I Wake To Listen
The comfort and claustrophobia of motherhood in a confined space.
Words and photography by Naomi Wood
In October 2018, a year after moving into a static caravan, I gave birth to our child.
It was never my intention to have a child here, in fact, it was something that internally, I fought against fiercely. I had heard looking after a baby was hard and feared the restrictions the space could bring. But everything else felt right and after 13 years living in boats and caravans as two, what was one more tiny body in this space?
There’s a busy A-road that tears past the field we live in. Just over the high hedge which grows against the polytunnels, its branches poking long fingers against the taught plastic. The road howls through the countryside, connecting the West Country to Hampshire and then London.
The traffic is constant, its roar begins around 4 am with the boom of 60mph quarry trucks and doesn’t let up until around 2 am. When I am awake (as I so often am), I relish the brief pause for those two hours, baby asleep at my breast, my partner breathing heavily beside me, sinking deep into the pillows.
At some moments the rolling sound of the cars and trucks is like the swoosh of waves over sand, a gentle noise I can let go of or zone out from. Other times it is a potent addition to the cacophony of baby screams, discussions around sleep windows, what to buy for dinner, the best way to lay down a sleeping babe to avoid suffocation? How are you ever going to teach independence if you keep picking him up? What is the best age to start solids? When are we going to find time to do x,y,z?
I thought motherhood would feel magical, but it didn’t. On my second night of labour, the clocks went back, signalling the start of winter. And with this abrupt change, I began a new life as a Mother, a structure existing merely to sustain a new being. The cries of my child—naked as the branches of the newly bare trees surrounding our home—came with a shocking violence for which I was entirely unprepared. A primal experience in which my entire being turned into another human’s sanctuary overnight.
Privately, I was ripped apart, every emotion overloaded my senses. Yet publicly a silence had closed in, I felt the need to censor myself. My camera became a therapeutic tool with which to pull myself back out of the fog of early motherhood. I poured myself out in front of it; seeing, accepting and occasionally even celebrating my new being. With winter had come peace; space to hunker down and nurture, a quiet space for love to grow.
In A Life’s Work, Rachel Cusk writes; “Looking after children is a low-status occupation. It is isolating, frequently boring, relentlessly demanding and exhausting. It erodes your self-esteem and your membership of the adult world.” I had entered this new phase of my life without realising the profound shift that would be demanded of my entire being.
Stretch marks, scars, sagging boobs and leaking breasts were unwelcome but expected. I was taught about puberty in schools, I hear mutterings of the hot flushes and sleepless nights of menopause to come, but the silence around matrescence is chilling. Before actively doing my own research, I knew nothing of its existence, yet it is an entirely natural phase that all birthing bodies experience and the mental and physical shift is as profound as both puberty and menopause. And so I lay in front of my camera, to make this family so vulnerable so that you cannot ignore its existence. I want you to hear of matresence and through the images, feel it with me.
Four aluminium clad walls, barely 2 cm thick hold huge glass panes which let in everything from the golden morning sun to summer’s thick brambles and winter’s slicing breeze. Together my partner and I cling together to shelter our child from this outside world. But now, at almost 3, he opens the door himself, creating space between us and him. A space I have craved for so long and now it is here I can’t bear. I want so badly to be in control of myself again, but it’s not I who defines the boundaries of our relationship, no matter how hard I try. Better I think to give in to the seasons, let them be my guide and find joy in the spaces between.
The caravan sits in a wild parcel of land, and the oak tree standing next to it provides me with a calendar to mark the passing of time. It reminds me that although each generation of new parents has their own battles to plough through, nature remains, parenting continues. Sprouting, growing, wilting, reproducing, its cyclical nature showing me that no state is permanent.
I am so tired of the standard parents are expected to live up to. It feels liberating to step out of these expectations, to accept the duality of the experience and lay bare its brutality. I invite all of you into my space to consider what it means to take part in this act of creating life because I need you here feeling this with me, meditating on our role as a society in supporting families at every level.
A note on the title: The line; “I Wake to Listen” is taken in Sylvia Plath’s 1961 poem; ‘Morning Song’ written after the birth of her daughter, Frieda.
