How Do We Know We're Doing It Right?: Essays on Modern Life

by Pandora Sykes

I was extremely relieved to take to motherhood with less anxiety than I have taken to most other things in life – I instantly loved being a mother – but I rejected the social identity of motherhood. So keen was I to prove that having a baby didn’t mean I had changed (of course I’d fucking changed!) that I gave myself no time to adapt to this new role, which I was both desperate to inhale and terrified of being overwhelmed by. I went back to work after the briefest whisper of a maternity leave and thus began a period of private agony: a push and pull between who I was and who I had been. Looking back, I think that in a subconscious attempt to ‘have it all’, I denied myself any of it. In the words of Rachel Cusk, ‘I wanted to – I had to – remain “myself’”.’23 But in refusing to let go of a stagnant concept of who I was, I almost lost myself entirely.

Now, I know that this is not specifically baby brain. It’s just what happens when you are extremely exhausted and have gone through a fairly traumatic, overwhelming and unfamiliar event like giving birth.

‘Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad’.