Writer's Block

Sitting in a coffee shop, sun shining, drinking lattes by the gallon with Little One asleep in the buggy leaving me with time to think and write…. That cosy pre-baby dream of how my maternity leave would be spent has finally become a reality. After 8 months of relentless baby brain (the cloudy-headed, memory loss feeling that sits like a permanent hangover – without the sick – no, with the sick just not my sick!) napping wars and an endless to-do list, it has come. Exactly TWO WEEKS before my return to work. THANKS WORLD.

Don’t get me wrong, the last 8 months have been by far the best of my life and every day I have looked at my child through tired, un-mascaraed eyes and felt a joy, awe and love that I never imagined was possible. HOWEVER, while I wasn’t quite as naïve as my musings above might suggest, pre-baby me did not quite account for how much of my time e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g else would take. And how difficult, nay impossible, I would find it to write anything down. Now, as an English teacher and lover of all communicative things, this came as a shock. I started a journal while pregnant and loved the idea of recording every special memory so that one day I could share it with my child and refer back to it when time came for number 2. Then, about a week before baby came, it stopped. Obviously, this is acceptable during the first few weeks when time goes by in a blur of crying, sleepless nights and sore nipples in which only superwoman could find a spare hour to sit blogging on the recent change in nappy content or most recent google search ('is my episiotomy scar supposed to look like this?'). Yet, as time progressed and we got into our groove with this parenting lark, something still prevented me from putting pen to paper. I think it really comes down to 3 obstacles which could pretty much be applied to all items towards the lower end of my to-do list (ironing, dusting, cleaning the car, sorting through all the clothes that no longer fit me...):

1: Time

I’m not going to ramble on about all the things that took priority before writing. Firstly, because it hurts my head to think about it. Second, because it would bore anyone to tears. Suffice to say, baby came; writing went.

2: Motivation

As above. Plus, on those rare occasions that Little One napped for longer than half an hour (ooh I see Blog post #2 forming…) what kind of lunatic chooses writing over sleeping, eating or going to the toilet???

3: Where on earth to start?!

As more time went by, I found it harder and harder to contemplate writing anything down. I just couldn’t think of how to form my memories. So much happened in the last 8 months (emotionally, physically, mentally, blah blah-ally...) and the more things changed - and they did at an extraordinary pace - the harder I found it to remember what happened before: how I was, what Little One was like, what I was thinking/feeling The idea of starting at the beginning made me shudder. In fact, the idea of thinking backwards at all had no appeal. So, I resolved to starting with now and reflecting on the past as things come to me or seem relevant. Obviously, now I have made this decision, it is blindingly clear to me that of course that is how one would start. However, baby brain…..

Ooops, Little One’s awake!