Starlings On Sunday

 The darkest cloud swells and subsides again and again. It has become a welcome speckled sight against these usually still skies. The flock is as punctual as only nature in her timelessness knows how to be, arriving in our patch of grey at around 5.20 every evening. I spend the next few minutes watching a grand and ancient waltz that I imagine must continue to swirl forever over other roofs in other towns long after my curtains have closed and the streetlights flicker on. 

 If my son is with me at this time, I point the flock out to him and he stands by the window in as much awe as me, asking the same two questions over and over again: "Mummy, what are they doing? Mummy, where are they going?" For those few minutes and beyond I do not know whether or how to answer him, because the lightness of some mysteries are so sacred that I'd rather not weigh them down with a simple search and a simpler answer. Some days I decide to tell him they are dancing, I tell him they are going wherever the wind takes them, and he tells me that sounds fun. I silently agree.

Today we watch the birds swell, subside and swirl. As I watch, I'm listening to an old playlist of sentimental songs I never intend on letting go, singing along heartily and missing all the top notes, swaying with my baby girl, watching my not-so-baby boy run from my side to reimmerse himself into his play, smelling the food my husband is preparing for our dinner, feeling my way ever so slowly through this home, this family, this expanded heart with all of its stretch marks. This rugged life of mine. And this? It is the writing and recording of moments of it all, it is the cherry atop my healing Sunday filled with starlings on grey skies. It is a necessary ritual for my body and blood to feel good in themselves again. Just for today, I feel good inside myself again. I hope that this is more than enough to see me through.

MAMA HOLDS ANGER

 The torrents of Anger that wept down when I rose to greet my first pregnancy took us all by surprise, shock and horror. When it drenched us again during my second pregnancy, we were doubly astounded. Anger is not an emotion typically associated with motherhood, let alone ‘good’ motherhood. I think I shocked myself the most, because I had always believed & often declared myself to be a fairly peaceful, conflict-avoiding citizen. I’m known to my colleagues as Zen Seun, to my family and close friends as The Mediator, always sticking my oar in to diffuse and placate wherever high emotions and injustices arise.

But the first nine-month period of Undoing and Growing and Becoming Anew apparently let loose long-bound fastenings. Things that I had not been allowed or given myself space to feel for a very very long time, if ever, had their great escape and it was equal parts ugly, painful and exhilerating. There was anger, yes, but fiercer things still we were met with: desire, passion, terror, disappointment, sheer joy, unbridled faith and hope and fear and so many others whose names I did not even know.

The biggest grace I have received in my experience of becoming a mother is the opening up of a special new space (or perhaps it was always there, unnoticed on my periphery) to be exactly who I am and always have been and was always meant to be. Wholly me - good, bad, delightful and devious all present and accounted for. Not just Good Daughter, Defender of Sisterhood, Doting Wife, Loyal Friend, Mediating Presence or even simply (complexly) Mother of Any Kind. I am all and so much more - my newfound expansiveness is most fulfilling even though I have no clue into what where or whom I might continue to expand. I do now know that at the end of each blessed little battle of a day, the only person I and my children need me to be is ALL of me. Acknowledging, knowing and accepting this under all circumstances has been my most glorious feminine triumph yet and I can only rightly give that glory back to my Maker. 

The only shame I've happened to feel here is that it took this long for me to arrive at who I've always known myself to be (and I say ‘this long’ as if I’ve not only just turned 29 - some never get this close to themselves at all if we’re being real). I just feel like I’ve been holding my breath and holding myself in up until the point I knew I was to be a mother. Motherhood in all its cherished forms (biological, adoptive, spiritual, or otherwise) is by no means ‘for’ everyone for myriad complicated, mystical and human reasons, nor is it at all a necessary prerequisite of joyful self-discovery and -expression. But I know in my own body and bones as I’ve always known for as long as I can remember: that it is a very essential part of who I, Oluseun (neé Alabi) Stancombe, am. This assuredness isn’t everyone’s experience - in fact it is perhaps the opposite for many in our anxiety-riddled self-conscious world - so I also acknowledge the incredible privilege of giving myself total permission to be what I am, external expectations and consequences be damned. Again, I can only thank my Maker here.

Of course turning up to the same old party freshly hatched as oneself can cause a great deal of confusion and damage to the people around you, especially if there is a great deal of perceived negative change. To clutch at the familiarity of albeit limited/limiting titles again, going from Agreeable Yes Woman to Combative Shouty Lady for example, all in such a compressed space of time, can be jarring from the outside. What might have seemed a gradual and natural awakening to me was perhaps more like the sudden flip of a switch in the wrong direction to some others. What brought light and freedom to me, how I view myself, how I operate as purely as I can within this world, may have brought sheaths of shadow and darkness to the person others thought they knew well enough in me. While I sympathise, I hold no shame and proffer no apologies here. My only hope through all this is that my little family will be all the richer for mama showing them just how powerful and Good it can be to walk in the spaces that have been divinely held for you, and how wonderful it is to truly follow the lifelong process of knowing thyself and turning up to all those spaces as exactly who you are. There is no point in denial or repression here; more so, the feelings of guilt and shame that often dog these openings have their place and use but certainly not here. Only truth and integrity, with a healthy dose of compassion of course, are worthy pursuits for me and mine. Call it naive to make such bold, stake-driving statements at so tender an age on something as inconsequential as an online personal blog, but this is indeed how I’ve always intended to grow my life and make it as bounteous as is within my God-given power. 

Bourdain & Mother

 Do you remember, ma? We used to devour episodes of No Reservations together in front of that bulky silver Hitachi thing that stood in the corner of our mouldy ground floor flat like a three-legged robotic rhinoceros. You’d sometimes let me stay up late watching it with you and we would gobble up together every morsel of the familiar ease, the nobullshit take on cultures and their cuisines, the simplistic escape to places we could never even imagine taking breath in, the heartfelt meals and the many many people across this earth with whom he would converse and eat. 

Food was the language we all shared as we crossed over and passed through those borders, partakers all in his culinary pilgrimage. We ate and drank and burped with the gumbo shack regulars in the Deep South and the noodle stall hawkers in Thailand or wherever it was he’d bring us to. Those minutes spent sat before his world, nestled in next to you, were absolutely everything to me. Do you remember, mama? It’s why feeding and being fed are sacred and deep acts of care to me. It’s why travel is not mere escape, but a wholehearted embrace of the familiar within the other. It’s why I have so often sought out that experience of being unmoored and unfamiliar as we all felt we were then. But it’s how I've often ended up finding home and comfort buried in the pockets of a hand turned pastry or long broiled stew…

Bourdain & Mother blessed me with a gift of loving home in places, faces and foods I never thought I’d find it. 

My village came

 Mama has power, but has she enough strength? I have found an old definition of motherhood and it is simply, complicatedly, ‘Everything’. 

 My village arrived in drips during the weeks after the birth of our son. To tell you the truth, I do not really remember anything other than the relief & gratitude I felt whenever my door would swing wide to the smiles and coos of some warm person I loved so much, often bearing food or open arms. 

 There were photos, of course there were, with our new bundle where he should be: at the centre of all of them. And I was there too - not the headless, bodiless arms that were only there to hold him up so others could see. But me, my whole self, my whole bloated and sagging and lifegiving body. We were there and my people held me as I held my baby and I swear it was God on Earth all over again. 

 There is power here, oh yes, power in abundance. And deep within my village there is more strength than could be told. 

Sweet peas

Right where my scar is,

on the inside of it,

that’s where I used to feel your little fingers

moving as sweet peas do:

unfolding upwards into the air,

reaching for the breeze like

gentle, eager little things,

so keen to know what else the heights far above 

into which they grow could show them. 

And now I hold each precious stem in my own hands,

and I kiss each one of them, one to ten,

if you'll sit still long enough to let me.

I pray, as I go, that each would learn to hold

the fullness of the world with the same 

lovely gentleness, and to keep unfurling, 

always with a grateful eagerness.

The Nursery

 F ck, I’m almost livid at myself for being this  silly heap of a mess. . I am staring at our doorway, cracked open & showing a sliver of dim hallway,  and i wait for my baby to need me. The  sentinel - a monitor which very tenuously links the two of us by no sense other than sound - silently betrays the fact that, right now, he does not. .      Need me.  

 I am waiting, still. For a cackle of static to erupt suddenly from the tiny retro-looking device and carry his little voice to me , his mama.  Instead it is my ears  alone that  are filled with a needlessly terrified buzz, and oh  the base of my stomach swells and heaves with that  same noise now and oh oh i just want my baby back in the crib beside me here. Not forever, just for now.  Where I can see him. Where I can hear him breathe and move  and where I can reach him within one stretch, should the long long night prove too much for one so small to bear alone. 

 He’s just a baby, yeah. My baby he is.  But he knows what ‘alone’ is already.  (Did you know how soon they learnt it?)  And though i try to act so strong and one so cheery  like we don’t both know the word, for us, means ‘away from one another’,  it shatters  my uneven heart to be away from him and yet still know that he really is just fine

  without me always  near  . 

 I miss my baby who is in the other room for the first time, even though  it feels as if I am the one who has been unexpectedly exiled  from my own warmth . . .

 Oh, 

i hear 

my baby boy I’m here, 

my baby boy. 

I’m here,

right here. 

Always here

‘Don’t ask me what any of this means’ - 2022

 I scrolled through hazy pictures, grainy with the heat of adventure and youth, and felt that same dull prod of jealousy that often appears when observing the lives of my peers through the small lens of that app. 

My idea of the word Adventure has been under most strenuous interrogation this past year. I thought as a late-twenty-something year old that the definition lay in the very obvious physical sense of exploration – the one constantly tugging at me, pulling my mind from country to country, allowing me to roam freely, to taste new cultures, to converse with strangers, to know the earth and its fullness and all that wonderful, thrilling, romantic stuff. ‘Adventure’ had at some point been sold to me as a specific type of youth, entwined with an even more specific kind of freedom, and I happily bought it all up. 

This has been a hard & dear purchase to return - I’m not even sure I kept the receipts. My life, as you may know, is not very typical of the average late-twenty-something year old. I have a son, a beautiful and curious and determined little boy who wants to see all of the world just like his mama. I have a husband, a house, a new job (finally!), and a something I can barely call a small business— essentially, I’ve a boatful of responsibility that keeps me bobbing precariously along from day to day. And yet this tugging to drop it all, run away to see the world, persists. The two halves of who I am at this time in my life - young but also older - are at odds and cannot realistically meet. However much my outside life looks like I have it all and all my proverbial shit is together, the truth is I’m still like every other youthful person who craves a sense of transient chaos and wondrous novelty which my current existence could not seem further from. I have had to uproot much in order to find my small sense of adventure in the cracks and crevices of this everyday life. And I really wasn’t expecting how equally painful & thrilling it would be. 

 I hate cliches but I do have to say it: this year has been the greatest adventure of my life in absolutely none of the ways I expected. That chaos and novelty I craved? Oh you bet i got that in spades with a newborn who's somehow turning one in a few months… But while I scroll through friends & acquaintances living it up abroad or out for fancy meals (and frequently try to recreate that life within my small means), I’ve sat here far too often for my liking wondering if I should've just waited that little bit longer to fulfil this longing to be a mother and wife. This might all seem incredibly superficial and ungrateful of me, considering the immense blessings I am able to call mine, but it’s a truth I feel eludes careful inspection and conversation far too frequently… I want to pick away at this very specific idea of ‘living your best life’ while of a certain age. I want to throw it under my lamplight and reveal it to be actually a bit of a con, because in reality it’s just a new generation of keeping up with the Joneses wrapped up in the spirit of ‘youthful freedom’. I’m fully aware I’m not saying anything we don’t already know. But if you’re anything like me, no matter what side of the fence you may currently fall - young & carefree or mature & settled - there will probably always be some gnawing sensation reminding you of the other places you could be, of the other lives you could have. That feeling, my friend, is the biggest con of all. The grass is always greener. . right?

 Another thing I’ve always hated hearing but have lived & muddled through this year in order to really grasp: you won’t appreciate anything you already have unless you sit down to look at all of it, the difficult and the exciting and the gruelling and the rewarding alike. That’s why I thought about listing all the ways I’ve come to appreciate my small adventures as a new mother, as someone opening herself up to the community & boundless opportunity right on her doorstep, all while letting go of (and indeed mourning) the Other Lives That Could Have Been. But even I’d eventually find that boring and trite. I’ve done my grumbling but I don’t think I’m here to preach or offer solutions. . I guess I just wanted to publicly acknowledge certain truths in the hopes that it might strike a familiar chord at this time in our lives.  

 I’m okay with wanting the more exciting and seemingly superficial things in life, and with wanting the humbling and deeply fulfilling family life I have too. I’m perfectly okay with sometimes not being bothered by the fact that I’m not living the life I’ve been prescribed by this youth- & ego-centric western society, and I’m also okay with sometimes finding the self-sacrificial and thankless life I am currently living too hard to muddle through. In short, it’s okay to want it all and want none of it at the same time. Ours is a complex age constantly caught at the apex of something new & shining ahead and also something very very old behind. We’re told to embrace it all as we step foot atop the summit, but we’re not taught how to find and keep our balance as we do so. It’s always one extreme pitted against another, and so we often find ourselves flailing while trying to grasp at everything but holding armfuls of nothing we really feel satisfied enough with in the end. 

 I’m hoping one day, we won’t have to teeter, we won’t even feel like we have to grasp or climb and climb at all. . but if one thing history has to teach it’s the fact that as humans we are by our very nature ambitious things. We are babylonians building our confused towers up to God-knows-where. Arms always reaching up to swipe at everything we know we could not possibly hold. And that tower is a beautiful sight in its own way, but it’s a tragic one too. And that’s okay. Building, teetering, balancing, flailing, falling – it’s all adventure in its own way. Adventure of the most raw & human kind. None of it nearly as neatly typed or heavily punctuated as this little blog post might wish to suggest. But it’s there whenever we care to sit down and take a look. 

mossy

 You are more than the sum of everything that ever was before you and could be after you. 

Love, mum & dad

R v W

 My personal, humble and unwanted opinion on Roe v Wade is that – while the simple and unavoidable truth will always remain (no matter what side of the debate you’re on) that abortion is literally by definition the termination of human life, and in my personal, humble and unwanted opinion will never constitute a ‘basic human right’ or absolute necessity in large part because of the innocence and defencelessness of those little human lives in question – Americans (indeed all humans) should probably focus more right now on reforming the law to make sure people who find themselves in unwanted pregnancies are actually supported and know that there are other options. That pregnant people and their babies actually have REAL basic rights like paid maternity leave and free quality healthcare and a fair chance at survival, earning a decent living when they grow up, not worrying about unjust incarceration or death by gun violence etc. That all people are actually educated enough to make choices that lead to fewer unwanted pregnancies in the first place.

This is where legislation should focus all of its might and effort. But it won’t. Because it has never taken women’s needs seriously. Because it prefers to debate over our bodies for decades instead of doing things to help us reach our fullest potential now. Because why fix the rot at the root when you could just punish people for feeling like they can’t cope with a mammoth lifechanging situation they do not want to be in. . .

I’ve heard from catholics that you can fight to both make abortion illegal now while supporting all those causes that will eventually lead to the basic safety and empowerment of women. I wholeheartedly disagree. One is far more urgent than the other.  especially in a place like America where the very structures that currently exist are only moving in a direction that puts women between an insurmountable rock and an impossibly hard place and promises no respite or reform whatsoever. 

Fix the foundations and you might find that you don’t need to build gallows and prisons on top to hold the people falling through the cracks. 

I’m Looking Forward

To being able to carelessly fold and tuck my body into itself with no bumps or barriers to worry about.

To having whole lungfuls of air at my disposal whenever I command a breath.

To wearing jeans again.

To not constantly having my heart and stomach and intestines burning in my throat at once.

To sunshine and warm breezes, and walking too quickly round the parks for people with short legs or slow gaits to keep up with.

To being Wanted and Needed.

To wearing jeans again.

To watching and hearing from the outside, rather than feeling on my insides, every precious and uncomfortable little twist, kick and hiccough.

To holding you in trembling arms that have waited far longer than nine months for the weight of your precious self to fill them.

To the hope of maybe one day being okay with the equal batterings of fear and peace, utter elation and sinking overwhelm, that will invade my already full heart all at once, every single time I look at you. 

To finally putting on my jeans and being your mother.

written: 32-33 weeks

Slow walker

 I have become one by necessity. Our child gently reminds me with each rise and fall of my legs that I can only go so fast and certainly no faster. I waddle now, sometimes shuffle when the painful stretching sensation on the right side of my groin gets too much to bear lifting a foot for.

 Motherhood is already transforming me in ways I’d not thought of - small and profound ways, often creeping into my being as I try to get on with things as best as I can; without more than a whisper, appearing out of nowhere over days and weeks and now months as I look back. In reality, I sort of expected this bafflingly new phase of my life to hit me like a boom between the ears, and then keep hitting and hitting as we hit each new milestone… but the blows have been soft yet somehow more powerful whenever they have come, and they have always come unexpectedly.

 So with this particular blow, I am now a slow walker, and I should be content with that. I can no longer keep up. I should no longer try to keep up. And really this is the thing that I have waited and prayed for as I grew into whatever the next phase of my life would bring, but it’s also the thing I kept fighting because I just did not want to let go of how far and how fast I have come. My path is far more different & honestly more difficult now than I could ever have prepared myself for, and I cannot continue to pretend I’m able to straddle both it and the one the infamous ‘Everyone Else’s of the world walk. I am not on ‘their’ path. They are not even on ‘their path’ as far as my limited perception & shallow glimpses of other peoples’ lives will ever allow me to imagine… Motherhood tells me it’s time I leave behind such shallow ways of looking at myself, at others and at the world. 

 I will have much bigger things to care for soon enough and none of this will even matter in the end. That makes me so happy to think about. Anxious, but so unbelievably happy. . .

written: 32 weeks

Early Pregnancy

    Be still my eggshell heart,

It’s just the pinkness of my shaking finger

Through the translucence of the tissue paper.

No blood was spotted here, not today. 

And we pray not until the day we meet,

For on that day my blood will bring life into the world. 

Life begetting life. 

written: 17 weeks

Some learnings, 2021

This year of learning really did teach me a few gaping truths about myself and about those that I love. It was uncomfortable in that wonderful ‘becoming-anew’ kind of way - you know the one where every molecule of your being is painfully transforming under varying levels of heat and pressure, and there’s nothing you can do about it but it’s what you’ve always wanted for yourself, and besides, you’re actually quite excited to see what of your currently recognisable self survives the crucible. If anything. 

A lot survived. A lot was refined. A lot died too, and I find myself rejoicing and mourning at once on the eve of this new year. 

I’m trying to see if there was a golden thread, or a few threads, that linked the chains of each month in 2021 together, because retrospective intentionality is my paradoxical thing apparently. There are a few that I can spot, and they all revolve around my loved ones. My own little family - as in Sam, myself and now another little one coming soon to a Victorian mid terrace nowhere near you - our extended family, and my closest most beloved friends. 

I think 2020 really forced me to open my sleepy eyes and not take these relationships for granted, to actually put the work into them which I’d been meaning to for the longest time. So that’s what I tried to start doing in 2021. And I’ll be honest, it’s been really bloody hard to be intentional about relationships that have just ‘always been there’ and you assume will be forevermore. But looking back I really do feel a lot closer to the people in my life despite the physical distance that separates us and has actually often made me feel isolated from them on the bad days. 

I also feel like I’m shaking off old habits that made me see the people closest to me in a one dimensional, often transactional, way. I find I’m seeing them in a more dynamic way now. In other words, I’m moving into a constant state of getting to know them rather than settling for who I think they are and always will be. It surprised me to find that the latter was how I saw my loved ones. Given that I’ve always seen myself as constantly evolving and never one stable thing, you’d think I’d extend that same grace to others. But this is one lesson learned that I’m continuing to practise and will always be working at by its very nature. It has started with building an understanding of people as they are, wherever it is you meet them, and accepting them as they might be or not be in the near or far future, and then deciding each day to love them all the same. Whether that love manifests itself in each passing ‘I hope they’re doing okay’ thought or in a message or phone call on a random Thursday evening, or in a yearly meetup that’s always cobbled together at the last hour, or in a last minute trip to Barcelona… that’s perfectly okay. My only expectations are that I continue cultivating these close bonds with all of the love and time and patience I can give, for as long as they’ll allow me to give it. Because I’ve started to enjoy actively appreciating just how precious each one is. 

What else. Well, Sam and I ‘achieved’ a lot this year and stopping to look back and smile at those achievements is something neither of us have ever been good at. At this point you might expect me to list them off and conclude that celebrating myself is the learning, but actually the thing I finally unearthed here is that these ‘achievements’ really aren’t anything in themselves. At the time, of course, we stopped to celebrate each one with the loved ones I rambled on about in the previous paragraph, but then it was full speed ahead onto the next thing. Because that’s all we knew about life. There was no room for stopping, resting, appreciating for too long. There was always another milestone to reach, and so we kept running towards it. Anyone who knows me well will know that this restless and blind ambition is a little beastie I’ve been wrestling with forever: in my career, my relationship with Sam, my worldly goals and even in my creativity. Too often have I denied its existence, only to arrive at that infamous point of burnout which comes after running for too long and pushing too hard into what ends up being total exhaustion and existential angst. No exaggeration. 

Accumulating achievements - and generally amassing pointless ‘stuff’ that one never really needs - simply for the sake of it is not really how I want to live my life over the long term. But that’s easy to say when you don’t know anything else and no one is showing you another way that works for you. Lesson? We’re figuring out for ourselves how to go slower on our own terms, and funnily enough, this will take time. No more running from pillar to post. There’s also a certain little human arriving in the new year who might just force that habit out of us anyway…

Now that is an adventure I am both wildly excited and inexplicably terrified for us to step into, hopefully with our eyes as open as they can be and with our family & friends close by the whole time. 

Long-Awaited Child

 Kayin told me not to move or to blink and so I am sitting here with my eyes wide open, breathing. 

This wind is merciless and takes tears from my eyes without permission. My God, it smarts, and I don’t know how long she has kept me like this. Where is she? Where are you my Kayin? 

The blackness dissolves my vision from the outside in and soon it will be a single speck, searching in the dark. I will not be able to see you when you come back for me, my Kayin. Where are you my Kayin?

I sent you to the house to bring me my wrapper and my fan, but the wind has gone and the sun has gone and you are not here, my Kayin. Where are you my Kayin?

Can you still hear the hawkers in the closingdown markets calling your name for me, Kayin? Can you see my lips open in the darkness as they ceaselessly cry out these two syllables for you, Kayin? Where are you my Kayin?

I am crying for you, Kayin, my child. I am crying like I did not know you before you left my side to wander home. I am searching for you, Kayin. I am longing for you like I never had you. 

Though I cannot move because you told me to be still and wait, I will shake and shake all because of you, my Kayin.