Category: Becoming Mum

Power cut

Winter morning
starts out fun
two small boys
wielding torches.

But we squashed it.

Harried.
Fuses flipped.
Phone calls made.
Rushing them
out the door.

When I pick you up
they said you’d been
quiet.

That night
monster puppet
had something to tell me.
“I’m worried about the lights”
“What if the torches stop working?”

Sorry monster puppet.
sorry little one.
I wish i’d done
this morning
differently.

I wrote this poem after a power cut last winter. Sometimes it is hard to keep the show on the road and be the parent you want to be.

Postpartum

Skin stretched, stitched, sore.
Breasts tender, engorged.
Belly empty,
while organs
rearrange themselves.

Oh travel weary vessel,
victorious glorious
carrier of new life.
Precious cargo,
wrenched away, disgorged.

As fluids leak
and muscles scream,
dare I celebrate these scars?
Adorn these wobbles
with joy?

Pregnancy robbed me of reason,
birth affirmed my strength.
Body broken and beautiful.

The hole you left

You came
like a bolt
into my womb
and into my heart.
And then my body
and my world
fell down.

You were so loved
for that short time
that I carried you.

A paper cut-out
of a life
full of future.
Crumpled,
discarded.
As a fluttered heartbeat
…..stops…..
and bloody pulp
gets flushed away.

My body throbs
with your loss,
achingly knowing
you are not there.

This is grief
without the memories
to anchor back to.
Only the space
where your tiny form
would have
parted the air
is gone.

I can still taste the
place you would
have been.

In my plans.

In my dreams.

In my arms.

I wrote most of this poem after having a miscarriage over 5 years ago and it’s now ready to be sent into the world. I am now at peace with our loss, and feel unbelievably blessed to have my husband and two boys. But I feel it’s important to be honest about what our unborn baby meant to me, and how it felt for the promise of that new life to be wrenched away. Miscarriage is very common, but I feel it is too rarely talked about.

Standing on the bench

Three years old
and arms reached high
touching the sky
on Selsley common.


I wrote this in the summer of 2020, as we were emerging from the first lockdown. Loved ones had died and been born without us being there. But over that beautiful, hard summer, there were also quiet moments of joy. Just over a year later my boys were back on the bench, a year older but still reaching for the sky.

Birth

And then I
am floating
on the hospital ceiling.
Looking down
at my body.
Naked,
open,
centre-stage.
It’s pretty biological.
Must be the fucking
gas and air.

What’s that
war film where they
go into slo-mo?
There’s a beach,
must’ve D-day,
or b-day,
Or VBAC day
(chortle).

Down there
by my body,
people gather
round my vagina
Like it’s a camp-fire.

A midwife pauses,
waiting like a surfer
for the next wave.
It will come.
Oh fuck not yet.
Leave me up here
a little longer.

The door opens
and it rushes in.
Sweeping me
down from the ceiling.
Back,
all of me united in
dark, purple pushing.

Well I thought I might as well start as I mean to go on. With the real stuff that is birth. VBAC stands for vaginal birth after cesarean, which is how my second little one came into the world.