In this week’s Dispatches from New Motherhood piece, Beth Talbot movingly reflects on how her self-identity has changed since becoming a mother.
Beth says ‘many people (quite rightly!) feel that they lose part of their identity when they become a parent. However, I found it to have the opposite effect.’ Beth goes on to say, ‘I had a very misspent youth. Doing things that never felt right, or wholesome and I didn’t have a strong sense of who I was - my only identity was that of a “wreck head”. Becoming a mother has allowed me to develop an identity I like - I enjoy being this version of myself. I feel like being a mother, and being a Mothership Writer and honing my creative side, has given me an identity I am finally proud of.’
In vivid, rhythmic prose Beth writes of the before, the after, and her evolving selfhood in this beautifully honest piece.
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Then My Baby Came Along
Beth Talbot
I have spent so many nights unhappy and drunk. Once out, I never wanted to go home to my old curtains and second-hand mattress. I was so afraid of that empty room, of being with myself.
My nights were always the same. At 9pm I’d walk in to the same dingy, damp bar, the pungent smell of beer surrounding me. My friends were usually there, spending the evening drinking and talking shit, with stale cigarette breath, until closing time. I would join in, piping up with my opinions – whilst drinking and drinking and drinking.
At 2am we would move on to another bar. This place always felt like a battleground with high and drunk casualties shouting at each other, dancing, fighting to have a good time. The music had changed from soulful songs to heavy house, and the beat thumped away, taking me further and further with it.
5am was kick-out time, with people hailing taxis and calling it a night. But not me. With the fear of that empty room looming over me like a thunder-cloud, I would find the dregs that were having an afterparty and tag along. I could be in any area of the city, Hotwells through to Fishponds, looking round a room full of strangers, not knowing anyone, not even knowing myself. More lost and alone than as if I were on a moon of a planet no one had heard of.
Finally, at 6am, when the booze and fags had run out, and people were collapsing onto sofas, or passing out upstairs, I would finally go home, to that empty room.
Then my baby came along.
There is a new 2am now. 2am is when I wake from watching dreams and attend to your snuffly grumbling – you need your midnight milk. We have both had half our night's sleep, we are over the hump, and are snoozily coming back down the other side to morning.
There is a new 5am now. 5am is when you wake and I bring you in to my sleep space, my matriarchal bed. Your warm fingers knead my skin and I feed you groggily and milkily back to sleep, for one more hour.
There is a new 6am now. The time that used to end my nights is now the time I start my day. This is the best time. You are my 6am, taking me from the dark of night and placing me into the light of morning.
With you I have become wholesome, I am natural, I am who I am meant to be. Although I don’t always know what I am doing, and the responsibilities are heavy – sometimes I cannot fulfil them all – I feel a peace with you I have never felt before. I feel at home.
You have become my home, and there is no empty room anymore.
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Then My Baby Came Along by Beth Talbot 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.