The Joy & Addiction

A lot has been written about the struggles of motherhood, the exhaustion, the lack of time, loss of identity, but what of the gorgeousness? What of the smells, the soft touch, the joy, the chest crushing love motherhood can bring?

Jodi Bartle has found it difficult to wean herself off from these beautiful bits, so she recreated them with her six children. Here, she writes about the joy and addiction of creating a large family.

There’s a scene in the BBC’s labour ward drama This Is Going to Hurt where a baby gets prematurely ripped from its mother’s body via a hasty blood and tissue-flecked c-section. Each episode, in fact, features some sort of hellish vagina-related vignette; a barely functioning NHS, reused scrubs, scalpel-sliced stomachs and a thin, miserable-looking Ben Whishaw vigorously yanking things out of holes.

My husband has been responding to the series with frightened-looking eyes and too many trips out of the room for refills of restorative tea. Me? I just feel jealous. Jealous of the pregnant women getting lubed and scanned on-screen, jealous of their splayed legs and deep, primal bellowing, jealous of the raw babies being handed to mothers still bleeding onto the bedsheet. I’m watching, but—my own private unwanted redundancy package—strikes. It feels urgent. I long for it all to happen, one more time.

I wasn’t always like this. My first baby, now 17 with a tentative moustache, a girlfriend and a thing for Dostoyevsky, was conceived after years of gentle badgering from my husband. Our second son followed 18 months later: again, it was my husband’s idea to have them so close together which I thought was weirdly eager of him but went with it anyway. In for a penny, in for a pound, etc, etc.

But something shifted in me after that. I was nearing 30, deeply enmeshed in the duties of stay-at-home mothering, and I discovered that I was pretty well suited to it. I managed the chaos by getting slick with routines and found I could capitalise on my high tolerance for noise and mess. I had no mother or mother-in-law around to scrutinise my choices and I felt emboldened by doing maternal things instinctively. I was subsumed and overwhelmed, in love and bewitched by motherhood. I, Sheryl Sandberg-style, leaned into it all even more by welcoming a third baby, and then another, and another, and another. This way of living felt mad and transgressive and thrilling, and was to become my signature. Some women find themselves go for a streak of chunky forelock blonde in their dark hair to shake things up, some discover ceramics, or others get promoted. I became the woman with the six sons.

Why? It’s complicated. A big part of my compulsion, my addiction to keep on having babies and all that it entails—for the still verboten thrill of a positive pregnancy test, of endless antenatal appointments in NHS waiting rooms, for the high octane of drugless labour, of the animalistic opening and expelling from my body of another, for the blissful postpartum days of feeling fragile, wasted, wounded and rarified—stems, I think, from my own childhood as the youngest of four, whose much older siblings were never really home. I wanted them to come back to me. I wanted them to see me and to choose me; to fill up the house with their chatter and their slamming of doors and their adolescent energy. I was a small, unnoticed, a witness to their teenage clamour, their unimaginable comings and goings to parties and school and work and dates. It was intoxicating to be a part of that, and for me it was never enough.

So, I recreated it, or have at least tried to. I birthed six big babies and miscarried three more. They outgrew cots and had to be shoehorned into double and then triple bunks. I wore babies in slings and encouraged toddlers out of their buggy space onto scooters to make room for the next one. I packed bags and forgot coats and lost shoes. As each baby morphed away from softness, losing the yeasty biscuity smell from the neck and began to harden and pull away, I’ve felt the inverse tug to make another new one. For a fresh one, an untold story, the chance to have another go.

The truth is, I feel good in this role, safe here, the chief mama leading a tribe of rioting, hollering, daft and beautiful boys. I’m a glutton for it. The sensorial overload of children’s voices and bodies and needs erupts into and onto me like the repetitive pounding of waves, unrelenting, meditative, calming. Echoing my heartbeat. It’s what I best know how to do.  

My mother, many strangers and most of my friends have found this hardwired baby factory setting in me difficult to understand. There have been late night drunken interventions at the tail ends of parties where I’ve been taken aside and been told that it’s time to give it up now. Told to stop hiding from myself, to stop avoiding the hard things like what to do when new babies aren’t an option anymore. I’ve been told to face up to the part of me that swerves grown-up feelings of failure and rejection by swelling with a new baby rather than excelling at work. I’ve been told to think of the already-here kids, deficit from individual attention, gasping for air. To acknowledge our lack of space, our not-young-anymore ages, our non-existent pensions, the dire state of the planet. It puzzles and frustrates them. It makes no sense, they say. It’s time to end this.

And they’re right; of course, they’re right. But the gnawing pull of another baby never leaves me. The dogged private pursuit of just one more allows me to orbit a different space and play by different rules. I do not have to measure myself against anyone else. I do not have to prove myself. I cannot get fired here because I’m actually the boss. Until that last period comes and goes and I am, without a doubt, no longer able to make another baby, then I’m stuck here, helpless, dreaming, hopelessly addicted to the possibility of again becoming a mother, one more time.

Read the other stories in our MOTHERHOOD edition.