The Fruits Of My Labours

“This time, twenty-one years ago,” I said, “I was paralysed”. I was sipping a martini, dry, one olive on a stick. My fellow guests were browsing the à la carte. It was 7.30pm. “Should I have the lamb or the beef?” said one of them. “What’s a velouté?” said another. “I think we should have the selection of bread and Irish butter,” said a third. I had mentioned I’d like my martini at 4.44pm because that was the time they called it in the theatre when my first baby was vacuumed out into the world and my identity changed and my mothering began and it would be a few hours before my legs worked again and a few years before I’d get over the shock. But it didn’t suit everyone to be at a hotel in the city centre at 4.44pm for early drinks on a Tuesday. And I’d had ideas about this twenty-first birthday celebration, but then it had rained, and the taxi was late, and the traffic was all clogged up because of a football match, and one of the middle children refused to come because no one picked her up from school and her hair was no longer straight, and she had nothing to wear. And it was complicated, this motherhood thing, and when I added up the numbers, I’d been doing it for seventy years.

Having children had probably been on my bucket list and I was glad I’d done it and there were times when I enjoyed their company, and I was #proud of them, and I saw little bits of me in them and that was kind of reassuring when I was in one of my more existentialist phases. Writing a book had always been on my bucket list too but I’d kept putting it off for various reasons because it demanded a coherency of thought and a willingness to carry its weight around for a few months and finding an audience who was interested in what I had to say. And then I thought what if, what if I never do this thing I’ve always wanted to do and I was quite afraid of death-bed regrets and so I reckoned I’d be intentional and I’d set a deadline, and in a moment of symbolism, I decided I would complete it by 4.44pm on the day of my eldest daughter’s twenty-first birthday and so I booked a copyeditor and I told her my 50,000 words would be with her by the middle of October. And I’d had ideas about that moment of symbolism and how we’d make 15 October a double celebration, but there had been last-minute issues with footnotes and referencing and a cake to pick up and a visit to the grandparents and a balloon and a nail appointment so I’d look nice for the moment of symbolism and so, I didn’t make my deadline, and when I was sipping my martini, it was with the knowledge that I wasn’t finished yet, not the book, not the mothering.

And I thought about that first labour in 2003 and how even though I’d wanted to sit in a birthing pool and have Enya playing in the background and listen to my husband reading Alexander McCall Smith and get a photo taken at the end in full makeup, none of that had happened and I’d ended up on a cocktail of drugs with an epidural and my insides falling out and the next day, I’d got up on to my feet, trailing my catheter, and I’d wheeled that less-than-six-pounds baby into the toilet over and over again until a nurse stopped me and asked me why I didn’t just leave her in the room and I looked at her like she was mad because I had this responsibility now and then I’d gone home and I hadn’t slept for four days and I’d become Al Pacino in Insomnia and developed a nighttime jerking that lasted for months and an anxiety that lasted for years. And there had been three more labours, in carparks and corridors and waiting rooms and occasionally in delivery suites, and although I was more prepared and knew they’d be completely out of my control and there was no point in having a plan, they were still terrifying because they involved a complete surrender to the unknown.

But my children now had a cumulative age of seventy, and on the basis of my decades of experience, I felt I should have been writing one of those pieces like “21 things I’ve learned about parenting” but I wasn’t sure I’d learned anything at all and besides, the jury was still out on the results and I thought about the passage I’d written in the “everything I know about motherhood” chapter of my book.  

“No one ever tells you that once you get past the night feeds, the nappies, the toddler tantrums, the settling-in-days, the phonics, the transfer tests, and puberty, that you will spend most of the rest of their teenage years in the reception area at the orthodontists. No one ever tells you this will coincide with a kind of bruised feeling, a sense of is-this-it and have-I-done-enough and a realisation that the outcomes you have been waiting for that might evidence the fruits of your parenting labours may never materialise. Those careers they end up with, their life skills, their personalities. Well, that could just as easily have been their father. You will come to understand that you have been managing some sort of passing-through facility where you fed, clothed, and watered and tried to hand on some values and a bit of wisdom and your thoughts on the future of the planet but you probably could have done a lot less or a lot more and it wouldn’t have made any difference”.

This was another terrifying labour, the birthing of a book. It was a complete surrender to the unknown too, not knowing what the outcomes would be and whether the labouring would be in vain and worst of all, whether I had even done enough to let it go because it felt like I was only scratching the surface with its content. And I remembered that thing that Leonardo Da Vinci supposedly said, "Art is never finished, only abandoned”.

And then I wondered if I was now equipped to write “21 things I’ve learned about writing a book” because I could share tips like keep a record of the page numbers of your quotes so you don’t go insane trying to find them again and you only really have three good writing hours in you per day and these are never on a Monday and what Donal Ryan said on a podcast about wishing he’d cut that sentence but it was published now. It was too late. It couldn’t be changed.

And in the week which held these two milestones, the birthing of a twenty-one-year-old and the birthing of a book, I was struck by the two journeys I’d been on, the journey of mothering and the journey of writing and how similar they were. It seemed both were about balancing the smaller details with the bigger picture, the commas and the semicolons alongside the overall message, the form-filling and the vaccinations alongside being there to hold their emotions and provide a safe space for them to come home to. With both, I could try and impose structure and order, but I needed to recognise that beauty often emerges from chaos. I could fine-tune those sentences and sharpen those paragraphs but as someone once said, writing is bleeding on to a page. I could yearn for uncomplicated children but know that somewhere along the line, I’d granted them permission to be themselves. There were times when I was all written out and needed to walk away. There were times when I was all mothered out and needed to walk away. But I came back again, and I was better for it. And there was a sense that you could read all the books on parenting, and study all the theory, and you could consider how you’d been parented, and how everyone else was parenting, and make comparisons, but in the end only you could do your kind of parenting.

“There is no doubt that somewhere out there the ideal mother exists and most of us aspire to be her. In the meantime, we blunder along, feeling like we are not doing anything very well, aiming towards something that looks like better, our best moments only coming when someone unexpectedly, for reasons unknown to us, because we haven’t been performing any more successfully that day than usual, tells us we are a good mother”.

And I’d written that passage too in my book. And I had no doubt that somewhere out there the ideal writer exists too. But you couldn’t write anyone else’s book. You could only write your own.