The Love Isn’t In The Cupcakes

I’ve wanted to be a mother for as long as I can remember. For the majority of my life it was the only aspiration I had - maybe I wouldn’t strive for  greatness, but maybe I’d raise somebody who would. Part of this feeling came from a message sent loud and clear through my education that I wasn’t very good at anything “useful.” A message that took me a long time to overwrite, or mostly overwrite - it still creeps through sometimes after a sleepless night, even after all these years. I’ve written and spoken about that before - particularly at the wonderful DO Lectures - about how my parents allowed me to leave school at 16 and begin to live. But a bigger part of why I felt that my primary purpose in life was motherhood, was the overwhelming instinct that my primary purpose in life was motherhood. 

I would spend hours imagining what my children would look like, and the type of mother I’d be. How I’d be firm but fair. Kind and cuddly. How I’d spend my days with them painting, making dens and building forts, teaching them to ride scooters, and playing hide and seek in the garden. 

Throughout my early twenties I kept that vision alive by working in nurseries and elementary schools, and nannying for a host of beautiful families - constantly falling in love with the children and enviously admiring the mother-child relationships, wondering if my chance would ever come. 

Then when I was 24 I got a different kind of job, with a desk and with adults around. That job led to another couple of jobs, which led to the kind of job I’d never even let myself dream I was capable of. The kind of job that lets you travel the world, and talk to interesting people, and write articles, and feel like you’re making a difference. The kind of job that isn’t a job at all, it’s a passion, a calling and a career all in one. It also led to meeting the love of my life, Anthony, starting our own company, and building our life together. Which led to Adeline. Our beautiful daughter. 

The morning after she was born I texted my in-laws from our hospital bed: “she’s still here, she wasn’t just a dream.” 

But she was a dream. My dream. My lifelong dream. And she was finally here. 

But the moment we brought her home something inside of me snapped. 

My mother had postpartum depression with my brother. She talks about it a lot - two years of hell. I disregarded this cautionary tale. Why would it happen to me? I’ve wanted to be a mother my entire life. Why on earth would having a baby make me depressed?

Postpartum depression looks different for different people, but I didn’t feel a lot of the things I thought PPD should feel like - for starters, I was besotted with this baby. There was no problem bonding or connecting with her. And I could get out of bed in the mornings. I didn’t physically hurt, like some mother’s describe. So for a while I could almost pretend to myself it wasn’t happening.

What I did feel was an overwhelming urge to climb to the roof and shout HELP as loud as I could. What I did feel was a crippling sense of isolation, but whenever I reached for the phone to tell anyone I froze. I felt paralysed by the fear that if I said it out loud it would be true, and that I would be forever judged by this truth. That this one truth would define my experience of motherhood. So I didn’t tell anybody, not even Anthony for a long time. I spent nearly two years drowning, too afraid to call to the shore for help. 

Things began to change in January of 2020, when Adeline was 20 months old. Honestly, I’d had enough. No, she still wasn’t sleeping through the night. No, I didn’t feel any better, but I was going to push on through, and importantly I was finally going to admit that I needed help. We decided to take Adeline out of nursery, where she had been part going part time and where every week she came home with a cold that turned into an ear infection that turned into hours at A&E (because fevers always get unmanageable after 6pm on a Friday when all GPs have gone home for the weekend). 

Confident in this new plan we hired a wonderful nanny, moved into a beautiful new office and dreamed big. We made plan, after plan, after plan for 2020.

Then the pandemic hit. The nanny couldn’t come, the office was closed, the dreams and the plans fell through, and I was back at home without the help I was so desperate for and had finally built up the courage to admit I needed. 

And that is my reason to be cheerful: being stuck back at home without the help I was so desperate for and had finally built up the courage to admit I needed. Without my dreams and my plans.

When the postpartum depression fog began to lift we made decisions that we thought would move us forward. But in order to move forward properly you have to settle the past. Not fix it necessarily, but reconcile yourself with it enough that it doesn’t rise up and block your path every time you try to go on. I hadn’t done that. I was so desperate to get as far away from the past two years that I’d not even tried to address them. 

Postpartum depression made me feel that I would never be the kind of mother I had always dreamt of being. It made me feel that motherhood wasn’t what I had imagined it would be. It broke my heart.

But I was wrong. 

Because of lockdown I have been at home - painting, baking, making dens and building forts, teaching my daughter to ride a scooter, playing hide and seek in the garden. Becoming the mother I always thought I would be. The mother I thought I wasn’t able to be. The mother I hadn’t been. The mother I wanted to be. 

And in some ways, I was right.

Because it turns out that motherhood isn’t just about the painting and the baking, the dens or the forts, the scooter or hide and seek in the garden. Those are just activities. They don’t make me a good or a bad mother, they made me a good nanny. I’m not sure I believe in the concept of a good or a bad mother anymore, but what I am learning is that motherhood is about love. 

It’s the love that made me stay even when I seriously considered walking out the front door and never coming back. 

It’s the love that kept me alive when I imagined myself wading into the ocean with stones in my pockets. 

It’s the love that keeps me awake even though I haven’t slept through the night since my third trimester started in 2017. 

It’s the love that shoots me out of bed like a rocket when she cries out for me at 3am. 

It’s the love that hurts when she hurts, 

and laughs when she laughs, 

and grows as she grows. 

It’s the love that makes me look at her father and want to burst with gratitude. 

It’s the love that stretches me wider and bigger, 

that constantly readjusts my limits to fit just a little bit more than I thought I could handle, 

that finds comfort in my wobbly tummy, 

and remembers to put sunscreen on her when I forget to put it on myself.

And when the world opens up again, and the nanny starts to come, and there are less cupcakes in the oven because Anthony and I are focusing on rebuilding some of the dreams from other parts of our life, this love will still be there. Because the love isn’t in the cupcakes, it’s in me. It’s in all mothers, it’s our superpower. It was there when I had Postpartum Depression, it’s here during lockdown, and it will be here when lockdown is over.

This awful, horrible, disaster that is 2020 has given me the opportunity to rewrite my journey of motherhood. Yes, I spent two years struggling with postpartum depression. That is true. It was true whether or not I said it out loud to anyone. But that truth does not define my experience of motherhood. It does not define who I am as a mother. I define and redefine that each and every day. And that’s my reason to be cheerful.

Kate Robinson

www.nevergrey.org