Lying down has become sacred to me since becoming a mother - Harriet Bailiss
/Lying down has become sacred to me since becoming a mother.
Actually, I think my desperate desire to just lie down began when I was pregnant. The act of relaxing during pregnancy was performed by positioning myself in officially-sanctioned positions, propped by sensible cushions, which could offer the sensible support required by someone sensible enough to become a mother. The idea of just lying down seemed suddenly rebellious.
I remember saying in pregnancy to friends who already had kids, “I can’t wait for the baby to be born, so I can just lie down comfortably again”. They didn’t reply. They couldn’t bear to break to me that I would be denied the pleasures of carelessly lying down a while longer yet: firstly on account of my body becoming an entire food supply chain, and then because my existence as a mother resembled an extreme scavenger hunt of mundane chores, completed against the clock, whilst minding a kamikaze crawling baby.
Eventually, I emerged deliriously into a promising new world where my daughter could entertain herself for a few minutes in relative safety, and there I discovered it - the art of lying down. I would just lie down while she played, in a defiant display of childlike selfishness, there on the floor, or our garden’s small patch of grass. Gloriously, for those few minutes, no part of my body had any action in it, nor took responsibility for anything, not even for its own weight, cradled somewhere between gravity and the ground.
I realised, lying in the scratchy grass while my daughter bothered butterflies, happy without me for a moment, that since pregnancy I dreamed of the much-touted phenomenon of “me-time”. Instagram tells us we need it, we see friends having it and feel deep envy, and well-wishers continually dole out the tantalising advice “make time for yourself”, as if we have a supernatural ability to spin free hours out of thin air. This advice has often made me crave things I never did even before I had a child - massages and manicures. But the truth is that the real freedom of pre-motherhood, the really juicy, salivating freedom, was having time to do absolutely nothing - not running so fast to and from a massage appointment that I am sweaty and adrenalin-fuelled when I run to relieve granny of baby-care.
Lying down is the thing that gets me closest to that true sense of freedom. I look up at the sky or the ceiling for two minutes with the unconcerned, uncommitted gaze of a child; doing nothing and thinking of nothing - for however long I get before I am called for. I cannot feed my daughter in this position, I cannot cook dinner, I cannot work, I cannot clean anything. I will not be posting this moment as anything of significance to Instagram; lying down represents a moment of delicious nothing, in a life where every other moment has to be a something.
Bio:
I am a mum of one and I write for my own enjoyment - I loved writing as a child but it got sidelined by my day job, until I had my daughter when I felt a compulsion to write as often as I could, even from pregnancy. Although I don't have a huge amount of time for writing now I'm a mum, I do it as often as I can, often writing things just on my phone and then editing them later. Writing about motherhood has been my way of making sense of the experience and trying to understand the new existence I suddenly discovered.
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