‘Without a Mother, I Don’t Know How to be One’: A Personal Reflection

By Lisbeth Black

Rock-a-bye baby

I imagine it less as a clock and more like a stick of dynamite. At some point, it got wedged deep within my sternum and lit itself – God knows I didn’t light it. 

On the treetop

Can I possibly blame it on John Lewis? The shop of possibilities for the rich and taken care of; to the poor it’s basically torture porn. You think ooh, what a lovely casserole dish, then you realise the price is the equivalent to making casseroles for the rest of your life. I mean, I work in a dead-end job and I need the casseroles more! Anyway, I was in John Lewis, in the baby section looking for a gift, when I felt it. This ... ball of need.

Back then, I didn’t know what it was and so, while my boyfriend was bored and looking at tagine dishes, I picked up a tiny babygro. It was soft and had Eeyore on the front, too cute and expensive at £20 for something that was going to literally get shit on. It was well out of my price range. 

I cried. Not full heaving tears because I was in John Lewis – and I like to pretend I fit in sometimes – but small tears. I told myself it’s not that crazy because now I look like some poor sod whose baby probably died.

When the wind blows

I came home to my cold, unheated house and didn’t know what to do with the suffocating, overwhelming sadness. My boyfriend and I watched some TV and we were normal, but I wasn’t. Not underneath. I snuck glances at him and wondered if it was just me that felt this. I didn’t want to ask him, in case he felt the same.

The cradle will rock

Swallowing this feeling, I continued with my life for a while until I found myself in the baby section of Morrisons buying another gift. When you get to your thirties you find yourself buying a lot of baby shit. My friend had given birth to a girl, and I wanted something yellow, not pink, and was flicking through tiny babygros when I felt it. Worse than before. The need was snaking up from the pit of my belly and wrapping itself around my throat, choking me. This time I went outside to cry.

When the bough breaks

In the dead of night, I began to prod at it like a human inspecting an alien carcass, afraid that it would eat me alive. I was caught in a constant spiral of picturing what I could never have –running my hands over a bump, holding a newborn. Seeing mothers with small children was like being stabbed and watching anyone act a birthing scene on TV was like drinking acid. I told myself it was biology, hormones, being almost forty. Time was running out, that was all.

The cradle will fall

Time, it turns out, is the thief of all joy. I started to question – like really question – what the fuck was happening to me. Time became intensely relevant. I was running out of time; it’s never the right time, it’s time to make a decision, time to face up.

And down will come baby

I’ve never had the times that matter to make this truly enormous decision. Instead, I’ve had Christmases cold and alone, waking my mother out of an alcohol-induced haze, wondering how I could get money to feed my sister. Birthdays with no presents and no celebrations. Not ever.

I don’t want my child to be cold and hungry. I don’t want to work to make a better life for them. I don’t know how to hold someone or be held; I don’t know how to protect something that small.

In my head, I am the perfect mother. I cook, clean and work to take care of my imaginary child. I am joyous and generous at birthdays and Christmases. I love the little person I have created, and they love me.

In reality, I hurt and ache. Outside in the cold harsh world there seems like there are babies everywhere, but I plod on. I love my nieces and nephews like they are my own. I cry myself to sleep.

Without a mother I don’t know how to be one. Which means my time will never come.

 
Cradle and all