In the end, it was Mariah who did it. I had been trying so hard not to cry, and in fact was feeling quite cheerful about the baby starting nursery and me reclaiming some precious time, which I am mostly planning to use by lying on the floor. Besides, the bairn is a socialite, so is thrilled to be hanging out with so many other babies. The first day of settling in went well. I was feeling buoyed. Until Always Be My Baby came on, that is.
I wept. People said I would, but the force of the emotion surprised me. “It can be hard for the mums,” the kindly staff had said. You’re telling me. I thought I had got used to the mixed emotions that come with parenthood. I hadn’t foreseen bawling at 90s pop hits. But I know that some songs will always be different for me now. They’ll come on in shops when I am 50 or 60 or 70 and hit me with the full force of how it feels to love him and miss him at all the ages he has ever been.
A week earlier I had gone to Foyles to sign some books, and while I was waiting I asked a staff member in the children’s section for a book on separation anxiety. The book she brought me was Owl Babies, a classic of decades’ standing. In it, the baby owls wake up to find their mother gone. They suspect she is hunting for food for them, but still, they are scared (“I want my mummy!” is the constant refrain). Of course, she comes back. I almost started crying right there in the bookshop.
The question is, who has the separation anxiety: me or the baby? I said goodbye (you must always say goodbye, they say, rather than slipping out), waited in reception until the allotted 20 minutes were up, and returned to discover that he had been fine. This was a fact that I found both cheering and faintly disappointing. When he had a meltdown the next day, I felt that same mix in reverse: cheered that he does in fact need me, disappointed that I didn’t get to go and have a coffee on my own.
“Mummy’s back, Mummy always comes back,” I say to him. I think he knows it, because he has, after that one big cry, settled remarkably quickly. They do it very slowly at his nursery, so for the first four days I didn’t make it past reception. Now, when I drop him off, he barely looks at me. He has a day of playing ahead of him.
Some people can be judgmental about childcare, even now, when both parents almost always need to work outside the home to support their children. There seems to be this persistent idea that it’s always best for every child to be at home with their mother. The educational and social benefits of childcare are rarely highlighted. On the baby’s first day, a staff member dressed as a dragon and danced for the babies to celebrate the lunar new year. I am simply never going to do that. Aside from it possibly being culturally insensitive, I am too tired.
I suspect the notion that nursery is something families pay for when they have no choice comes from the fact that the British state still heavily relies on the unpaid labour of mothers to keep the show running: this is so deeply ingrained that paid childcare is barely ever thought of as a right, more a slightly uncomfortable necessity. In other countries, people feel entitled to it in a way many don’t here, because lots of us feel too guilt-tripped. It’s a form of ambient gaslighting, really, and it works. Women cobble together the patchy hours (often with part-time work or help from relatives), and their careers pay a price. They are giving so much, yet there’s a niggling notion that it still falls short. It can feel like playing a doomed game of Tetris, in which the different components of your life don’t fit together properly, so there’s always a little gap you feel guilty about.
(Despite suggestions the government might increase its childcare offer in England, I have little faith that anything it implements will be radical enough to drastically improve affordability and availability.)
In my case, the guilt thankfully didn’t last. But I am lucky: he will go for two and a half days a week, and besides, I have been too ill to feel overly upset – we all caught a hideous cold the minute he enrolled, naturally. Still, it feels like a sea change. Suddenly, I have some time. It is a shock that I had not expected. As Rachel Cusk wrote: “I realise that I had accepted each stage of her dependence on me as a new and permanent reality, as if I were living in a house whose rooms were being painted and forgot that I ever had the luxury of their use. First one room and then another is given back to me.”
Once I have stopped sneezing, I tell myself that I will embrace the new spaces in my life. I will work, mostly, but I will also catch up on reading, I will see friends, I will swim. (I tell myself this, but if my first day of freedom is anything to go by, I will spend it doing things for him: babyproofing our home, and buying him little jumpers from charity shops.)
At the same time, I feel a tug of sadness that the days where the only space we needed was the size of a bed, lit by a lamp that shone through the endless night, with him at my breast; my body the border to his world and his to mine. And I will cry all over again.
What’s working
After resisting the dogma of baby-led weaning, the baby and I are finally at a place where we are comfortable with him handling and eating bigger bits of food. We arrived here thanks to the glory of the Melty Puff. Before I became a parent, I had assumed everyone was giving their baby cheesy Wotsits, but these are an apparently healthier alternative, designed for young kids. Though I know a couple of mums who overdid it on the wine and ended up snaffling several packs of said puffs, I think I’ll stick to my favourite brand of fluorescent crisp. Still, the baby is a fan.
What’s not
Sleep deprivation has reached a dangerous level, and something must be done. When I’m not fantasising about hiring an elite sleep trainer to do the dirty work for me, I’m imagining checking into a hotel – just for one sweet, blissful night. It used to be Claridges, or the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, but now the Premier Inn next to McDonald’s would do.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author of The Year of the Cat
