Motherhood Moments 2 - Singing
From before she was born, Jack and I knew that there were only two things we needed to concentrate on once she was here: keeping her alive and making sure she sleeps.
I need sleep. Like, everybody needs sleep but I NEED it. My body will shut down so quickly - I can be wide awake and enjoying myself and then within seconds, I’m fully knocked out.
We knew that having a baby meant that sleep was going to be a treasured gift; a much loved guest that only visited sporadically and without warning so we’d be sat staring out the window like an over-excited toddler, sitting and waiting for sleep to pull into the driveway.
The first couple of weeks were okay - we weren’t expecting to be able to sleep and we were running high on fear and adrenaline. The country was just at the beginning of lockdown, it was just going to be us for the foreseeable future. We had biscuits and sweets and Netflix and Grand Designs. We were coping.
And then the tummy troubles started. For reasons that were undiagnosed for weeks (I never met my health visitor - she called me once and then stopped answering my calls or text messages and there were no clinics due to #lockdown), Ramona started having unbelievably painful tummy issues at night. It wasn’t colic or like anything we could find on the internet so we did what we could; we held her, keeping her upright in the dark for up to an hour after feeds, cycling her little legs as her face turned purple from screaming and crying so hard. Once we realised the issue and once her tummy had developed more, the problems abated and we concentrated on getting her to sleep for longer periods without us.
There are so many theories on how to get a baby to sleep. We tried the cry it out theory but we couldn’t stand to hear her cry for more than 30 seconds, it was too heartbreaking. She cries and grumbles and whines because she needs something, not because she wants to make our lives harder; once I understood that, everything became so much easier. So she would cry and we would go to her and hold her, soothe her, kiss her tiny head. And we’d sing.
Singing is my refuge. During the first 5 or 6 years of my depression, I sang constantly. My mum worked on the weekends so I would be in my tiny box room, standing opposite the window with my music playing loudly and I would sing. I always felt so free. I didn’t care if it was too loud - the neighbours would stop my mum in the street to tell her how much they enjoyed the weekly concert. I have no idea if that was sarcasm or not. But I knew it wasn’t going to stop me doing it. It was the only time I felt happy.
And so I would stand in my dark bedroom, cradling this tiny, warm body against mine and I would sing so gently and sway. She sniffed and sighed, clung to the fabric of my shirt. Her tears would dry on my chest as I sang songs to her from the most significant moments of my life; Silly Games by Janet Kay, Badhead by Blur, Always and Forever by Heatwave, The Wild Ones by Suede, As The World Falls Down by David Bowie.
No, they weren’t the traditional lullabies that you see the cookie-cutter parents singing in films and soaps but they were more than that. It felt like a way to gift her more of me; to share parts of myself that would be inaccessible without these songs and so many others. Each song has a million memories attached to them, too many for me to detail for her so I give her the music and the words, I tell her all of this with my own voice. There isn’t a part of me that I don’t want her to know and singing these songs felt like a new way to open up to her.
I can see myself standing by her bedside cot, holding her close to my chest, my mouth pressed against her head. I brush my cheek over her delicate hair and sing. And even in the exhaustion and the fear of holding your heart in your hands like that, I can still feel the heat of love that flowed between us in those moments.
