This week’s piece from Dispatches from New Motherhood is THE OUTER REACHES by Liza Thompson – a brilliantly observed account of roaming suburban streets with a buggy and seeking refuge in a pub.
‘I wanted to write about feeling far away – both physically/geographically and existentially – from an old life,’ says Liza. ‘I’d heard people say that becoming a mother could often feel like a loss of identity but I’ve never felt that way, more like the same person, with the same sense of self but transplanted somewhere other. Like a different country almost. It’s a subtle distinction but one I think is important.’
Of her Mothership experience, Liza says it was ‘the first ‘real’ thing I’d done with Keir - our first class was when he was 4 weeks old! I felt so emboldened by getting us both out of the house. Funny to think how important these minor victories (being somewhere other than at home on the couch) can feel in the midst of it all.’
THE OUTER REACHES captures a seemingly everyday moment in time with great insight and poignancy (doesn’t it feel like the start of a novel?). We’re delighted to share it here.
***
THE OUTER REACHES
Liza Thompson
I parked the buggy by the Deal or No Deal fruit machine. How drab it looked against the blinking lights. ‘Flint’ was the colour on the Mothercare label – very understated, very me. Now it looked like the colour of looming storm clouds. I wished it would pour, then I’d have an excuse for being in this pub. I ordered a large, watery sauvignon hoping I could get through the exchange of money before he woke up again. Such a small task, yet so fraught with fear. I darted a few glances at him lying peacefully beside Noel Edmonds’ enormous, grinning face. A curious coupling but then life felt full of such incompatibilities these days.
I spent that August in suburbia. Deep suburbia. So deep you felt you could disappear entirely. Which I had in a way. Yet I took a strange kind of comfort in the long stretches of houses exactly the same apart from small flourishes of individuality – an outdoor fern here, a zesty lime car there. Everything was how it ought to be. Built out of an ideal, and post-war optimism by Quakers, I think. It looked a little tired and dreary now. That’s the thing about ideals – the cracks of real life will always find their way through somehow. Or maybe it's life that finds a way through the cracks, a necessary fracturing.
This sauvignon wasn’t having the invigorating effect I’d hoped for, and my eyes were scratchy as if full of tiny grains of sand. I attempted a conspiratorial glance with a man nursing a lager and reading the Telegraph. Us day drinkers, eh? He stared back blankly. I pulled out my two-month-old London Review of Books and started an article about Elizabethan crockery as a metaphor for something. I’ll make the most of this nap time, I thought, do something edifying. I couldn’t focus and Googled ‘make four month old sleep through the night’ for what felt like the millionth time. I couldn’t read that either, I could barely read the soggy beer mat in front of me. ‘Guinness: made of more’. Made of more what? The more I said it the more nonsensical it became. Made of more … made of more … I dreaded to think what I was made of these days. A frayed wool jumper left out in the rain sprang to mind. Heavy and not quite what it once was. If I was made of something soggy and bedraggled, what was he made of? Similar stuff, I suppose. I pulled the buggy over and peered in. One of his hands was open slightly and I grazed his palm with my index finger. He clasped on, as babies tend to do. I knew it was a reflex but suddenly I felt a part of something, even out here, lost as I was in the outer reaches of the city and the outer reaches of an old life. I held on a little tighter, no longer worrying if he woke up.
***
The Outer Reaches by Liza Thompson 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.