“No place I’d rather be”: balancing a life of music with motherhood.
It’s 2014. My baby has just turned one. I am standing in our front room, and the June sunshine is pouring through the window. We are watching the Glastonbury highlights together.
A group called Clean Bandit are playing. I don’t know them because I’ve had my head in a whirl of nappies and reflux and teething for the past 13 months, totally unaware of the outside world and its pop music. They play a song, since sullied by being used on endless adverts, with an uplifting chorus and a danceable beat.
Out of nowhere, I’m infused with the euphoria of a hundred club nights from years gone by. I leap up and dance with my chubby baby for the whole song. I throw him in the air. He giggles. I feel alive.
It is a rare moment of energy and old-me-ness in a year that, although monumentally joyful, has made me lose my grip on who I am.
I did not want to lose my identity to becoming a mother.
But, until I was one, I had no idea that a certain loss of self is inevitable.
You are swallowed by the mundanity. You’re exhausted, chained to feeding and sleep routines, so you stop going to gigs, you no longer support the DIY scene. You get rid of 4X12 speaker cabs to make way for things you didn’t even know existed a year ago, like jumperoos and rainbow rockers.
Then, of course, the mum-ness creeps up on you and infuses everything with a distinct lack of cool. It starts when you realise that nothing fits, and end up buying or borrowing cheap frump-wear to tide yourself over. The confidence starts to leak away. You realise that, quite by accident, you have become all the things you said you wouldn’t be. And then you convince yourself that you are boring and invisible and forgotten.
The world starts turning without you.
What nobody tells you is that it’s a trap. It’s not real. It’s like that bit in Labyrinth where Sarah can’t see the break in the wall until the fuzzy worm dude tells her it’s there.
That bit of you that was cool and fun is still in you, alive and well. The bit that has interests and energy and irresistible you-ness.
How to find it? How to retain it?
Sometimes it’s a case of finding your people. The ones you let you get your old self out of its box occasionally, dust it off and remind you it hasn’t vanished.
Sometimes it’s clawing back a bit of time, however small, to do the things you feel good at.
Sometimes it’s asking for help, for space, to allow you to just be a whole, single person again.
Sometimes it’s listening to a song that takes you back to yourself.
And it does feel tough, and endless. But the path does get clearer as babies get bigger. The trick, I think, is staying proactive about the things you want to do. It’s so easy to lose momentum and become disoriented. Like a rat trapped in a maze, you need to remember your way back out.
If this sounds down on motherhood, I don’t want it to be. Being a mum brings me enough joy to write and fill a library’s worth of books.
And I hope beyond hope that the benefits of being a parent (and growing up in general) will ultimately feed our creative souls and lead to better, richer versions of ourselves that allow all aspects of our life experience to coexist happily in one body.
It’s so important that our avenues of self-expression are there to capture that, because we need those voices, and we need those people out there taking up space.
Whether that’s being out there dancing at 3am in a nightclub, making art in a backroom, or standing onstage, middle-aged mum and proud, playing a ginormous, skull-crushing riff.
We need you, mums. Stay creative.
This post is part of the #write52 community project. It’s a thing that makes you write every week for a whole year, and it’s magic.
I’m Penny, a freelance copywriter and communications consultant. Track me down sharing excellent GIFs on Twitter and filling the character allowance under unrelated pictures on Instagram. And I have a website! It’s here.
