I read somewhere that it is inappropriate to refer to a mother and her newborn child as two separate beings: they are one, a composite creature best referred to as mother-and-baby or perhaps motherbaby. I find this claim unnerving, even threatening, in spite of the fact that it perfectly describes the profound change in the co-ordinates of my being that I experience in the days and weeks after my daughter’s birth. I feel like a house to which an extension has been added: where once there was a wall, now there is a new room. I feel my heat and light flowing vertiginously into it.
