Pregnancy Poems: 'Who will we be when we come back?'

When I edited Night Feeds and Morning Songs, I asked to include a few short pieces on aspects of motherhood. I did rather regret insisting on this when I found myself combining work - both on the book and in my job as a publicist - with homeschooling my children solo. Perhaps it wasn’t the best vantage point from which to survey parenthood: I was deeply in the trenches of it. But it was still a pleasure - once I finally secured a place at Holiday Club and could hear myself think / go to the loo uninterrupted - to think back to the earliest days of my children’s lives. Here’s what I wrote about pregnancy, and some of the poems from that section I love.

We met early on. There’s an initial, thrilling tick and whirr, a flutter on a hitherto unsuspected inside edge of me. There were moments when I was going about my life – it was still mine then – and nobody but I would know that my attention was far from the meeting room or train carriage. I was straining secretly, inner ear cocked, like a dog vibrating with anticipation, for a wave or a wriggle. The second semester saw my daughter rolling and tumbling and, a scan revealed, even playing with her toes. In the last weeks there was indignant heaving, when a fist or foot could be seen – to the horror of my child-free colleagues – threatening to burst out of my bulk.

I still have ghost kicks now. Gas, obviously, but there’ll be a moment as I’m bellowing about shoes to my five year old when I’ll suddenly feel the echo of tiny her, flickering in my belly. I can’t explain to her why I’m pausing in my shrill school-run tirade but there she is, suddenly, as she was, and I’m transported. Before I thud back down into the now of book bags and morning chaos, there’s a glimpse into that time of magical possibility, when you’re first madly in love with someone you don’t yet know.

From the flood of relief when I saw a tiny ticking bean on an early scan to studying the distances between high street bins in case I had to be sick into them, I found pregnancy a peculiar time. How could it not be? Someone is having hiccups inside you! (Was I the only one who thought anxiously of those world record holders, hiccupping for twelve years straight, every time this happened?) There was the debilitating but oddly luxurious bone tiredness at the start and the end that had me sinking into unconsciousness by 9pm, and the feeling that you’ve got one foot in a new life that is still – with a first child – unimaginable.

Heartsong, by Jeni Couzyn

I heard your heartbeat.

It flew out into the room, a startled bird

whirring high and wild.

I stopped breathing to listen

so high and fast it would surely race itself

down and fall

but it held strong, light

vibrant beside the slow deep booming

my old heart suddenly audible.

Out of the union that holds us separate

you’ve sent me a sound like a name.

Now I know you’ll be born.

We began researching a slightly terrifying world of arcane equipment – from buggies to bedding, and from sterilisers to swaddling blankets. My urge towards thrifty nesting did battle with the anxiety about plunging into parenthood without some essential piece of kit, though in the event my babies seemed unperturbed by the relative cheapness of their pram. (The two things I have done in my life that made me feel most ‘mum’ were folding up a buggy and chucking it into a car boot, and putting in earrings while briefing a babysitter. Peak mum.)

The mysteries of the state of pregnancy have captured the imagination of generations of writers, from Anna Laetitia Barbauld addressing ‘a little invisible being who is expected soon to become visible’ at the dawn of the nineteenth century to Jeni Couzyn, holding her breath to hear her baby’s heartbeat. It’s time for last trips as a couple – Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi being kicked at the Colosseum, and Katharine Perry navigating the cobbles of Lille – before you need an extra suitcase for the baby gubbins and have to snatch baby-free time together during naps.

Singing Lando Lullabies, by Katharine Perry

Singing Lando lullabies to you,

Orlando, Orlando,

your eyelids soft while I dream

of the last holiday

two days in Lille, holding hands and

sleeping all night in ironed, white sheets, undisrupted.

He kissed my hair going out to dinner,

dark green dress against the dark blue night air,

with heels tripping over the cobbles of the old town.

Seven courses and marble stairs and glistening glass.

They made a special effort not to serve blue cheese,

so that you were safe.

And on the train, through the streets,

eating chips at lunch,

and delicate meats at dinner,

we talked about your name.

Felix Lexington;

Too many ‘xs’.

Orlando Lexington;

too many American places.

Lexington after the pub in Kings Cross

where we met on the dance floor.

I wanted Leonard,

He wanted Ulysses.

I mentioned how handsome he would look

if his name was Orlando.

And I think about handsome you are now;

my little Lando.

We look, half shyly, at children of all ages and wonder: what will she be like then? And then? What will it feel like to hold his hand crossing a road, to tuck her into bed, to carry them on my hip instead of within? And, as Liz Berry asks in ‘The Steps’: ‘Who will we be when we come back?’ Parents are newborn, too, when their children arrive.

Already looking into an invisible distance, already handing in our resignations from our child-free existence, my fellow parenting class students and I lumbered increasingly slowly around the neighbourhood. We lowered ourselves like hippos into the water of the local lido, chuckling at the panic on the skinny lifeguard’s face as he calculated which of our massive frames he would be able to heave out of the water if necessary. We awaited dispatches from the ones who had rudely interrupted these last hazy days by doing the thing we each, privately, thought wouldn’t really happen to us – giving birth. We obediently ate our pineapple and sipped our raspberry leaf tea. And we waited.

Taken from Night Feeds and Morning Songs: Honest, Fierce and Beautiful Poems about Motherhood, published by Trapeze.