We’re excited to share the next of our anthology pieces with you here: Unexpected Consequences by Rebecca Megson-Smith. With tenderness and lyricism Rebecca evokes the otherworldly feeling of new motherhood, before going on to celebrate the glee to be found in 'sneaking off'; Unexpected Consequences is a paean to simple pleasures, and the fulfilment that comes from being your true self.
Of her process, Rebecca says 'these days my writing time tends to be of an evening. I don’t always feel my perkiest but I write longhand, in a notebook, usually just before I go to sleep, so it feels like a nice cosy quiet way to end my day. Even if I don’t really feel like it, I coax myself in with the line ‘just write one sentence’ – I’ve not yet put down the pen after that one sentence’.
Here’s to starlit writing sessions; to keeping that pen moving and those sentences coming.
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UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES
Rebecca Megson-Smith
You arrive in a hurry, defying the old wives’ tales of first-time lateness. One arm above your head, you fly into the world, Supergirl style. The midwives chatter excitedly about the unexpected ease of your birth.
At home we maroon ourselves on our island sofa. We become mermaid and merbabe. Slung across my belly, a warm sea slug lying as close to your original watery home as possible, you’re lifted by the rise and swell of my tidal breath. I hardly dare move, for fear of disturbing you.
Time shifts. Until you, my time had belonged to everyone else. I had belonged to everyone else. But now I belong, by absolute and unalterable priority, to you.
Saying ‘no’ is suddenly easy. ‘No’ to the groups I don’t really want to join; ‘no’ to the coffee-and-cake catch-ups with women I hardly know; ‘no’ to going out on cold evenings for too much wine and too little return. First I say ‘no’ to others for you; but increasingly the benefit is mutual.
I’ve never been one for the shallows, the small talk at social gatherings. I tend to freeze at the simplest questions, gaping inelegantly, a fish out of water.
Emerging from our cocoon, however, ‘I’ has become ‘we’, and, well, that changes everything.
We swim synchronously, my seal-pup and I. There’s a simplicity and a flow to it that opens a new channel of thought in my mind when I think about future engagements. You charge your way through milestones – sitting, crawling, standing, chatting, walking. Life holds no fears for you. And I follow in the wake of your courage, all the way into our first formal social as a family.
It is a beautiful, faceless wedding.
We sit on the grass in the unexpectedly hot April sunshine, amusing ourselves and each other. Tottering on increasingly confident feet you laugh at the enormous stick you’ve found, dragging it behind you down the little path by the breezy daffodils.
We leave the reception when we’re ready. Just after the puddings but before the speeches. Before the day collapses into its drunken cups of grown-up fun, after saying our goodbyes to Daddy. No apology needed.
In the car, the lowering sun chases us all the way down the country lanes. We twist this way and that, singing ‘the wheels on the bus’ like naughty schoolchildren let out of class early. Back at the digs, your bedtime routine – often fraught with niggle and complaint – flows like a merry brook, as we babble, two conspiratorial fishes. Before long you’re blinking and yawning, soft warm baby-breath sighs.
Back in the sitting room I have a hot cup of tea. I open my novel. Contentment seeps out of me. I laugh out of luxury, the unexpected pleasures of being here, doing exactly what I like and never let myself do. The rain thrums on the window above me whilst you, my innocent co-conspirator, lie dreaming on the other side of the wall.
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Unexpected Consequences by Rebecca Megson-Smith 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.