Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy

Oh, this book. This extraordinary book. It has floored me. It hurt and it healed.

The vertigo and grief of realising, too late, that you have crossed the border into that new world — Liz Berry’s Republic of Motherhood. Without meaning to, you have left home because “all along I had believed I was equal, when all along I was not, because all along I had been treading towards this great crevasse called motherhood, and now that I was at the bottom of it looking up at the world through my brain fog, I could see that to have presumed Empire and patriarchy were dead was naive at best. Not only were they alive and well: they had won… the fear that gripped me… was not a fear that I had experienced before, having never been weak before, nor injured, nor incompetent. I was now too stupified to find my way back to my old life. That girl was gone and all I could do — indeed all I did do — was cry when you weren’t looking.”

Competence. It seems a basic thing, but when it’s stripped away we are left reeling. Soldier, Sailor is so good on the moment when the trapdoor opens and you plummet out of your life, shambling and leaking and weeping and raging. There are many areas of life in which I am not a competent person, including — but not limited to — parking, assembling furniture, maths above Y5 level and absolutely any sporting endeavour other than riding a bike. A friend said that new motherhood felt like being plunged into a deeply physical, 24/7 job for which she was unqualified, untrained and, she often feared, unsuited and I felt this so deeply. This book expressed that panic and frustration so lucidly — oh, the mini-meltdown at the supermarket checkout! I used to be a capable adult, you know. I once accidently shoplifted a pack of reduced-price casserole vegetables because I’d slung them under the buggy and was so, so tired. Sorry about the swede, Sainsburys.

I viscerally reacted to the portrait here of the thousand near misses every day, occasions that I still tremble and sweat about, that flash across my inner eye: the sharp stone steps, the reachable knife, the road darted across, the playground vanishing… There’s one involving dismounting from a train without having fastened the pram straps properly that haunts me now, eight years on, pretty much daily. Look at a mother and you are looking at someone who is going about their life with lurid catastrophe reels looping in their minds hourly. How can the world hurt you? Let me count the ways. How bright those bloody pictures are at 4am. I’m a decade into this and I know that although the content will change, there isn’t an off switch. Soldier, Sailor reminded me how astonishing it is we can put one foot in front of the other, dogged by such fear.

Claire Kilroy is so good, too, on the rage and resentment. It blazes. And explaining, even to those who share your life — but haven’t offered theirs up on this altar, not to the same all-consuming degree — feels like returning from the Western Front, ravaged and ragged, and trying to talk to a provincial gentlewoman who has been knitting for the boys in a tranquil parlour with tea. She brought all this back to me.

But the love.

She is incredible on the love.

Would I have wanted to read it during those lunatic nights? I’m not sure. (I lost the ability to read almost entirely for about a year anyway.) It took me back to those early days: running to get nowhere, a million things to do every second, always teetering on the edge of a scream that shreds you, and nothing to show for it but the miracle of them, which is everything, but where are you? A me I’ve since shed felt seen and scorched. I loved it and I bawled. This is a brilliant, brilliant book.

Soldier, Sailor by Claire Kilroy is out now in paperback.

The Parent Trap: On not studying art history and not growing vegetables

During maternity leave, I was going to study art history and grow my own vegetables.

During his two week paternity leave, my husband was going to decorate the nursery and replace the decking.

In the event, during that year I ate anything I could extract from a box and put straight into my face (thank you quiche) and read one short book, in increments of up to three sentences. The nursery remained undecorated for six months. The decking rotted busily until we moved out.

What I learned during that first year of my daughter’s life was that high expectations – of myself, of experiences, of my child, of my ability to make it into town to visit the aquarium – were not my friends. The ambitions I had for our first family Christmas were Dickensian, featuring carol-singing, bracing walks and relaxed family feasts at which my daughter would beam from her highchair. In these fantasies, I was eating hot food. With two hands. My husband and I spent that first festive season sleeping in shifts, shuffling past each other on the stairs and sustaining ourselves on foraged leftovers (pro tip: cocktail sausage and brie is the sandwich of kings.)

When I was a parent, my house would not be full of music-emitting plastic horrors. My children would play with one toy at a time and then put it away.

The imprint of a Lego brick is still etched into the arch of my left foot. You could look at every photograph of my daughter playing in our old flat without getting the merest hint of what colour the carpet was, such was the tsunami of toys in which she bobbed. In unguarded moments, although my youngest child is seven, I regularly find myself scrolling through the various trippy exclamations the long gone pink plastic walker made (“The flowers spin in the sun!” What does it even mean?)

I couldn’t imagine my children would throw tantrums but, should it happen, I was confident that I could offer reasoned reassurance to head off the crisis.

Things my daughters have melted down about in public include (but are not limited to): the suggestion they might like to wear a coat. The confiscation from under the pillow of a shard of glass referred to as a ‘bed emerald’. A plate being blue. My husband and I not walking in adequately neat single file. Being denied the ‘juice’ (urine sample) she had spotted in my bag. The offer to peel a tangerine. Being told not to lick the supermarket freezers. A dog leaving.

When I had kids, my family would enjoy lively conversation over delicious meals, just like people in films about Italy. These would not be characterised by horrified complaints about the food, by diners springing up to chase the cat, by vicious kicking wars or by the need to give the room a full deep clean in the aftermath.

Recently I realised – to my horror – that a friend had thought the evening meals I posted on Instagram (cauliflower curry, artichoke pasta, fennel bake) had been enjoyed by my children. During the week my children’s diet consists of a cheese sandwich for one and a boiled egg for the other. They have a hot meal at school and I refuse to do nightly battle with the fact that they have strictly divided all foodstuffs between them to ensure that there are no universally liked meals. Even meals they visibly enjoyed only days ago can be greeted with howls of horror. I had to apologise for having inadvertently given the impression that I was winning at dinner.

By posting pictures of meals, just because I am not a particularly proficient cook and had produced something that looked nice, I had unwittingly become that enemy of tranquility: The Comparison. They’re the person against whom you measure your own life – your career progress, the cleanliness of your kitchen, the happiness of your children. We all peer through heavily filtered windows and see these people. They’re jogging on the beach, or giving their children a piggyback without pulling a muscle, or laughing (attractively, mind) while quaffing prosecco with friends. Their offspring consume lentil gratin without a murmur and have never picked their noses and wiped it on the wall. Their relationships are deep and healthy and their school runs serene, before they head off to their high-powered but socially conscious jobs.

The dawning realisation that I had – however accidentally – been The Comparison to someone else was odd. I clarified that my children wedge beige food into themselves in front of the telly most days, just in case anyone else had been fooled. But it was a great reminder that although reality rarely matches up to our aspirations or the way we think others are living, that’s fine. If asked for parenting advice – and I am patently unqualified to offer any – I’d plump for: low expectations are your friends.

That first Christmas? It was magical. Despite the baby sick in my hair and the fog of fatigue. That time I was discovered scraping toddler poo off the library floor with a shopping bag? It’s a hilarious story now, and they were wise not to have invested in carpet. The mealtimes during which at least one person is sulking under the table, and half the table consent to eat only half the meal? How I’ll miss them when the miscreants are grown and gone, and eating whatever they please (cauliflower curry?) at other tables.

When I retire, I’m going to study art history and grow vegetables.

Ana Sampson is the editor of poetry anthologies including Night Feeds and Morning Songs: Honest, Fierce and Beautiful Poems about Motherhood (Trapeze).

Poems for Mothers' Day

One of the most intense and rewarding projects I have ever worked on was Night Feeds and Morning Songs, a collection of poems about motherhood. This was not only because of the emotive subject matter, but also because, immediately after Mother’s Day 2020 and shortly before I began editing the anthology, the nation locked down. We retreated into our houses and for many of us – although we didn’t know it at the time – the longest period of separation from our mums we would ever know was beginning.

It was far from an easy year to be a parent, enduring the sticky chaos of home-schooling or the isolation of the newborn days without a support network, but it was an agonising time to be a grown-up child, too, wracked with fears for our parents. (And, in lighter but occasionally genuinely fraught moments, trying to help them navigate Zoom.)

I edited Night Feeds and Morning Songs, a collection of poems about motherhood, while locked down with my young children and unable to see my own mother. I have to admit that I cried a lot. (Also: shouting, wine, half-hearted attempts at Joe Wicks workouts, wearing the same tracksuit bottoms for weeks, despairing of going to the loo alone ever again, forgetting what a hairbrush was, more crying.) These poems took me from pregnancy to the empty nest and to every mad milestone between, and it felt a particularly poignant time on every level to be thinking about this wild, deep bond, and about how it evolves over the years.

 Now the paperback is about to be published, and — thank goodness — life feels back on an even keel. We can say in person how grateful we are for each other. I am a better mother by far for not being so crushed up against full-time motherhood. Being teacher, family and friend to my daughters (not to mention chef, housemaid, cheerleader, encyclopaedia, referee…) was an impossible task. But this collection is a beautiful thing that came out of a difficult time, and the poems still move me so much. Here are a handful of my favourites.

Great-grandmother, by Jean Valentine  

Great-grandmother,

be with us

as if in the one same day & night

we all gave birth

in the one same safe-house, warm,

and then we rest together,

sleep, and nurse,

dreamily talk to our babies, warm,

in a safe room             all of us

carried in the close black sky.

I love the peace within this poem, and the sense that as mothers we are part of a long line of women who walked this way before us, feeding, soothing and loving.

The Evening Star by Sappho  

Hesperus, you bring everything that

                                     the light-tinged dawn has scattered;

you bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring

                                    the child back to its mother.

Sappho’s poems survive only in scraps and tatters but those fragments are enough to show us why she was so feted in the ancient world that Plato called her ‘the Tenth Muse’. I find these beautiful lines so deeply soothing, with their nursery rhyme cadences and the idea of rounding up the animals and bringing everyone safely home.

The Temple of the Wood Lavender by Lady Caroline Blanche Elizabeth Lindsay

A perfum’d sprig of lavender

You gave, dear child, to me;

It grew, you said, by the red rose bed,

And under the jessamine tree.

’Twas sweet, ay, sweet from many things;

But (sweeter than all) with scent

Of long past years and laughter and tears

It to me was redolent.

Our mothers are the repository of memories for the years we can no longer recall. We don’t remember learning to clap our chubby hands, or grabbing for the candle on our first birthday cake… but she does. It’s hard for a mother not to mourn her children’s infancy – though we might not miss the sleepless nights, we grieve for the squeezable thighs, the tiny froggy legs and the months when we were asked if we ‘merembered’ something. This short poem beautifully expresses a mother’s nostalgia for that strangely one-sided intimacy, built at first from months and years that only one of you remembers, though they colour everything after it with love.

Limbs by Mary Walker  

Afraid of the dark, they find their way

to my bed at night; one hot, one cold

and no rest for any of us.

Sleepless elbows and knees find my hip,

shin, and the tender bone under my eye,

my body remembering a knot of child

kneading my bladder, stealing my breath,

stamping footprints on my belly.

These growing limbs –

needing new shoes, longer pants, another haircut;

these limbs that cling to me like vines to the face of a house –

they are working themselves free.

Against the curtain of their still small breaths,

truth dawns – these limbs will outlast me.

Worse, first

they will stop walking themselves

to my bedside at night.

Personally, I’m a demon if I’m woken. Having weathered the extreme exhaustion of the baby years, I genuinely don’t feel nostalgic for the months I slept only for the odd hour, dropping like a stone out of consciousness until the next howl. Despite that, this lovely poem ambushed me completely when I discovered it – especially the beautifully paced power of this line: “they are working themselves free.”

Mother and Daughter Sonnets XVI by Augusta Webster 

She will not have it that my days wanes low,

Poor of the fire its drooping sun denies,

That on my brow the thin lines write good-byes

Which soon may be read plain for all the know,

Telling that I have done with youth’s brave show;

Alas! and done with youth in heart and eyes,

With wonder and far expectancies,

Save but to say ‘I knew such long ago.’

She will not have it. Loverlike to me,

She with her happy gaze finds all that’s best,

She sees this fair and that unfretted still,

And her own sunshine over all the rest:

So she half keeps me as she’d have me be,

And I forget to age, through her sweet will.

Victorian poet Augusta Webster expresses so gorgeously here that your mum is always your mum, no matter how many years pass, what they bring or how many miles are between you. I hope the last Mothers’ Day we’ll be apart is behind us.

Night Feeds and Morning Songs, edited by Ana Sampson, is published by Trapeze.

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.

The Poetry Exhange

I first became aware of The Poetry Exchange after meeting John Prebble at the 2019 Chiddingstone Literary Festival. It was a wonderful day full of treats: a fantastically lively event, a surprise appearance from one of my former English teachers and Joanne Harris making friends with my mum in the Green Room, making her the envy of her book club. Meeting John and learning about The Poetry Exchange was another gift. I so hope we can have those experiences again soon.

The Poetry Exchange invite people to talk about a poem that has been a friend to them. They have an excellent podcast - I’ve recently enjoyed interviews with actor Brian Cox and about Dylan Thomas’ ‘Fern Hill’ - but they also give people the chance to explore their relationship with a poem in depth, with the Exchange’s poetry gurus. I was beyond thrilled to be asked to participate, and the poem that first sprung to mind was Liz Berry’s sensational ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ - which you can read in full here - so I asked to bring that to the discussion.

I read a LOT of poetry. I’m currently completing edits on my eleventh anthology, and I must have read many thousands of poems over the past decade, many of which have become cherished talismans. But to have the opportunity to dive deep into a poem I love, to pore over what it meant to me for an hour or so, was a novel luxury and a completely wonderful experience. It felt medicinal. I recalled the first time I met ‘The Republic of Motherhood’, stumbling across it online when my youngest daughter was one and we were still in the grip of baby madness. I was electrified. I had never seen a poem that spoke like this or about this.

The image of the totalitarian state of motherhood - the uniform, the ritual, the red book bureaucracy, the prescribed choruses - is perfect.

‘As required, I stood beneath the flag of Motherhood
and opened my mouth although I did not know the anthem.’

I know Liz is saying something deep and true about the expectations placed on mothers not to deviate from the sanctioned hymn sheet of baby-wrangling bliss, but she also managed to remind me of my bafflement at parachuting into this strange territory without having learned the language. Where did the five little ducks go swimming one day? How did everyone else know when to Zoom Zoom Zoom their nonplussed babies? What actually was weaning, or mastitis, or cluster feeding?

Liz captured so vividly how the neighbourhood through which I had previously hustled in heels to work was transfigured by crossing that border, the mundane made strange. I was now one of the daytime denizens, bundled in puked-on cardigans ‘soft as a creature’ against the cold, blearily pounding the pavements. My suddenly small world was landmarked by draughty church halls, weighing clinics, libraries offering Rhyme Time and coffee shops with enough space between the tables for me to bump and shamble my buggy through. On the outskirts of one of the world’s most exciting cities, I pottered between municipal amenities in an exhausted daze.

I had been so avowedly urban, such an indoors cat, that I hadn’t owned a waterproof coat until I had my first baby. I always figured that if it rained I would use an umbrella (impossible to hold while pushing a pram) or just, I breezily told my husband, “go in a shop.” With a baby who was frequently incensed in company but tranquil when I pushed her for miles, I became an outdoor creature. When Liz writes of pushing her pram through freeze and blossom and, later, daffodils, I was reminded - by the sensitively incisive questions from John and Andrea - how that year plugged me back into the seasons’ rhythms for the first time since my own childhood. I don’t think it was just that I spent so many hours tramping the Common, although my daughter’s urban world was bounded by duck ponds and dandelion clocks, snowdrops and squirrels. There’s something about parenthood that links us to the turning world again: a growing baby is a yardstick against which to measure the years.

What Andrea and John helped me to understand was something I already knew on an intellectual level: that we bring our own emotions and memories to every piece of art we encounter. When speaking about poetry, I often point out that nobody expects two people to listen to the same record and have the same response - there might be a sticky-floored nightclub in my mind’s eye and a sun-soaked beach in yours - but school has left most of us with the idea that there’s only one way to understand a poem. Discussing the poem in such detail made realise just how deeply, vividly personal my response to Liz Berry’s Republic had been. It looks like Tooting to me, but everyone who reads it will map their own psychic geography onto the poem, and it will belong to them.

Liz also talks about the physical toll of childbearing, in a way I hadn’t previously seen literature of any kind do: the fistfuls of moulting hair, the aching, exhausted ‘spindled bones’. If you’re lucky, a first pregnancy can be a deliciously cosseted time: take my seat! Don’t lift that! Build yourself up with nourishing meals! The poem brilliantly evokes the shock of being plunged into an unfamiliar, manual job with round-the-clock demands - the tender drudgery of ‘Feedingcleaninglovingfeeding’ - while feeling like you’ve been run over. There never seemed to be time to get going on that vegetable garden I had so naively planned for my maternity leave. There was barely time to prepare any food for myself that required more than one hand. By four months in, I was about 95% biscuit. I have a shoulder and a bladder that will never be the same again, and Liz told me I wasn’t alone.

The image of the doctors in the poem - ‘slender and efficient’ - is quietly devastating in opposition to how the new mother feels. And the three of us talked for some time about the searing phrase ‘its unbearable skinless beauty’. There’s a poem called ‘Vixen’ by Glenda Beagan, also in Night Feeds and Morning Songs, which opens with the line: ‘motherhood peels me bare’. With John and Andrea, I probed these phrases. Why had they struck me so emphatically? There was much to unpack about the vulnerability I had felt in early motherhood, poised to panic when my baby erupted and, later on, the heartache of your children’s fragility when they are out in the world, out of your arms, blithely oblivious to your agony that they could be scalded or trampled or sneered at by the world.

It feels, to me, as though ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ builds to a climax that is a shout of sisterhood. Fervently, devoutly, the narrator asserts her citizenship of this wild queendom and her solidarity with its denizens - especially the traumatised, especially the haunted. The poem underlined the sense I had all through editing Night Feeds and Morning Songs of these verses forming a literary community during a locked-down time when we couldn’t access a physical one. Poetry of all kinds has been important to me this past year, and I don’t think I’m the only one. It can be gobbled even when time is short or attention is scattered to feed us by reminding us of our fellow travellers and our shared feelings.

Talking to John and Andrea about this poem felt intimate, emotional and deeply therapeutic. I discovered new personal reference points in a poem I love and savoured each beautifully constructed line and striking image with new relish. The sheer indulgent pleasure of being asked to examine the chords it struck in my memories and mind shouldn’t have been a surprise for someone who has been working with poetry for over a decade, but somehow it was.

There are now many people, publications and organisations who bang the drum for poetry’s mental health benefits: William Sieghart, whom I was lucky enough to interview about his Poetry Pharmacy books and Deborah Alma who edited The Emergency Poet anthology and runs the Poetry Pharmacy in Shropshire among them. I’ve often written on the subject myself for publications including The Daily Express and Red Online. But being given time and permission to spend this long with a poem that has been a friend to me was an extraordinary and unexpected gift that gave me a deeper understanding of how poetry works on us as well as a greater love for this poem in particular. I resolve to make time to sit with a poem in this way more often, to suck out its marrow and let it work its magic on me. The Poetry Exchange is a wonderful thing and I’m so grateful to have encountered it.

You can find out more about The Poetry Exchange here and listen to their award-winning podcasts here.

You can buy Liz Berry’s wonderful pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood here or from your local bookshop.

Night Feeds and Morning Songs, an anthology of poems about motherhood, can be bought here or from your local bookshop.

Please note this blog post includes affiliate links to Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshops, and if you buy through them I earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you.)

Book Review: After the Storm, by Emma Jane Unsworth

I was sent an early proof for this honest and brilliantly written memoir. I came to it with no expectation, really. I haven’t read Emma’s novels - Animals and Adults - though I’ll certainly seek them out now. Also, I didn’t suffer from Post-Natal Depression. Oddly, I didn’t even experience the dreaded ‘third day blues’ on which, I was warned by other women and our NCT teacher, our milk would flood in and we’d cry all day. I suspect that this was partly because I simply didn’t have the energy to process anything at the time.

I had what I now consider to be an averagely traumatic first birth. There was a worry about my daughter’s heartbeat and after some toing and froing I was given an emergency c-section during which I lost two and a half litres of blood. Almost half of it, apparently. I’m forever grateful to the serene and efficient theatre team and the fact that my spinal anaesthetic meant I couldn’t see the gory floor. The loss wasn’t quite enough to need a transfusion - though I was dimly aware through my opiate high of someone ‘getting the blood guy on the phone’ - but more than enough to leave me wraith-like for some time afterwards. Often, when I first woke, I couldn’t move my legs. A day or so in, after a fierce battle to swim up from unconsciousness, I was so weak I convinced myself I was dying and calmly instructed my husband to call an ambulance because someone would need to feed the baby. Fortunately, it turned out I just needed to be fortified with some apple juice and a piece of toast, but those early days weren’t a breeze.

Despite escaping PND, though, so much of this extraordinary book rang true with me. The subtitle is Post-Natal Depression and the Utter Weirdness of New Motherhood, and I don’t think there’s any mother who won’t relate to at least some of what Emma so eloquently articulates. She vividly recalled to me how my daughter’s screaming induced pure animal panic in me, how once it started - and there were months during which it seemed it barely paused - I could think of nothing but stopping it. I remembered the well-meaning people who kindly reassured me they didn’t mind the anguished howling while I strained out a smile, inwardly screaming, “I MIND! SHE BLOODY MINDS! JUST LISTEN TO HER!” Every moment my baby was quiet I felt equal to the alien new blue-collar job of motherhood. And every moment she was screaming - so many moments, they smeared into weeks - I knew that what was being asked of me all day, every day, half the night, every night was impossible.

Photo credit Alex Lake / TWO SHORT DAYS

The section where Emma tries to join friends for afternoon tea and the civilised world literally does not fit her anymore will stay with me forever. I vividly remember those occasions: bumping a laden buggy through squeezed-together tables, muttering apologies, praying for the nap to continue, with my seeping, sweating, unfamiliar new body squeezed into weird new clothes with extra holes in. The divorce between my work, my life, my mind and what I had previously considered my self was jarring. It felt permanent, although it proved not to be. I had been prepared on some level for the fug of exhaustion and the vomit-spiked hair, but not to feel incapable of finishing a sentence even in my head.

Emma writes with humour as well as with brilliant clarity. (I, too, resented the shrill and jumped-up Upsy Daisy for having her own bed on wheels to trundle around the Night Garden.) And she expresses things here that I have rarely seen written down about disappointment, boredom, shame and rage. I’ve read and written a lot since editing Night Feeds and Morning Songs about mothers’ stories being routinely undervalued and dismissed, and about the difficulties mothers face in carving out time for their own careers and creativity. This piercing, fierce, raw and beautiful book will help go some way towards redressing that balance. It will change and perhaps even save lives.

I actually hadn’t expected to enjoy the newborn days as much as I did - I figured they’d be brutal and boring, and those low expectations were my friends whenever they were just that. But we are bombarded by images of ecstatic, subtly but impeccably groomed women, suffused with love, enjoying tranquil moments of deep connection with their beaming infants in beautifully appointed, airy, pastel-hued rooms. It’s easy to believe that hype, and the jarring shock when reality falls short - as it must do - is so, so damaging to women. It feels like ingratitude, weakness or self-indulgence to confess that we’re struggling. The scorching guilt of admitting that the deeply desired state of motherhood sometimes makes us feel stifled or furious or despairing prevents so many women from accessing the help and support they need.

There has been a change, I think, in the way we talk about these things. The excellent essay collection The Best Most Awful Job, edited by Katherine May, struck a chord with many women with its truthful takes on the madness of child-wrangling, and I especially loved Saima Mir’s essay on maternal rage. This recent advertising campaign for Portal - showing a woman struggling with breastfeeding - had me in tears and time-travelling back to my daughter’s earliest days with its accuracy.

And After the Storm - this truthful, visceral, dazzlingly well-written memoir in which Emma shares her experiences of vulnerability, fury and desperation - experiences that I believe will resonate with many mothers - is an essential contribution to this discussion. I cannot thank her enough for writing it.

After the Storm: Postnatal Depression and the Utter Weirdness of New Motherhood by Emma Jane Unsworth is published by Profile Books.

Night Feeds and Morning Songs: Honest, Fierce and Beautiful Poems about Motherhood, edited by Ana Sampson, is published by Trapeze.

Please note this blog post includes affiliate links to Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshops, and if you buy through them I earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you.)

Today was the first day I missed them.

I wrote this last term. It feels shameful, ungrateful… sacrilegious, even. Perhaps I’ll regret sharing this. But today - the second day of the third week since we finished a two month long stint of solo homeschooling - I felt an unfamiliar flutter. Excitement, that I would be collecting my children soon. Anticipation, of seeing their faces, hearing them shouting and squeaking over each other as they jostle to tell me about the tiny triumphs and tribulations of their day. I was flooded with what I can only describe as a sense of relief. We weren’t broken. I wasn’t broken. We were going to be ok.

Even with the many advantages we enjoyed - adequate technology and living space, good health, kids without additional needs who don’t mind learning too much, the relative flexibility of some of my work, enough sleep - combining my jobs with homeschooling was horribly challenging. I felt I had completely lost my sense of myself, because I was never alone - though, not having seen an adult other than my husband socially in a quarter of a year - I was always lonely. Even while on the loo I was assailed by demands to referee sibling battles, unanswerable questions (“Why is it a called a house?”) and unceasing demands for snacks. It was impossible to finish an email, a sentence, a thought.

I couldn’t leave the house alone before my husband came home, and by that point it was dark. So the walks we were being encouraged to take to keep us on a mental even keel involved forty-five minutes of negotiation and hectoring (why are my children so fundamentally opposed to wearing socks when the mere thought of being unslippered for a moment gives me the heebie jeebies?) followed by a snail’s pace trudge round the same walk, often with someone wailing throughout. Uplifting! Rejuvenating! A balm to the locked down soul!

The children were expected to do at least three hours of schooling a day, and at four and seven, couldn’t work independently. Work required at least six core hours each day. We were up to twelve hours before anyone had cleaned their teeth. (Did anyone clean their teeth?) On my in-house days I started work at 6am, never finished before 9pm, and scrambled and failed to get through lessons and presentations, meetings and meals between, doing constant battle with the maelstrom of toys and drawing and Lego (bloody OUCH!) that swirled in their wake and engulfed us if left unchecked. If I’d worked in-house four or five days a week, I couldn’t have coped. Trying to do everything at once, I was always exasperated, impatient and snappy. I lost my temper often. I shouted, I screamed - and then I cried because I felt so furiously guilty.

Last summer, at the tail-end of a previous five month stint with both children at home, I edited Night Feeds and Morning Songs, a collection of poems about motherhood. The poems helped me remember the tender madness of the newborn days, and the sticky, beaming toddlers my kids were relatively recently. They reminded me of the privilege and pleasure of parenting when it felt like I was a mass caterer, a hostage negotiator, a kitchen maid and a referee - as well as a terrible teacher and an exhausted employee - and not really a mother anymore. They reminded me that my children are funny and bonkers and magic and that I love spending time with them.

But not all my time. It feels selfish to admit that I cannot be ‘mother’ with every last scrap of my time, my life, my mind, my heart - but it’s true. This week, I delivered the children to school - they are so happy to be back, so buoyant now with the dramas and delights of their days - and returned to the tranquil house and relieved cats to work. I recorded online events, attended meetings, crafted pitches and press releases, wrote chapter openers for a new anthology and book reviews, drafted blog posts and newsletters, answered emails. I could hear myself think. I could hear myself. And when I realised I missed my children, I cried with gratitude.