Sofamums are OK

This is a strange peace that is settling around me on the first full day with Sofia at nursery and nothing urgent to do. It’s scary, all this space for Me. I feel I can’t fill it. Anything I do feels frivolous. For over a year I’ve not had a moment to myself. Baby’s nap times and bedtimes which normal mums use to catch up on have been spent comatosed, praying she’ll sleep just that bit longer so my muscles can recover enough to move again. And now, suddenly, co-incidentally, I’ve got more energy than I’ve had in over a decade. Just a bit – nothing earth-shattering to a healthy person but enough to make my head spin with the luxury of it. And the subsidised nursery place we’ve been waiting for all through this hard, hard winter has finally come up.

Sofia has gone up a gear since starting nursery too. It’s as though after the anxiety of separation she appreciates the time at home with us much more. The joy of it is that Im just beginning to feel that I can lie on the sofa - as I need to do in between feeding and changing and keeping on top of the chaos - and it’s OK! It finally feels that to her, I’m her mum, and that’s what I do. The relief is immense. Now that she can walk she roams around the flat exploring her little world and brings me back her findings. Her new spotty giraffe, her shape-sorter. And I can make observations on them, or encourage her to put the shapes in the holes. Or if she plays her little dancing teddy tunes I can just make funny faces or wiggle my hands to the music and to her that’s mummy dancing and it’s brilliant.

Before she could walk I found sofabound motherhood agonising. The heartache of feeling disengaged from her world. Not able to give her enough love. Even though I tried to bridge the physical distance between us by talking to her all the time it felt so inadequate and she seemed so alone down there on the floor. The days were a limbo of endless exhaustion punctuated by dragging my bones off the sofa to do the absolutely necessary to keep us both alive. My little girl seemed enveloped in the suffering of those dreary grey hours of bare survival until her dad came home.

But maybe she wasn’t suffering after all. I still need to go horizontal a lot to pace myself through the day. And she seems so pleased to have me there, on the sofa, to chat to and potter around. It feels like we’ve come out of a huge tunnel, all of us, of not knowing whether this baby thing would be feasible or not. If only I’d known all through this terrible winter that as far as she was concerned I’ve been there for her and I’ve been her mum, only she couldn’t express it. It would have been so much easier.

It’s ironic having better health just when the help we so badly needed during my long relapse is finally in place. I keep asking myself why she’s miserable at nursery while I’m here writing my memoirs. I have to keep reminding myself that this plan is necessary in the long term. My recent few weeks of good health are certainly not the rule and we need a coping strategy for good and bad times. This is the best we’ve found.