This week’s Dispatches from New Motherhood offering is a wonderfully affecting poem by Rachel Dickens. In I HAVE BECOME A TREE Rachel explores her new motherhood experience with honesty, tenderness and lyricism.
Rachel says, ‘In the midst of PND someone told me that now I’m a mother, I am a tree. My family are my branches and everything I do affects them too. This natural analogy made me calm, despite how intense and overwhelming motherhood can be. I feel proud to be shelter and a life force for my boy.’
And we’re proud to share Rachel’s poem here.
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I Have Become a Tree
Rachel Dickens
The shock, the shock, the shock
I am shaken
my branches are empty
my roots are withered
my bark is worse than my bite.
Teeth marks on my arm, my leg, my nipple
sore spirit, dented pride
pity for my identity.
Continuous self-doubt:
One blanket or two?
Temperament or temperature?
The alien in the room.
Guilt for my every move
Should I sleep next to him?
Did I scrub that well enough?
Did I cause that rash?
Bruised, splintered cells, extra skin
extra hair, falling out
silky, stretched trails
knotted mother's wrist.
Pale, shrunken lotus leaf
no longer gives nourishment
It’s up to me now.
Gradually the soil of my soul is watered
and my wooden heart swells, filling up
dripping into my conscious mind
washing and clearing debris.
Waves of emotion; eroding grains of formula.
Did I mention my blossoming heart?
Refuelling sometimes after days and days
of drought.
Constant thirst.
The cotton wool clouds of my brain
desire freedom.
Sometimes it rains for hours
but seasons can change within minutes.
A sped-up film of germination
my brightest bud
every second a new branch springs
bouncing on the bed,
dancing, audibly pointing at flowers
clap your hands my son
shine your milky, moonstone smile.
Your infectious laughter
I cannot hear enough and I applaud you.
Gratitude brings its own reward.
And now under a starry sky
I gather memories like kindle
to keep my embers glowing.
In stillness and low light you grow
running rings around me
I count the transformation in milestones:
Perinatal and the perennial.
***
I Have Become a Tree by Rachel Dickens appears in the Mothership Writers anthology Dispatches from New Motherhood. All 50 pieces from the book will be published here over the year to come, creating an online library of what it really means – right here, right now – to be a new mother.