Precious Vessels
1st Trimester
From mid 2006 through to the beginning months of 2007 I was pregnant with my first child.
During the end of my first trimester when my tummy started showing, I had the sudden realisation that I was not going to be in control of my life anymore. I wasn’t going to be in the driving seat and I wouldn’t be able to do what I wanted, when I wanted, once the baby was born.
Had I been naïve? To a point I had. We were so elated that I had become pregnant in my late thirties. The big question in the back of my mind, when we were trying to conceive, was whether I was fertile or not?
My conflicting thoughts made me feel guilty and selfish: on one hand I was happy at the prospect of becoming a mother, but on the other hand I was saddened by the knowledge that I would be losing part of me. Come March my life would be the welfare and development of my child and not me.
Cage Range
The pieces in the ‘Cage Range’ represent me feeling trapped. Ladders normally allow people to access hard to reach places: they are helpful tools, but in my pieces I have arranged them to create cage-like forms to show how entrapped I felt at that time.
2nd Trimester
During my second trimester I had accepted my changing and growing body. I became one with my pregnancy and had accepted that after four and a half months I was ready to go maternity clothes shopping and show people that I was pregnant verses the assumption that I had been eating too many pies.
Belly Girls celebrate all the different sizes & shapes women are when they are pregnant.
3rd Trimester
Two months before baby was due, fear and uncertainty struck not only myself but my husband too. It wasn’t the fear of childbirth for me: that was a given that it would be long and painful. Our fear was that the impending arrival of baby was not months away but now only 8 weeks away.
How were we going to cope with being parents? There wasn’t the How to manual on being the perfect parents. Responsibility weighed heavily on our shoulders and not just for the short term of meeting the immediate needs of baby: feeding, changing, bonding and stimulating. This was a lifetime commitment, and we could not give it back if we changed our minds.
The Helping Hands Range
What is the right direction, key, way to becoming good parents? Is there a 100% guarantee? There isn’t.
Epilogue
After the birth of Torie and being a mother for a few months I reread my blurb for my exhibition. I felt I needed to add another section to my exhibition to address the feelings & issues that I had feared would happen, that did happen, once I became a mother.
The bibs represent my life after the baby was born. The whirl of the washing machine everyday: one load for spills and another load for poos. The images show some of my feelings I felt during the first few months of motherhood: the adjustment to becoming a parent, and the frustration and satisfaction of being the parent at home.
The hardest part about becoming a parent is the fact that your child does not come with an operation manual, and their only form of communication is crying: I’m hungry, I need comfort, I’ve soiled my nappy, I’m over tired, I’ve got wind and where are you?
Once I came to terms that crying was my child’s only form of communication, the next adjustment for me was simply letting go of how I use to do things before her arrival - more easily said than done. The satisfaction I got from completing a “to do” list with 20+ items on it was huge. So as not to upset myself, I now only place one personal item on my “to do” list but there is still no guarantee that it will be completed at the day’s end.
As soon as both Torie & I got into a routine, I had to confront the frustration I felt from the fact that I couldn’t come and go as I pleased. My life had become ground hog day. I knew that the umbilical cord had been cut but I was still the lifeline for my child. My husband however was able to walk out the door each morning and resume his life as though nothing had changed since the birth of our child.
As Torie grows and develops the pleasures of being a parent become more obvious to me:
She is smiling at me and it isn’t wind and that melts me,
She has begun talking to me and that melts me,
She has discovered that her hands are hers, and she can reach out and touch things and that melts me,
She interacts with visitors and enjoys the limelight, and then I realise that we have a wee diva on our hands and that too melts me.
Postscript
I know that I’m very lucky to have a supportive husband & family during this period, but I would also like to acknowledge the special support of chocolate (and other sugar-based foods) that have come into our house since the arrival of Torie. Their energy fixes have enabled me to continue on during my induction into parenthood.
