Motherhood and Me
Sleep is my ‘lost’ commodity, and sleep is one of the things I need. I have a propensity to wake up at 3 am, 4am or 5 am with the mind alert and wanting to play. I have my most reflective meanderings in the wee small hours and often I just get up and set my pen to paper and see what is delivered.
I remember a time before my child was born, where I had no problem with sleep. I would sleep, I would dream and then I would wake up. I loved sleeping! I was good at it and welcomed it as my friend. And then I became a Mother and sleep became deprived, snatched and resented for its brevity. Ah the 4 am feeding and the tiredness that followed! Even now, I have that element of remembered resentment. And my sleep has never really recovered.
I truly believe Motherhood brought this inbuilt alarm of ‘child listening’ as I was forever unconsciously listening out for the first snuffle, the first, cry, the first needing moments between sleep and awake-ness. And maybe years and years later, I am still primed for those listening moments when he needed me to be alert and ready.
Motherhood was all encompassing for me and it was a role in which I gave my all. I have had a fierce love and I have dedicated my life (up till this point) in ensuring he survived. I remember when we got to the eighteenth birthday, and for me there was a sense of such relief that we were all still here, intact after the hell years.
I have navigated rather a lot as a mother to an ASD child. And a lot of it has been rather hard graft, down in the ‘mines’ so to speak. Wading and pushing and feeling helpless. It has not been easy and yet my fierce love has always been the saving grace. I have loved deeply, I have loved determinedly and I have never given up.
My innate curiosity and probably quite a lot of bloody mindedness, has made me look for solutions to problems that most people would never question. I have never accepted that ‘this is the way of things, so put up and shut up and just manage’. I have found therapies that have helped us and therapies that have not. And through all of this I have loved passionately, this child who is now a young man. And over the years I have felt so much pain, and then so much love and tenderness when something difficult has been made better. The child who managed a sports day, and a deep outpouring of love seeing him run round the running track. The boy who played ghosts in the dark with me, laughing and chuckling at the top of his voice. The picture of ‘Magic Mumma’ with her wand that he drew for me, with the words ‘I love you Mummy’. And the child that broke my heart when he said ‘I hate this Mummy, I cannot cope anymore’ when school became impossible for him.
And I think that the hell years of his and my trauma, the shutting down years and the uncommunicative years, finally broke this woman’s body and this mind. I could not comprehend how it could all go so wrong as I had showered so much love. And yet autism is a hard master, and autism takes prisoners. In our case love was not enough, or I would say love helps and yet it is in the letting go that has actually been the precursor to things getting better. No blame, no shame, no guilt. I held the blame/guilt card for so long and so tightly did she reign that finally the cord broke. I remember a moment when I realised that it hadn’t all been my fault and that gave me the reality to be willing to let go. And this has given me my freedom, and my child is growing because of it. Child to man, a beautiful symphony.
I now realise that my forever pushing, my feelings of guilt and my anger and rage are beginning to recede. It was detrimentally damaging to my psyche and was not serving either of us. And I feel so much lighter these days, and I’m now ‘ready to party like it’s 1995’ in the words of Prince.
Happy Mother’s Day!