This week’s treat of a Dispatches New Motherhood piece is WAITING by Eleanor Rose Shaw. It’s a brilliantly vivid and intricately-rendered account of a particular time of day – the torpor of late afternoon – before the return home of her partner. With brilliant originality and vigour Eleanor takes us right inside these moments so we feel it all too. In her piece, Eleanor says ‘You can’t capture both the menial and the momentous in a single sentence’ but I think she’s achieved just that here – multiple times.
Eleanor says, ‘When I wrote this piece I was still mostly at home with my two children. My son was four months old when I started the Mothership Writers course, and my daughter had just turned three. I wanted to try to convey to my partner how I felt, in those lost hours between the last afternoon activity and him coming home. I'd written in some form all my life, mostly as work, but doing Mothership Writers helped me see that conveying these feelings, these moments, in poetry or prose was something that was important to me, that helped me. I wrote, and still write, almost exclusively in the notes app on my phone. I try to capture a few sentences or thoughts, and then sometimes flesh things out later. Often poems especially come fully formed and I'm notoriously unwilling to edit them! But with this prose piece Emylia did a great job of supporting the original vision and helping it to be its best self. I'm still really proud of it, more than a year on.’
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Waiting
Eleanor Rose Shaw
There is a time of day, after their naps, when my brain slumps against my skull. One hour and twelve minutes before I will pick up the phone and say ‘Where are you?’ In my ear the hideous sea creatures wail, ignored on the rug. No matter what cleaning may have taken place earlier, I am surrounded by garish debris and tiny pieces of unidentifiable carbohydrate. On the days where my fingers tingle and judder with exhaustion I lie down in surrender. The biggest one tells me I need to ‘have the black hair’ so I can ‘see the animals properly’. Chewed plastic tines scrape my scalp in a way that would be invigorating if done at something less than breakneck speed. I look ‘beautiful’ now, apparently. I wouldn’t personally have chosen fringe brushed straight up as a go-to style, but what do I know. I stare at your as-yet undeparted train on my phone. One hour and two minutes. Yes, I would like a cup of tea. Twelve pompom sugars. Might take the edge off the robot ABC song. Maybe I could hack the offending light-up laptop to say ‘Please be gentle’ at four-second intervals. I try to nuzzle the smallest wispy head but I can’t smell him now. His sharp gums rake my nipples with dissatisfaction. Small fat fingers grasp at me, needing endlessly.
Nobody told me that every afternoon would be stupefied, a long-awaited key in the lock breaking, finally, the wall of shrillness. I won’t tell anyone either, because it’s not really a kindness, speaking the unspeakable. You can’t capture both the menial and the momentous in a single sentence. I refuse to be the cartoon mother with coffee mug and ringed eyes, comedically miserable. My laugh rings true as we stuff her feet into too-tight unicorn slippers. Later, I will put my face into the blissful soft crook of his neck and breathe deeply. I spin with happiness when they are asleep. It’s just that I want to cut every single split end on my head with a pair of travel scissors uninterrupted. I wait for your feet along the hallway and my body aches to slip upstairs, unseen, leaving you to the shrieks and tears. Until then I stuff pork product covered in mayonnaise into my mouth just to have some kind of pleasant bodily sensation. I know these brief days of domestic intimacy are falling through my fingers but am unable to do anything to seize them. They continue to stream away. Time moves differently now, stretching endlessly over this rainy afternoon, yet springing whiplash fast across the years since each was born. If I could, I would pause here, look around a while. ‘No, there aren’t any more ice creams.’ ‘Yes, you can watch Dupliss Dragon.’ Forty-three minutes.
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Waiting by Eleanor Rose Shaw 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.