‘To Experience New Motherhood is to Experience a Type of Grief’: How The Birth of My Daughter Made Me Think About Death
By Sapphire Allard
Becoming a mother to my daughter made me simultaneously worry about her future and think back on my own childhood. These thoughts led to a sense of how quickly time passes, and how inevitable death eventually is. Collectively, the emotions these topics threw up brought about an intense grief that stalked me like a ghost and made me alarmed and ashamed for the first weeks of her life. So when I heard someone say on the radio that to experience new motherhood was to experience a type of grief, I breathed out a sigh of relief.
Once I heard it out loud, it made total sense. The presenter so succinctly and logically summed up how the loss of one’s freedom, employment, body, friendships and sex life, among other things, has an adjustment period and a grieving process. I wonder now whether this explanation, which seemed to be pointing to a list of tangible exterior factors, really explains the experience I was trying to articulate.
The feeling was more akin to the expected grief we feel in bereavement. The first time my daughter grew out of an item of clothing the grief I felt was an aching, bodily grief. The only situation in which I had ever touched time in this way before was in the company of a dying loved one. Nobody can deny a failing body; neither can we deny bags of tiny clothes that no longer fit piling up week after week.
After the birth, I had been warned about day three and it delivered. It was four in the morning, and my milk was coming in. I was sitting up in the darkness feeling exhaustion that I had never felt anything close to before, and I became aware of a loneliness that frightened me.
This was not the happiest I had ever felt, although I now had a baby, the only thing in life that I had ever really known for sure I wanted. But the love I felt for my daughter was so close to fear. I have never cared more about someone else’s survival, never felt my life more connected to theirs, nor felt more certain that their death would mean my own. But she was, to all intents and purposes, a stranger. And I was so, so tired.
Of course I felt love, but it wasn’t the overriding feeling at that time. Fear was what I can remember feeling. Fear and a type of exhaustion that made me recognise that whilst I’d known the meaning of this word in a dictionary-definition sense, I’d never known its meaning in an oh-sweet-lord-my-body-and-mind-are-collapsing-in-on-themselves sense.
I don’t know how far along the ‘normal’ scale my emotions in early motherhood were, but it doesn’t resonate with me to say I had postnatal depression. What does resonate with me is to say that in those first few days and weeks, a part of me died and a part of me was born. And seeing as both life and death are big experiences on their own, it makes sense that collectively they felt enormous.
It didn’t help that the things that normally made me feel like me were – at least in those first few months – entirely inaccessible. Even leaving the house was mission impossible. Yet what made it worse was the pressure to act as if nothing had changed, that I could carry on as before. When the other parent goes ‘back to work’ two weeks later, apparently that’s when our mental adjustments need to be complete.
Similarly, when my friend died by suicide when my daughter was seven months old, I literally didn’t have the time to grieve, so I didn’t. Instead, I had to hold it in the way I was holding in my poos and then pushing them out in brief moments that suited my daughter’s ‘sleep schedule’ (two words only known by dictionary definition).
It is these exterior factors of both experiences, ‘mother grief’ and ‘death grief’ as I will subtly name them now, that give me confidence to say that these two experiences are connected. Of course, the actual grief of knowing our loved ones are no longer in the world is soul-shattering, but sadness is not the only emotion. ‘Death grief’ is also perplexing, confusing, surreal, beautiful and even exhilarating at times.
Moments that were previously ordinary become so intensely vivid that they take on crystalline perfection, a kind of beauty that hurts and thrills me in equal measure. These mini epiphanies don’t usually last more than a few weeks, and perhaps they are an adrenaline-fuelled survival response, but they make it almost as hard to function like a normal adult as the ‘everything hurts’ days. Yet still, as in my postnatal early days, I am expected to get dressed and do the weekly shop, to pretend that nothing had changed me.
Like mental health, it’s become trendier to talk about grief after the worst has passed, or in theoretical terms, but not when things are bad. Not when you’re crying on the bus or sending an email cancelling work five months after your loved one’s death because a random wave of grief has crushed you today, in a way that didn’t happen on that person’s birthday or funeral.
Following my friend’s death, I had so little energy or spare time that I really didn’t want to waste it being with anyone who either didn’t know him or who wouldn’t talk about him in a real way, in a three-dimensional manner. Not just, ‘Oh, how sad’, but in every colour and texture that did his life and death justice.
Equally, when I was dealing with the intensity of my identity being burned to the ground before it could be reshaped differently as a mother, I didn’t want to be with people who were going to say things like, ‘Is she good?’ (WTF, by the way, does this question even mean?)
I didn’t even want to be in the company of anyone who wasn’t a new mother: I needed someone who would understand that I had visualised dropping my child down the stairs, that motherhood is the most life-changing, beautifully horrendous wonderful unspeakable extraordinary ordinary thing I have ever experienced. And no, I hadn’t figured out how to get dressed before midday yet either.
Now, my daughter grows out of clothes less quickly. Nobody can function in this intensity every day, but my body and mind have adjusted to these new realisations, and has processed the miracle with the inevitably and necessity of the way we are able to process so many hard things. This adjustment to toddlerhood comes with some degree of stability too, one that I never had pre-child: one nap a day at (sort of) the same time, a bedtime routine. I can almost be fooled again into thinking things never change. But they always do.
So, soak it all up – and cry on a bus if you need to.
Sapphire Allard teaches creative writing in outreach and Adult Education settings. She has a PhD in English from the University of Kent. Her fiction and poetry have been published by Ambit, Sunday Mornings at The River, Lucent Dreaming and other literary journals. Her work has also been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize.