Every day a new page: on motherhood and Schitt’s Creek
The fortnight before he was born was the most peaceful of my life. I finished a contract. I had nothing to write, nothing to read, nothing to worry about at all. Despite my prodigious size, I felt weightless. Untethered. It was the first time I’d ever felt still.
The feeling didn’t result in idleness. I was propelled by hormones into a frenzy of preparation. I mopped the bathroom ceiling, cleaned cupboards and drawers. I moved furniture, vacuumed, moved it back. At 38 weeks pregnant, I balanced the awkward weight of a window cleaning brush — fully extended at 3 meters — and scrubbed the second-floor windows of our home. I confessed these tasks to my partner, Bob, at the end of each day in vague details. He still doesn’t know about the windows.
“Remember,” I said to him, about a week before our son was born, “when this tiny bean turns up and steals all my attention, please remember that I love you more than I’ve ever loved anything.”
My mum always told me I had an obsessive personality. She said it many times: with resignation, exasperation. I doubt there was any harsh intent behind the words, repeated throughout my childhood, but the outcome was and is, shame. To this day, my reaction to feeling deep fascination or love for anything is to hide the depths of it. There is a lot to hide. Most mortifying is the depth of grief I feel when a story ends.
I’m a bit clingy. That’s all it is. I scrabble and clutch at good feelings as they depart. That’s why I filled booklets with Backstreet Boys posters as a teen and saw The Fellowship of the Ring twelve times at the cinema. I guess my mum didn’t see love in these behaviours but something more embarrassing. Perhaps it wasn’t my obsessive personality she was worried about so much as my questionable taste. Regardless, the truth is that to me, there is nothing more thrilling than being a fan. That’s why I kept a plastic Burger King figurine of Legolas on my bedside table for years. See also: Orlando Bloom.
The sensation of falling in love with my son was boundless and terrifying. When I met Bob I remember a sense of relief, like I’d finally returned home after a lifetime away. With Freddie*, it felt closer to falling for a story, a serialized one. Every day a new page.
On the 23rd of December, we went out to the West Coast for a walk at Te Henga. The effort required to shift my body across 200 meters of burning black sand was almost too much. The waves crashed. Clouds darted across the sun like birds. The wind blew great gulps of salt air straight into my lungs. My waters broke at 4am the next morning.
Freddie was born in the frigid atmosphere of an operating theatre on Christmas Eve. I was on the table, immobile beneath layers of warm linen and anesthetic. When I heard his voice for the first time my whole being was electrified with shocking grief. Tears rolled down my cheeks. I saw him for a moment only, hovering above me with a wail, then he was gone. My midwife said they were taking him for standard tests. The separation was jarring, unbearable.
“Dad can come over and be with him,” they said.
“Oh no, I’ll stay with you,” my sweet Bob assured me, as he watched the obstetrician manipulate my rubbery legs so she could begin to stitch up the damage.
“GO TO HIM NOW!” I gasped. Shouted. Screamed?
Years later, maybe minutes, Freddie was returned to me. Wrapped now in his own bundle of warm white linen. A silly cotton hat on his tiny head. His confused, bottomless eyes staring up at me while I strained to look down. The space between us was insurmountable. The grief remained.
We spent the first 3 months on the couch. His tiny body resting on my legs, head cradled by my knees. We stared at each other. Laughter started about 6 weeks in. There were no jokes anymore, just faces crinkled with meaningless glee. Giggles that cracked my heart wide open. For months I heard his cry in the sound of the water echoing down the drain while I showered. In the evenings, I would zoom in so close on the baby monitor that his breath revealed itself, pixel by pixel. My phone was filled with his face. Like countless parents before me, I scrolled through the photos while he slept.
We ran out of meals in the freezer. I started to read emails and talk to people about work. Freddie and I went to a few meetings. Each interaction with the world outside was unwelcome, I felt it threw us out of sync. I wondered if my brain had been irreparably damaged by our moment of separation in that theatre — like the children of Bolvanger in His Dark Materials. Would I spend the rest of my life trying to restore the connection that was lost when he was pulled from my body with a tiny baby vacuum?
I couldn’t watch anything with babies or parents in it. I vetoed the second season of the Handmaid’s Tale. We watched VEEP, instead, because it was a more benign version of the humorless reality playing out on the other side of the world. Even the Marvel Universe was too much. One evening, Bob showed me a ‘cute’ picture he saw on Reddit of a baby getting an x-ray. I cried.
When Freddie was 8 months old, I went to Taranaki on a sort of sisterhood pilgrimage with some friends. Not far from home but still, a flight and a night between us. An abyss. I expected to feel a sense of freedom but it was closer to despair. I had to wake at 2am to pump. I poured breastmilk down the bathroom sink. I was empty and full. So pained by the separation that I was numb to the moment. The lyrics to Graceland were stuck in my head.
“Losing love is like a window to your heart,
Everybody sees you’re torn apart; everybody sees the wind blow.”
Same same but different, I thought.
As our son approached the age of 1, we started sending him to childcare 3 days a week. He screamed when I left every day. I had catastrophic thoughts as I drove to work. Sometimes it was a call to go straight to the children’s hospital, other times it was me in a fatal car accident, unable to return to him. Still, the freedom left me giddy. I loved going to coffee shops alone.
“This is the worst I’ve ever felt,” I said to my sister.
I didn’t read a single book for a year. They piled up by my bedside. I listened to regency romance audiobooks instead. I sat in the dark in my son’s room while he slept, letting the same tropes play out again and again.
In 2020, our boy began to walk and forgot how to sleep. After Jacinda Ardern announced the first Covid lockdown he would wake at midnight and finally close his eyes again at 4am. He did it for 3 weeks straight. We watched Parks and Recreation and slowly lost our minds. When Leslie and Ben finally got together I felt a little shiver of joy, but I couldn’t hold onto it. I was bereft when we finished the show, so I followed the cast on Instagram.
Lockdown ended and his sleep got a little better. We watched Fleabag Season 2. I was consumed by her forbidden love for the Priest. I snuck home early from work the day after we finished the final episode and watched the whole series again. It was the first time I’d been alone in my own house since before Freddie was born.
He started to get more confident riding his tricycle. We bought him a helmet. He said, “love you Mama” for the first time. I didn’t hear it but Bob did. Even when Freddie slept well, I didn’t. I’d peer at the monitor, and then slip into an endless scroll of coronavirus and fresh outrage. Taylor Swift released a surprise album, but it didn’t explain motherhood, how dare she? My jaw hurt from clenched teeth. My wrists stopped working but I kept using them anyway.
I wondered if I should go and talk to someone, then the second lockdown hit. Jacinda reminded us to be kind, but the internet was a cesspit. I felt as if I had a constriction in my throat that prevented me from swallowing for 3 days.
I tried to stop reading the news. I talked to my sister about strategies for dealing with anxiety. I listened to a Brené Brown audiobook, downloaded a meditation app. We bought Freddie a gardening set and planted a vegetable patch. I made a sourdough starter and used it to make everything but sourdough — bagels, cinnamon scrolls, brioche, focaccia, pizza — my little rebellion.
Not long after the second lockdown ended, we had a breakthrough. Of teeth. Freddie’s canines erupted from his gums and he slept. And slept. We watched Schitt’s Creek.
Johnny, Moira, David, Alexis, Patrick, Stevie, Twyla, Jocelyn, Roland, Ronnie, Ray, Bob. I fell in love. Deep. There’s a scene in season one where Alexis turns up overdressed and outrageous to a tailgate party. Nothing happens to her. It blew my mind. Our son became obsessed with rubbish trucks and birds. For me, it was Dan Levy.
My mourning period when we finished the show would not end. I turned on notifications for Dan Levy’s Instagram account — an honor previously reserved only for family members. The show won 7 Emmys and everyone seemed to feel the way I did. We left Freddie with my brother for a night and went out to dinner. I spent the entire meal dissecting the complexity of my feelings for the Roses and then apologizing. Bob was bemused. I was exhilarated.
I started reading again. Months later, I was still watching an episode of Schitt’s Creek on my phone every night before going to sleep. At first, I did this in secret. Eventually I came clean to Bob. It wasn’t that I was in love with Dan Levy, I explained. He seemed to understand.
“Why are you so amazing?” I asked, in wonder.
Freddie is two now and he loves Christmas trees (tipatees), anything with wheels, and rainbows. Every night before he goes to sleep, I sit in the chair beside his cot and tell him about what we’re going to do tomorrow and the next day and the next.
“More stories,” he says. “Mummy stay. More stories.”
I stay.