Salt River

When motherhood engulfs me like a flood, I find myself at the river. Some insistent calling of the water in my cells pulls me like the lunar tide.

The river I mean is a real one. The Maribyrnong, the saltwater river, where a mineral meets an element and becomes something new. The salt river emerges fresh from the earth in the far-off mountains. By the time the flow reaches me it’s slowed and deepened, the ripples opaque and silty in the wake of slender rowboats.

I walk and walk along her winter banks, my tiny baby strapped to me, desperate that he sleep and that I learn how to be what he should, apparently, reasonably expect. Passersby, I’m sure, are alarmed by my general air of complete personal calamity.

Corrugated clacking of frogs

Cormorants drying their wings like laundry

This place is a floodplain. Fossils of sharks and shellfish made their mark here, far inland. Dolphins, I’ve heard, still sometimes dip and slick across the surface of the salt river. A charming and chubby fur seal called Salvatore pops up his shiny head fairly regularly, too, delighting locals and the Instagram account dedicated to his appearances.

My baby is so small and fragile, yet innocently rules my every moment with a vast and formless power. That minuscule wrinkled fist so delicately around my throat. How can someone I made with my own body be so foreign?

I don’t know how to grow the mechanism of the inner ear, the vesicles of the heart, the feathery brush of eyelashes. My body in its knowledge is unknowable. I cradle him, staring at the duckling flick of hair at his nape and the uptick of his nose. I adore him and I am afraid of him and I am lost most of the time. I am cut untethered by the whole endeavour.

1. I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things: ( )As much as I always could ( ) Not quite as much now ( )Definitely not so much now ( )Not at all 

– Edinburgh postnatal mental health scale

Overwhelmingly, in those early months and years of caring for my baby, I had the sense of a protective layer having been sheared away. My insides were outside and simultaneously I’d never been further away from anything.

A man in a raincoat with a tartan-lined hood glances sideways at me as I sob openly on the salt river walking track, my baby’s head lolling on my chest, wiping my face with a snot-streaked sleeve. His mop of a scruffy little dog seems more sympathetic.

Woolly wind blowing across my ears

Papery applause from gum leaves above

(Thank you, yes, I am doing something astounding)

I’m unhinged by sleep deprivation. I have simply lost my hinges. I used to swing easily back and forth between laughter and duty, a normal person doing normal human things, and now I flap about wildly, screeching.

His most basic needs I can meet, just about, with what seems like a ludicrous and heroic round-the-clock effort I still can’t quite believe happens everywhere, every day. It’s my own needs that shrink out of reach.

During pregnancy, I would watch water birth videos on social media. Even then the water called to me. The water called forth the babies too, in rust red gushes and into their trembling parents’ arms.

Later, my own baby’s sweet bowling ball head would refuse to travel down the canal those other more natural mothers’ water babies did. In a surprisingly calm ‘emergency’ birth, he would emerge directly from my belly, cradled in my no-nonsense obstetrician’s gloved hands.

The simple cry of joy I offered to this serious woman became the catchphrase of that baby’s favourite childhood story – of his own birth because of course that’s his favourite – ‘My baby! My baby!’

Pungent buckets; father and son holding lines

Palm fronds exploding in snapshot fireworks

When I was a child I dreamed often of being able to breathe underwater. Caves with deep turquoise water and refracted sunlight shimmering across stalactites called to me. I’d dive with a slippery otter’s wiggle and sink, looking upwards to the blurred cavern’s mouth and the bright sky outside. I’d stay at the bottom as long as I could hold my breath, and then just as I knew I needed to kick back towards the surface, I’d find myself breathing right where I was.

I’m not ever formally diagnosed with postnatal anything; no official depression or anxiety. The research stats are one in seven Australian mothers, perhaps one in five. Having experienced the years-long voracious group chats and rages into the void from virtually all the mums I know, however, I am convinced the figure should be much higher.

But you’re all in such suffering for so long, it’s like a sad inverse of doping in professional cycling: just the playing field you’re weeping on.

I’ve said, fervently and sincerely, to friends unsure about having children: you can be a fully realised person with a meaningful and fulfilling life without being a parent. Of course I only truly know this in the specific, personal, way I mean it because I’ve been both these people.

If I knew then what I know now – really knew it – I might not have made the choice I did.

But also I wouldn’t want to have not made it.

And also I’m angry that I didn’t know what I know now.

That’s my motherhood in a spiralling paradox.

Oh, now you’ve done it

Get your bulky pram out of this cafe 

do your slow walking away from this airport

shut that baby up on the plane

stop disgusting us with your leaky breasts 

and wetting your pants and embarrassing yourself with your child melting down on the dirty ground while you struggle with too many supermarket bags. 

Can’t you see you’re ruining it for everyone? 

You knew what you were in for.

Is anger always the top note of something else? Because rage is part of this. Curled up alongside sadness at what I’ve lost, despair at what lies ahead, embarrassment that I fell for it, shame that I’m feeling it all wrong.

Toni Morrison once said that her children only needed three things from her: to be competent, to have a sense of humour and to be an adult. I find myself noting these repetitively as three more ways in which to hopelessly admire her.

I start to experience shooting pains in my wrists. ‘Mother’s thumb’ is the colloquial term. It’s tendon inflammation from picking up and holding your baby so often, as if you’d want to stop but also like you have a choice. The locum GP tells me there’s not much to do but rest my wrists. And by rest, he clarifies when he sees my face, means not pick up my baby as much. ‘Who will pick him up?’ I ask. The doctor suggests anti-inflammatories.

This is an excerpt of the essay, Salt River. You can read the full piece on Lucy’s website.