This week’s Dispatches from New Motherhood piece is SOMETIMES YOU MUST LEAVE by Deanna Rodger, a lyrical, spirited and super smart account of a working mum’s thought processes.
‘What a ridiculous time for this particular piece of writing to be published,’ says Deanna, ‘literally as the world was going into lockdown and families were keeping up connection through technology such as FaceTime. Esme is now two and has a baby sister Asha, who was born during the lockdown. I wrote 'Sometimes You Must Leave’ whilst travelling back and forth to London for work each week at the beginning of this year.’
In rhythmic, lively prose, Deanna writes of the push and pull of motherhood. ‘It's really about the pressure to perform parenting. To perform priorities. The pressure to be in all places at once, and the brutal but basic realisation that my kid is absolutely fine both with, and without me (for short periods at least).’
Of Mothership, Deanna says, ‘I've always said the Mothership Writer's course saved my vibe! I moved to Bristol a month before giving birth to Esme and found the adjustment to a new city awkward similar to how I feel writing about pregnancy, birth, and postpartum stuff. It felt like I'd glided through it all unphased and had all my anxiety fixed on ensuring I maintained my career. I learnt that the most important thing is to be fully present wherever I am; when I am working I am working and when I am with my children I am completely with them.’
We’re delighted to share Deanna’s piece here.
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Sometimes You Must Leave
Deanna Rodger
Sometimes you must leave
before they wake up. Though you didn’t do the bedtime story and hardly did the bath, busy packing and repacking your bag. And the night feed was left to your partner and the baby was at nursery the whole of the day before and you won’t return until tomorrow, after they are asleep. And the best that you can do is scribble love, in all the ways the dawn will give light to, on a green post-it note with red pen and hand-drawn emojis. And this is your parenting and partnership: lingering past the leave time of half seven in the hope you hear her wake. Or him wake. So you can hug and wave and kiss and hug tight again. But they don’t. And you wouldn’t want them to anyway. You’re relieved to leave unseen because it’s best not to have face time when you are going away. Slamming the cord in the front door feeling it pull taut with every step along the alley. It’s best not to FaceTime when you are away.
Best not to send signals of your journeys on trains, pushing their way out of the station into days daring to become themselves after months of light sleep and occupied rest. It’s best to stick to texts or nothing at all unless it's an emergency, or incredibly visually funny, and even then check first that the baby is not near or within earshot, because homesickness is a virus.
When you miss your lovers and your loved ones and share this misery with them, you depend on them to make you better and you call or FaceTime with expectations of a connection that will alleviate an affliction which can be remedied by nothing other than returning. But you can’t right then. So you hang up as the chat shrivels and falls like a week-old umbilical cord and you each have to get yourselves back into where you were and what you were doing and that can be difficult for an adult.
Now, a toddler is blissfully unapologetically present; playing and playing and playing until they get distracted with something they might want more and then they want that, especially if they can’t. And you know they don’t fully understand hazards and heights so you put safety sockets in, remove the choking hazards, fix stair gates and keep clean their hands and toys and do not call and ask to ‘speak’ to the toddler. They can’t grasp ‘she’s not really here’; when the screen goes black, they only want more of what they can’t have. And in the best-case scenario they ignore your ‘hello’s and ‘hiya baby’s because they simply don’t give a shit. So, mainly for your benefit, do not FaceTime the kid. You wanna see them? Ask for pics.
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Sometimes You Must Leave by Deanna Rodger 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.