you need to crawl into bed with your baby and stay there.’
I wouldn’t have listened, though. You see, I thought I was failing at motherhood and I did not have a great attitude to failure then (I have, thankfully, had many opportunities to fail since, so my philosophy on failure is more robust!)
I Hope You Can See Yourself
‘When you look at yourself in the mirror, I hope you can see yourself…I hope you look away from those myths and into your own eyes, and see your own strength.’
‘I just couldn’t do it,’ is the phrase I repeated in the Birthing Circle. It’s not true. I did do it, five months the first time, seven the second and almost ten the third. I got better over time. I discovered lanolin cream and silver nipple cups, I was quick to take antibiotics when mastitis hit (and it did, several times, with every child) and I sat with breastfeeding consultants so my latch could be scrutinized from every angle. It was never easy. Every feed hurt. No-body told me. No-body told me.
I don’t know if I made the right decision to persevere the way I did. It certainly cost me a lot. I will not judge my younger self harshly because she was doing her absolute best and she loved those babies with every fibre of her being. For years I worried that my fixation with breastfeeding success had impacted those early days of infant bonding. There was so much guilt.
Other Stories Too
But there are other stories too.
My sister got married. I wore a fabulous dress, utterly unfit for feeding. My son and I stole away for quiet moments in a suite that overlooked the garden. I sat in the window seat, the sun tickled his forehead with long, slender fingers. He held my thumb in his tiny hand as he fed.
We bought a backpack baby carrier when he was five-months-old. I walked for hours across the countryside, finding my feet, listening to rivers, singing Old MacDonald on repeat until he nodded off. I carried my daughter while my son hit his stride; I carried my third while the other two climbed trees.
The outdoors was all the healing we needed to remember ourselves, to become ourselves.
Once, I sat on a bench in Rowallane Gardens, feeding my youngest as winter set in. The others were beside me, legs dangling off the seat, drinking soup I made that morning. There were many days I found that sweet spot and it felt very, very good.
Not Very Maternal
‘When women speak truly, they speak subversively.’
I overheard a women tell her friend, “I don’t know if I should have a baby, I’m not very maternal.” This beautiful act of truth-telling could be the opening of a conversation on subverting our inherited notion of maternalism.
The Good Mother archetype is nurturing and protective, tender and self-effacing. I love how she knows her children’s needs before they even articulate them. Her body is in rhythm with theirs; her dream is to see them flourish. She is what we hope to be and the yardstick by which so many of us measure ourselves. But there are other maternal archetypes.
In the Mayan tradition, the Creative Rainbow Mother is a maternal misfit. She values freedom and intuition. She inspires her children, connects with them in unique ways and is as fierce as wolf. To recharge, she needs solitude and creative practice. She can be expressive and dynamic with an unpredictable energy that at once ignites, then again, scorches.
I find archetypes incredibly helpful. They create possibility and extend permission. They explain why, when my son was 10-months-old I strapped him to my chest and sewed Christmas gifts for every member of our family. Why I bake, ferment, grow flowers, keep bees, make healing balms, wallpaper my own walls, work with clay, train squash vertically, patchwork quilt and press flowers. Our attic is full of equipment pertaining to old hobbies of mine from the mosaic tile cutter to the sun paper to the blow torch and roller for making tree stump prints. I was not distracting myself from motherhood, I was refueling so I could pour myself into their lives every day.
This, too, is maternal.
Listen
‘Listen to other women, your sisters, your mothers, your grandmothers - if you don’t hear them how will you ever understand what your daughter says to you?’
When I listen to my daughter I hear her ambition and quest for independence. Her thirst for adventure causes my own throat to parch and the space opening between us is fertile ground. I want her to understand the mother tongue as valid discourse. To speak, sing, write, make art and science in this language. This work is for me but it is also so much for her.
Sacred Space
To gather in circle with a sacred centre is an ancient, spiritual practice. The fire was lit, communities came together to eat, tell stories, perform ceremonies. The Red Tent3 tradition of women withdrawing during the new moon for menstruation happened all over the world and dates back to 800 BC. There is no hierarchy in a circle. We face one another, we turn towards the centre where fire blazes or candles dance. It is sacred space.
To close our circle, the facilitator sang: Sinsearach, sinsearach, sinsearach, sinsearach. This word means ancestor in Irish. The tune was simple and we were invited to join in when we were ready. With eyes closed and voices raised, we acknowledged our place in the lineage of our female ancestors. I listened to my sisters sing, I made a place for their stories in my heart, I wrapped my arms around myself and loved the mother in me to bits.
‘I want to hear you: whether you’re writing an article or a poem or a letter or teaching a class or talking with friends or reading a novel or making a speech or proposing a law or giving a judgement or singing the baby to sleep or discussing the fate of nations, I want to hear you. Speak with a woman’s tongue. Come out and tell us what time of night it is! If we don’t tell our truth, who will?’
All quotations are from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Bryn Mawr Commencement Address speech which you can read in her collection Dancing at the Edge of the World.
Names have been changed.
I really enjoyed The Red Tent by Anita Diamant as an evocative piece of storytelling on this subject.
Timing is great Bethany. We are two mothers raising our toddler and our new baby (8 weeks) - it is not easy and yet it is what we want. No one talks about the anguish, pain and the guilt paired with the beauty and love of it all.
this is beautiful. i’m 7 months in and this really resonates. thank you 🤍