A Thousand Illegible Scribbles: Chapter 1?
I've been playing with writing this memoir for a while, and over the last few weeks I kept coming back to it again and again.
The file on my computer is labeled ‘A book about my mother’; but the working title is ‘A Thousand Illegible Scribbles’. I’ve written a lot of the words but not all the ones to make it something I can pitch to an agent, so to keep myself going and hold myself accountable (while not writing this in a complete vacuum at any table I can find for my laptop or any moment scrounged in my day), I thought I’d commit to posting a chapter a month here.
If you’re an author and you’ve had experience posting a book in progress on here let me know how you’ve found it and what you’d advise. For now, here’s what I’m thinking of as Chapter 1. The next chapter to follow will be just about a month from now (probably for paying subscribers, but that’s another something to work out). Let me know what you think (but kindly).
Also, you know that question whenever you start a business or a new project or any fresh endeavor in life: what’s your why? This, this is my why. It does not fit neatly into an elevator pitch.
A Thousand Illegible Scribbles
Chapter 1: Mirroring
This is my favorite spot in our house. The sun streams in from the double-height windows. From where I’m sitting all I can see are the top of trees. Our home is built into the side of a hill, which is actually a cliff if you define it by incline. I can’t see another person or another structure. It’s secluded and private. We installed the glider here, so I can watch the trees—which reassuringly don’t do anything over the long, long hours that I too don’t do anything either, except nurse our new baby girl.
Ottilie (as in Ottoline Morrell – let’s get that out of the way now) came home from the hospital today. She’s our newborn alien. Her body is still contorted into a ball, all inward facing and purple-toned. She’s nursed and is now napping, folding into me.
Life becomes still again and it feels like a good moment to call my mum and dad who are back home in England, while I’m out here in California. I couldn’t get a connection from my room in the maternity ward and haven’t been able to tell them that Ottilie arrived three weeks early. That we had an emergency C-Section, again. That it was a close call—one swipe of Ottilie’s finger in the womb and I could have hemorrhaged—a loaded gun our OB called it. That’s why they went quiet. Worked quickly and efficiently. I didn’t know that as I held my husband’s hand. I do know that I didn’t die. And that we’re both here. I haven’t had the chance to tell them all this.
My husband Simon had sent an email out to friends and family: something characteristically curt like: “Baby’s here. All ok.” He may have mentioned her name. He didn’t send pictures. I should have known then it wasn’t a good start to introducing our daughter to the world and her grandparents.
‘Hi, Dad.’
‘Hi.’ Flat. Hesitancy in his voice.
Not good. Something’s wrong. Talking to your parents, you know that quickly, don’t you?
‘I’ve had the baby. She’s called Ottilie! I know, we were thinking….’
‘Congratulations.’ Careful. A holding back.
Still not good.
‘Everything ok?’
‘No.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s your mother.’
I know what this means before he starts. We have this conversation every month, in different iterations. Though actually not the one he’s about to tell me.
‘Mum left the house this morning. A neighbor found her. She told the neighbor that she doesn’t have a head. The neighbor called the police, who assumed your mum was dead, as they were told that she didn’t have a head, and they sent cars and an ambulance. But of course, she’s not dead, she just doesn’t think she has a head. They came over and interviewed me, but she was right there. No one died. Fiasco. Awful.”
‘Where is she now.’
‘Right here. Do you want to talk to her?’
I’m starting to struggle. I want to say, “I’m so sorry that must have been so hard”. I want to offer some words of comfort, to acknowledge his feelings of frustration. But my stomach is starting to ache as the painkillers wear off, I’m feeling the exhaustion of the last sleepless week, and I have nothing left in me to offer. I’m spent. All I can think to do is retreat.
“No.”
Ottilie is six days old. This is our first day in our home. This is our first conversation with her grandfather. I do not want this. I want the magic and the happiness. I want joy. I want a mum who can say to me, and mean it, in this one moment: “Are you ok? You did great. I love you. I can’t wait to meet her.” Aren’t those the standard lines for this life-defining moment? I don’t want this other version: Not this conversation. Not this situation. Not now.
My baby girl snuffles. Stretches in her swaddle. I try to hold space for my daughter, as my mum had once held space for me. I hold her closer, tighter. I know already that my instinct with my baby girl is not just one of love but of protection. Rocking her gently, slowly, I try to believe that there is just her and I – that we are all that matter – I try to enclose her in this corner of the sun-filled room. I try to silence the voices. I try to make time stop. I try to fix it. But she doesn’t come from nothing, from nowhere. And I too am not fixed in this version of the adoring mother.
My mind has visited this place many times before. It likes to flee there in moments of what could be serenity but ends up as disquiet. It’s a reality—well, of my own devising—that had started to set in when I knew I was pregnant with a girl. That I may become my mother – a mother lost in her mind; my daughter may become me, someone who feels that loss keenly and is frightened by it. And for both of us, we might both have something in us that crafts a narrative of anxiety, depression, and something else as yet unnamed that lies dormant within us, only to be awoken later. I don’t want my daughter to inherit more than a crinkly nose when she smiles and a proclivity for white food. That’s something much harder to contemplate and scripted in a different way.
As I hold Ottilie in my arms, I know she is not a clean slate, in ways that I didn’t know with her brother Sam. When he came home, I was terrified of getting it wrong, terrified of damaging him, of feeding him too much or too little, or squishing him as we co-slept, of traumatizing the poor boy if he cried for even a second. I was consumed with the minutia of being a new mum and that took every second of my day. There was no big picture, no reflection, no future imaging. We were all in the moment.
But with Ottilie, now that I don’t have to just focus on how to change a nappy, what nursing is and how often to do it, and how to get the baby to sleep, my brain has space to go somewhere else. Who is she and who will she be? I know that she’s not a whole new fresh being starting out in life. I will spend the years to come learning who that is. I know that in her already there could be things—genes—that make her more susceptible to mental health disorders. I know also that whatever I did, and even felt, during pregnancy and labor, could predispose her to emotional conditions. I know that a person starts to be defined before birth. I know that she has within her a thousand illegible scribbles and already I am wondering how I can either erase them or overwrite them. When we are born, we are a new person, but we are not a blank page.
It will fall to us her parents to discern her lines. To render them more than or erase them where possible. To read her story as she grows. But is it really a choose-your-own-adventure book where together we’ll decide the next chapters, or are we working with something more akin to the scriptures, I kind of ‘thou must’ narrative? How much do we get to interpret or edit? Where’s the wiggle room? Where’s her agency? Our influence?
I’ve already started to shape that life, as have her grandparents, and ancestors, of whom I know very little. We don’t yet know her hair and eye color, nor do we know her personality. All these will evolve and take form over the first year of her life. Though I am her mum and we are closely tied, I don’t know anything about this person. I have been coming to terms with her for the nine months that she grew in me, and now that she’s here, we’re very much at the beginning of a life together. It’s an astounding thought; that you get to spend your life with someone that you didn’t choose but made.
Then another thought occurs to me that melts my hardened heart: my own mum must have once held me this way. She must have sat with me on her lap and stared at me and wondered. Did she look at me the same way I look at Ottilie? There must have been that moment when I was so newly born and she was connected to who I was, when she valued our relationship, when she projected hopes and expectations of who I would become and who we’d be to one another. I’m guessing that she held me, not knowing that one day it would be her who would break the tie, that she would leave me, that I would mourn her before she died. If she could have known that, would she have done anything about it? I doubt that she could have. There are choices that really she didn’t get to make.
I can’t recall any pictures of mum and me from the time I was a baby. There must be one in the red and green leather-bound albums tucked away in my parent’s wardrobe, but I haven’t seen them. She brought me home to a flat in Manchester. My brother Andrew was two. When I ask her anything about my babyhood, she doesn’t remember. Is that sleep deprivation? The mind-blurring of two small kids taking hold? Or was I easy after the trauma of my older brother’s first months (he had meningitis and was read the last rites – not something to place in a bracket)? She remembers so much of him and I wonder whether she focused her attention that way. Towards the child who needed her more.
When I do talk to my mum on Skype, and introduce her to her granddaughter, I see her look at us, this new mother-daughter relationship, and I see her confusion. Something visceral in her, a wanting. A vicious longing to be returned to being a mother again, in this form, in this moment of newborn connection.
I try not to be ashamed that I’m now in this position, that in becoming a mother I haven’t in turn done something unconscionable to her, haven’t usurped her right to nurture, and love, to hold a daughter near. I end the call.
And as I feel the weight of my baby girl on my chest, and as her warmth comforts, it also pricks the anxiety that I’ve known all my life. She’s my daughter, I am her mother. That means something beyond a birth certificate. There’s the two of us, but there’s also what makes us who we are and who we might become. That other weight on my heart lingers still.
The warm bundle that sits in my lap is all past and all future.
I change a nappy and defer to now. That’s the wolf by the door. Everything else is for later.
Thanks for reading.
PS I’ve since posted Chapter 2. You can find it here.
This is the second in a series of Sunday morning long-reads. When we get a break from doom scrolling on our commutes and are able to take our time to read what we want to. It’s one of my favourite moments of the week. Catching up on Substacks I’ve meant to read, something I bookmarked, or a fiction book from the pile by my bed. I hope you’ll add these pieces to your Sunday morning non-routines.