Two and a half years later, I find myself back at the pen. I never imagined that having a child would remove me so completely from the life I had before, but that he did. Coming up from the depths I am so glad to be here again, thanks to a week long workshop led by the author Janis Cooke Newman at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA.
It is so intimate, watching someone rub their two bare feet together. Toe caresses toe in a rhythmic trance, driven by the relentless beat of unheard music. I like glimpsing these hidden moments of self-soothing, a word echoed again and again in all of those hopeless books I read about baby sleep. The pages I devoured at hours of the deep night whose names I never knew, reading light dimmed and barely breathing for fear of WAKING THE BABY. A desperate search for the key to a padlock bolted tight on the “knowing”. I cringe at it now, but it was so real, so immediate, the trolling of a madwoman gripped by bone numbing exhaustion, body still torn apart and bleeding, emotions edging her tongue and wet eyes spilling intermittent tears of joy and sorrow.
Two years and four months later I am transfixed by those feet rubbing together, an adult’s feet, probably with children of their own. I can see it now as the self-soothing that we still allow our animal bodies. Looking around the room, it is everywhere. One person rubs thumb over cuticle, back and forth, back and forth. Another traces finger over ankle bone, around and around, around and around. I didn’t expect that I would need to come to a big wooden yurt perched on the edge of the continent to discover that self-soothing, the way that we touch and move our own bodies, is not just for babies. It sounds like an advertisement from the 1940s – Milk! It’s not just good for babies!
Babies. Have I really let myself feel the physical pain of being separated from mine for a few days? Fragments of his DNA swirl in my blood, rush around the crook of an elbow, pulsate down knobby spine and rest next to the throbbing mass of my heart. Four nights is at the same time the minimum of what I need to crack back into my own body and an eternity apart from riotous blonde curls and blue eyes always searching for mine, looking for the answers - is it good, is it bad, is it safe. He now sleeps easily for 12 hours a night, all manner of trucks and stuffed animals wedged under his body for safe keeping. Sometimes he rolls back and forth and back and forth over his hands, settling, soothing. I can only wonder at what he will allow himself once he is a man with children of his own. I can only hope that he will heed that small animal inside from time to time.