Not only do babies look like little Buddhas; they are also true teachers of mindfulness. They exist totally in the moment. The best days are those when I can be in each moment with my baby and take the day, and his mood, as it comes, accepting whatever happens. I find myself repeating my Nepalese mountain guide’s mantra: ‘No plan, best plan’. That doesn’t mean that I can’t make social plans; as long as I’m somewhere that I’m able to feed the baby on demand, stand, jiggle and sing to him as required, all will be well.
Things go wrong with inflexible plans, or more specifically when I try to get work done which requires quiet or concentration. I’m learning that working and looking after a baby are not natural bedfellows. It’s impossible to do either thing well if trying to do both at once. I foolishly agreed to some freelance journalism work and find myself unable to schedule a phone call within ordinary working hours because I can’t guarantee my undistracted attention. Inevitably, when I’m on the phone, that’s when the baby demands feeding or changing or being entertained. The baby will generally watch me doing housework in short bursts because it’s active, especially if I’m dancing or singing at the same time, but the baby is most definitely not entertained by me tapping on my computer keyboard. I can make a call if he is in the sling and we’re walking at pace outdoors but then I’m in and out of signal range, can’t make notes and there is a tendency for the wind or a passing tractor to drown out voices. I can also speak whilst breastfeeding, but again I can’t take notes and there is the added jeopardy that I might howl in pain when the baby suddenly chomps on my nipple or pulls it quickly away from my breast to discard it or look elsewhere. At least I have a word for that daily horror now: niplash. But I don’t know if my interviewees need to become acquainted with it.
I’ve been bemoaning this state of affairs to my poor parents, stroppily announcing, “I don’t know why I ever thought I could do this work. How can I ever work whilst looking after a baby? It’s not possible. It’s not actually possible for me to work ever again, or at least, not for years”.
Of course my parents roll their eyes at my hyperbole, tell me that every stage is a phase and that things will get easier. For now, I have to work in the margins of the day when the baby is asleep, which means late at night and early in the morning. In the daytime he doesn’t really sleep, unless it’s on me after a feed and if I try to move he wakes instantly.
I’m frustrated with myself. If I hadn’t committed to work then I wouldn’t have created this tension and could fully embrace every moment with the baby. Breastfeeding is enforced relaxation and me-time, when I can listen to podcasts, watch a film, or read a novel. When he’s not feeding he wants my full attention, but I enjoy this. In fact, it stimulates my imagination to find new ways to entertain and surprise him, like the first time I whistled or trilled at him. Blowing on his face can happily pass twenty minutes before he gets restless again. I talk to him in lots of different accents (badly) which keeps me amused and him wide-eyed. I love lying on the floor next to him, staring at the ceiling or out the window, pretending to be an old Professor or Guru: ‘Look to the stars young one…’ I create a world of characters. We play and play all day. (And yes, I also sing the song my Dad used to sing to me, ‘Me and my teddy bear, we’ve got no worries, got no cares, me and my teddy bear, we play and play all day’). I find myself singing songs constantly, even to myself when in the supermarket or out walking when the baby has long fallen asleep.
There is a widely shared internet meme that says: ‘The days are long, but the years are short’. It’s true. Each day passes slowly yet five months have evaporated before my eyes. Having a child seems to expand and shrink time. I look at my baby and imagine how my parents must once have looked at me. I wonder how quickly my life has gone for them. I have become a mother, my mother a grandmother. We’ve all graduated a generation.
Other mums have told me to cherish my baby falling asleep on me because it soon passes and I’ll long to hold him like this again, looking at his peaceful face whilst he is all cuddled up in my arms. An older father described to me the first time his child dropped his hand whilst walking in public. He went to hold his child’s hand again but his son pulled away. “There is a grief in that”, he said.
I think a lot about the comedian Rob Delaney who lost his two year old son Henry to a brain tumour. He said in a recent interview: “Now, when I hold my other children, I physically feel that they are like stardust that has temporarily assembled into human form and will one day disassemble and become something else and I know that’s true. So now when I hold those kids that still brings me profound joy.”
I have moments of pure bliss. The other day I was sitting on a chair, with my baby son on my lap and the sun streaming in through the window. We were listening to music and I was clicking my fingers in time, which he was watching in dribbly delight, eyes alight. My heart was full and I knew, with absolute throat-constricting clarity, that this is the golden time of my life, when my parents are alive and my husband is alive and my baby is alive, and we’re all sharing our lives together and it’s utterly precious and utterly precarious and we’ll never have it so good.