Dear reader,
How I have neglected you (yet again)! Happy Spring and greetings from the depths of maternity leave. When I
started writing this post, I was halfway through ML, which meant I was
a few days from getting my last full pay check until I got back to work in six
months’ time. I felt it was time to sit down and write my thoughts on what was
going on, while Joaninha
enjoyed her morning nap next door. On my right, the phone was telling me that
Bolsonaro had won the elections. I remember experiencing a wave of despair
running through me, followed by Joaninha’s inevitable wake up cry. And so I got up before I
even started. Needless to say, the blog post did not see
the light of day that month.
Then I blinked and she was 9 months old,
her first tooth cutting through her gums (and sometimes my breast), my sleep
deprivation reaching new heights because of something called separation anxiety and the unexpected fevers that came with the bexsero vaccine. My beloved Mozambique submerged by a cyclone. Brexit still going bonkers. Somehow, during
this time at home, I had managed to write a few lines for the blog, these very
few lines you are reading, whilst keeping my baby alive and taking care of the
house. I'm still not sure how that happened. In other words, I was starting to understand this
new way of living and writing – constantly interrupted by cries, poos and wees,
each interruption bringing me back to her body in need of mine. I soon realised
that, if I wanted to carry on writing, if only a few sentences here and there, I had to change my relationship
with technology. Forget about the laptop. My new best friend was now
the note app, which I could reach quickly every time I needed to write
something down, often with Joaninha hanging from my boob.
A sentence I noted there one night, sitting
down in the bathroom (pretending I was peeing): “This maternity leave has
plunged me into my body.” My note app is packed with these silly sentences. I
call them silly when I compare them to the urgency of my daughter’s cry, which
does not need words to make sense. A wordless dictionary in my body decodes the
cry and urges me to run to her and I never write notes about the complexity of
that urge. I feel simultaneously sorry and happy that my sleep deprived mind is
unable to write about it.
It is not unusual that I keep on writing while Joaninha is crying. I should be running to her and yet I steal seconds,
sometimes minutes, to write stuff like this on my phone. I write only when I
refrain from going straight away. Which is another way of saying that I now write only when I feel guilty. By interrupting my presence in front of her,
I remind myself that I am me and she is not me.
I need reminding.
