The Curious Loneliness of Not Being Seen

I know who I am. So why does it matter so much when other people don’t?

I am a mother. I have three children. I became pregnant with my first daughter at 17 years old and when she was born, I loved her with a fierce protectiveness that took my breath away. I looked at her chubby, perturbed, frowny little face and my personality, which was at the time so unformed and soft and nebulous, crystallised around it.

Although I became many things over the decade that followed — a student, a wife, a divorcee, a trainee lawyer, a friend, a runner, a lover — my various selves were fixed around one fulcrum. Mother. It has never not been a part of my adult identity.

I was taken aback, then, when one of my sisters made a casual comment to me last weekend, as we celebrated my youngest child’s fourteenth birthday. “Oh, but you hate babies.” Reflexively, and honestly, I said “What?! I do not!” and she replied, the devastating body blow, “Well, you might have loved your own I suppose, but I never got the particular impression that you…liked them.”

I was completely thrown. Nearly a week later, I have thought about that exchange every single day.

Babies are not any part of my world, now. Mothering for me involves completing sixth-form parental satisfaction surveys, and agreeing to transfer funds for horribly expensive sweatshirts, and pretending not to mind when my eldest daughter borrows my car for 3 days and brings it back with no fuel left in the tank and a mysterious scuff on one bumper. I cook and I occasionally monitor social media use. (Not enough, probably).

It is a long time since I wiped a dribbly chin or felt tiny thighs clamp around my waist or refilled a sippy cup or retrieved a sock that had fallen under the pushchair. But all of those things are still a part of me. I close my eyes and I can feel hot, grubby little hands burrowing into mine; a head of sweat-damp curls tucked under my arm through the night; the deep-sea dizzy struggle to wake up from the very bottom of the ocean of sleep when it is pierced by a sick child’s sudden midnight cry.

I was so devoted to my babies, that’s the thing. I did everything by the book. No alcohol for me, not one sip, from the…

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