Morning Song:

Compare and Contrast Sylvia Plath’s Morning Song with your own experiences of child rearing in the morning:

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

 

Lunacy set you going. What were we thinking of? I expect it was very cold.  Perhaps we huddled together for warmth and accidentally slipped.  Remind me not to even shake hands with him next time he’s got that look in his eye.  I was a fool to myself.  My mother told me never to marry a man.

The midwife was not allowed in the operating theatre due to NHS cutbacks. Mostly you were hoiked out of me at alarming speed as someone groped about in my innards in Marigolds. Mostly I felt sick. They might have slapped your soles. Who the hell knows? I was suspended at 45% with an oxygen mask over my face, and your father was a funny shade of green.  We weren’t exactly firing on all cylinders at that point.  Not quite the tranquil home birth with Diptyque candles and plangent whale calls I had imagined.

I remember a lot of crying. She got that bit right. Most of it was me, to be fair.  There might have been hair pulling and wringing of hands as well.

 

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our safety.  We stand round blankly as walls.

 

Our voices are mostly muffled as we creep about on our eyebrows trying not to wake you. We are slurring a lot due to lack of sleep and terror. Haven’t had time to drink gin, although we think about it a lot. Can’t even remember the time I managed a whole cup of tea while it was still hot, frankly.  I’d like you to be a statue. Unfortunately you are more like a hyperactive maggot with suicidal tendencies.  The best way to deal with you, I’ve found, is to sort of tuck you under my arm in a kind of death grip.

No. We’d never take you to a museum. Not at this age.  They wouldn’t let me in anyway. I’ve not been out of my pyjamas for the last four days and I think I’ve got dried baby sick in my hair.  As for nakedness, I’ve changed you six times today already and it’s only noon.  There are not enough babygro’s in the world for the amount of puke, dribble and fluorescent pooh that you produce. Maybe she’s right. Nakedness may be the way forward.  That and a Karcher pressure washer.

We don’t stand around blankly. That would be too much effort.  We sort of slump in a shell shocked, bewildered way. Dribble is a factor. Dribble is probably the only thing between us and falling over.  A pillar of drool.

I’m no more your mother

Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind’s hand

 

I don’t feel like a mother.  I feel like someone has let me out of the psychiatric ward and handed me a baby as a test.  ‘Look after this child, and if it isn’t dead in six months we’ll give you a pot plant.’ It is entirely possible that you are an alien, beamed down from another planet.  You certainly don’t behave much like a human being.  I’m told we are related. I have to believe this because it’s on a piece of paper that the nice lady in the town hall gave me. I can’t honestly say for sure. I couldn’t put my coat on properly yesterday, and when someone asked me my phone number I burst into tears.  That sort of thing.

All night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

A far sea moves in my ear.

Moth breath? Is she mad? You sound like a bull in the ring, just before it’s about to go in for the kill.  I haven’t been to sleep for more than thirty seconds at any one time in the last month.  When I do, if I can’t hear your snorting and pawing I wake up instantly convinced that you’ve died.  I’ve spent more time taking pulses than a bloody doctor.  I’m a wreck.  I’d like a moth-breath child. Can we get one of those and take this one back perhaps? Can we have a cleaner one as well please while we’re at it?

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian night gown.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s . The window square

Oh God! Do you never rest?  How come I can ignore the sound of trucks rumbling by on the M25, and sleep through car alarms and domestic violence, but one whimper from you and it’s Def Con One?  Crap. I’ve just tripped over the laundry basket. Oh god! I cannot see anything. Where are my glasses? Oh no! Your head has fallen off. Whoops, wrong end of the cot.  Ah, there you are.   Shhh.  Dammit, you’ve just puked over my vintage Victorian night gown. I’m going to have to wear your father’s jogging bottoms because you piddled over the the last clean pyjamas. 

The window square? What’s that about then? See. This is what sleep deprivation and constantly wandering around with your boobs hanging out does for you.  Failure to construct sentences with proper endings.  Still, it’s alright if you’re a poet I suppose. You can just put it down to artistic temperament.  When I do it they all ‘look’ at me, ‘in that way.’

Whitens and swallows its dull stars.

And now you try your handful of notes;

The  clear vowels rise like balloons.

It’s no good bloody squeaking at me like that.  It’s morning now, look.  Look. There’s the milkman.  Be quiet. I know I mentioned milk.  Just wait a minute while I try to struggle out of this bloody night gown.  Remind me to go for something with more velcro and less buttons next time.  Alright. I’m coming….